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Updated: 06/06/2014 6:33 PM |
Created: 06/06/2014 6:11 PM
By: Kai Porter, KOB Eyewitness News 4
He's now 89 years old. But he was just a teenager back in 1944 when he parachuted out of a plane into Normandy as part of the invasion.
These days, Carlos Gutiérrez spends his mornings at the Belen Senior Center, drinking coffee, meeting new friends, and teaching them his secret handshake.
But the 70th anniversary of D-Day brings back painful memories.
Gutiérrez proudly showed off the medals and badges he earned fighting in World War II. He made sure to point out his purple heart.
"Me and 5 other fellows were given 125 prisoners to bring them back to the stockade," he said.
The 89-year-old was shot in the leg after helping to transport a group of Nazi prisoners through Normandy.
But he remembers the invasion like it was yesterday.
"I feel bad seeing my friends die, but there's nothing you can do about it."
In the 70 years since the invasion, Gutiérrez says he's never been back to Normandy. He never wanted to.
"There may be a sniper," he joked.
After the war Gutiérrez returned home to New Mexico and his wife. Together, they had five daughters and he has about 25 grand kids.
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Efficiency is in the blood of a carpenter, and Florida builder Josh Wynne, profiled in "Custom
The Table: Picking Teams
Yes, it's tough for builders to find quality labor, but it's out there. The homes we feature in this magazine are only a minuscule sample of the top-notch luxury housing in this country.
|The Roundtable
Yes, itÆs tough for builders to find quality labor, but itÆs out there. The homes we feature in this magazine are only a minuscule sample of the top-notch luxury housing in this country. Enough skilled craftspeople are out there to build billions of dollarsÆ worth of homes a year. So once youÆve found them, you need to keep them.
Whether you build one custom home or 50 spec homes per year, whether you keep your own crew for all or most of the work or you contract everything out, keeping your labor force satisfied is paramount to your business success. The builders featured here have varying backgrounds and philosophies, but they all recognize the contributions of their workers and the importance of keeping them.
Steve Morgan of Morgan Builders in Park City, Utah, subbed out all his work several years ago but saw an opportunity to hire a talented carpenter, and soon his method changed. When his favorite contractorÆs company was reorganizing and he heard the man would leave, Morgan hired him as project superintendent.
ôI knew his abilities and built a crew around him, person by person,ö Morgan says. ôNow I have three highly skilled guys who can do just about anything and four guys as support. There are always some that come and go, but the core has stayed intact.ö
Now that he employs his own carpentry crew, Morgan says his scheduling is much smoother than before. His guys are there throughout the project ù from foundation to finish materials ù getting things ready in time for the other trades and handling any surprises as they arise.
Scheduling simplicity also appeals to Gerrit Dykstra of Dykstra Construction Services in Lynden, Wash. He employs 18 people and puts most of them in the field to make sure his elaborate homes progress smoothly.
ôOver time, I found that [subcontracting a lot of work] is more hassle than itÆs worth,ö says Dykstra. ôItÆs easier to monitor the progress and quality of these high-end homes when you do it yourself. If we make a mistake in the beginning, weÆre going to make sure itÆs fixed or weÆll be fighting it the rest of the way through the house.ö
While Morgan and Dykstra both use only the plumbing, electrical, drywall, insulation and other specialized trades, Ken Bernhard of SeBern Homes in St. Charles, Ill., prefers to sub out all of his work. He employs only four full-time people aside from himself and his wife, with one project super and one laborer to cover the 15 homes he builds each year.
ôWeÆd have to have 30 people on staff to do the kind of work weÆre doing now,ö says Bernhard. ôBut it would be too costly for me to keep them busy ù IÆd end up paying some of them $20 an hour to sweep floors.ö
These three builders operate a bit differently, but they still look for the same qualities in their labor force and manage the workers in much the same way. They have spent a lot of time looking for employees and tradespeople who might not be the cheapest but just might be the best.
Finders Keepers
The trick, of course, is finding them. Morgan has this problem licked because, as he puts it, he has been building in the same relatively small town for nearly 30 years and knows practically everyone. But every once in a while, when a client specifies something particularly unusual for the Park City area, even he has to search for a specialty trade.
ôWe sometimes have to look pretty hard for those with expertise in different or unusual materials and techniques,ö says Morgan. ôWe go about it like anyone would: checking references and looking at their past work to find out as much as we can about them. But there are times when we have to take some things on faith.ö
Bernhard hasnÆt been in business nearly so long, but by staying active in his local HBA, he can put the combined experience of the other members to use when seeking quality tradespeople. ôI know most of the trades in the area, but I can always check with other builders in the Fox Valley HBA to help me find some of the more obscure ones,ö Bernhard says. ôStaying active in the industry has been a big help in my finding the right labor.ö
There are a few distinct characteristics of ôthe right labor.ö All three builders quickly named craftsmanship, reliability, timeliness and scheduling flexibility, but they emphasized value. They rarely hire the trade with the lowest bid because they recognize that excellence often costs more.
ôWe rotate among the same two or three companies for each trade because of the quality of their work, not because they have the lowest bids,ö Dykstra says. ôWhen you pay a little extra for work that truly satisfies a client, you reap more rewards than double that dollar amount in advertising.ö
Playing Fair
Even with the right labor, problems arise. How builders handle these problems can go a long way in keeping a good working relationship with their labor. Dykstra handles these situations ù whatever they might be ù by first isolating and identifying the problem.
ôWe design a plan and work it out to everyoneÆs benefit,ö he says. ôWe donÆt hold our trades out there to take a big financial hit. WeÆll go to bat for them if we need to.ö
Morgan concedes that sometimes, no matter how hard a builder tries, some labor problems canÆt be fixed. Even though he puts everything in writing to ensure that all are on the same page, he has gotten burned. Trades have disappeared from his job site to work somewhere else, sometimes for only a few days, but that has nearly wrecked his entire schedule. He says in that case, a builder is better off to look for someone else next time.
ôI suppose a builder could draw up some sort of agreement that says the trade will promise to be on site for the specified days or pay some sort of penalty, but by that time, youÆre at the point of divorce anyway,ö says Morgan.
Dykstra and Bernhard agree that finding the right employees and tradespeople might be tough, but once you find them, you know it.
ôFor me, choosing a trade is similar to æchoosingÆ a client,ö Bernhard says. ôYou know pretty quickly if youÆre going to be able to work well together.ö
Dykstra says that the first time you work with a crew you can tell how competent it is and how willing it is to work within your schedule. That kind of intuition has worked well for him. ôIÆve had to go to court over problems with trades only two times in more than 40 years in the business,ö says Dykstra. ôAnd both times the lawyers were the only ones to make any money.ö

subset: commoncrawl


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Selena Gomez and The Scene performed their hit single "Love You Like A Love Song" at the 2011 Teen Choice Awards on August 7th. The song is off of their new album "When The Sun Goes Down."
If you watch carefully below you'll be able to see Selena's boyfriend Justin Bieber dancing and singing to the song along with Selena's friend Taylor Swift! A little later you'll also get to see Demi Lovato singing along!
What did you think of Selena's performance?


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About Schools in Tensed, ID
Contact a Coldwell Banker® real estate agent to learn more about the schools and school districts in Tensed, ID.FIND AN AGENT
Tensed, Idaho is located in Benewah County. Nearby cities and towns include De Smet, Farmington, Tekoa, Plummer, Latah, Garfield, Oakesdale, Onaway, Parkline, Potlatch, Worley, Princeton, Conkling Park, Palouse, Waverly, Fairfield, St. Maries, Harrison, Rosalia, Rockford, Steptoe, and Rockford Bay. Tensed is a rural community with a population of 124. The median household income is $30,624. In Tensed, 69% of residents are married, and families with children reside in 31% of the households. Half the population of Tensed commutes 22 minutes or less to work, with 67% of residents holding white collar jobs and 33% residents holding blue collar jobs. The median age of homes in Tensed, ID is 22 years, with 61% of those homes owned, 20% rented, and 20% not occupied.
Contact a Coldwell Banker® real estate agent to learn more about the schools and school districts in Tensed, ID.FIND AN AGENT
See if your personality and goals are right for real estate.SEE ALL REAL ESTATE CAREERS
Community information and market data Powered by Onboard Informatics. Copyright ©2015 Onboard Informatics. Information is deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
This information is provided for general informational purposes only and should not be relied on in making any home-buying decisions. School information does not guarantee enrollment. Contact a local real estate professional or the school district(s) for current information on schools. This information is not intended for use in determining a person's eligibility to attend a school or to use or benefit from other city, town or local services.


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More-with-Less Cookbook
|Doris Janzen Longacre
|Herald Press
Publication date
|0-8361-9103-X (spiral edition), 0-8361-9263-X (paperback edition)
The More-with-Less Cookbook is a cookbook commissioned by Mennonite Central Committee in 1976 with the goal of "helping Christians respond in a caring-sharing way in a world with limited food resources"[1] and "to challenge North Americans to consume less so others could eat enough".[2] The first edition of the book has received forty-seven printings, with over 847,000 copies sold worldwide, including Bantam Press, British English and German editions.[3]
The book advocates the consumption of more whole grains, legumes, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, the moderation of meat and dairy products and the avoidance of processed and convenience foods. The recipes, collected from Mennonite and other Christian families around the world, are intended to be affordable, nutritious and socially and ecologically responsible.
See also[edit]
- ^ Longacre, Doris Janzen: More-with-Less Cookbook (25th Anniversary Edition), page 7. Herald Press, 2000.
- ^ "More-with-Less -Earmarks of a bestseller". Retrieved 2009-11-11.
- ^ Longacre, Doris Janzen: More-with-Less Cookbook (25th Anniversary Edition). Herald Press, 2000.
- Martin, Pat Hostetter. "Longacre, Doris Janzen (1940-1979)." Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1987. Retrieved 11 November 2009


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David McGrath Schwartz of the Las Vegas Review Journal reports that Gov. Vilsack focused on his renewable energy policy and the Iraq war during his speech at the University of Nevada. LINK
J. Patrick Coolican of the Las Vegas Sun writes that if Gov. Vilsack's candidacy makes the Iowa caucuses less competitive, "the Silver State becomes that much more important in the presidential race." LINK
The Des Moines Register on Gov. Vilsack's Nevada trip. LINK
The Des Moines Register on Gov. Vilsack's much talked about past and its role in his campaigning. LINK
The paper also reports that the presidential hopeful expects to raise over one million dollars before the end of the year. LINK
Pennsylvania native Vilsack waxed nostalgic in his boyhood hometown near Pittsburgh over the weekend, writes James O'Toole in a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette profile. LINK
Daschle bows out:
Tom Daschle, the former Senate Democratic Leader, told KELO (an independent TV affiliate in South Dakota) on Saturday that he will not run for president in 2008. Daschle spent time in the Iowa and New Hampshire over the past year to gauge public support for a possible run. He says several factors played into his decision, including the daunting task of raising the estimated $50 million needed for a presidential race. LINK
2008: Democrats:
The New York Sun's Josh Gerstein reports that John Edwards "warned that civilization itself might unravel if America cannot recover its moral position. 'I don't believe it's too much to say the future of the world is at stake. I do. I believe that,' he said." LINK
Note that Edwards said McCain-Feingold, which he supported while in the Senate, has proved to be a failure. "'If it's had any effect, I can't tell it,' he said. The former Senator said he now supports public financing for all political campaigns."
Politics of Iraq:
On Sunday, Michael Gordon and David Cloud of the New York Times published a must-read story based on a leaked memo by outgoing SECDEF Donald Rumsfeld (written just days before Rumsfeld resigned) to President Bush calling for "a major course correction" in Iraq. LINK
You can read the memo here: LINK
In his Monday news analysis, David Sanger of the New York Times asks the "will Bush listen" question and seems to see some hints that he may not. LINK
Keying off of Stephen Hadley's interview on "This Week," the Washington Post's Chuck Babington reports that President Bush is "sorting through an array of options" on Iraq, "including a partial withdrawal of U.S. troops from violence-plagued cities and a redeployment near Iraq's borders with Iran and Syria." LINK
In his "Political Punch" blog, ABC News' Jake Tapper wonders whether a Democrat would have been criticized as being a "defeatist, an appeaser, a terrorist-coddler" if he or she had said before the election that it is "time for a major adjustment" in Iraq because "clearly, what U.S. forces are currently doing in Iraq is not working well enough or fast enough." LINK
Bob Novak on President Bush's Iraq dilemma and GOP state officials and party leaders crying that the Republican Party cannot go into the 2008 campaign with troops fighting in Iraq. LINK
The Washington Post's Walter Pincus looks at those House Democrats that initially opposed the war in Iraq and will now take over as chairmen of the Appropriations, Armed Services, Budget, and Judiciary committees. LINK


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New Digital Edition! The current month's Journal is now available for viewing in a digital format. Visit the Journal Archive page to view the latest Journal on your computer, tablet or smartphone.
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Posts Tagged 'Animal'
If you've ever seen a camel run, you'll know it's not a pretty sight.
However, something doesn't need to be pretty to be cute! So meet Nessie, a cute camel who loves to run!
Beat that, athletes.
Here's another video of yet another silly cat! This cat here seems to think he is a cobra, just watch the way he stands on his hind legs and bends his neck!
I would not want to mess with this kitty if I was the other cat..!
So now confess, did you bury your head in a pillow while watching this video? I bet you did, because this is one scarily cute cat right here.
Well, don't worry, he may look like a cobra but he is not poisonous.
I go to the grocery store almost every day, but unfortunately I've never seen one of these cute hairy brown vegetables called bear cubs there.
I wonder if they are on sale this week? If they are I should go check it out, because they do look adorably cute!
Don't worry though, I'm not thinking about eating the poor little bear cub. I'd rather hug him all day long, for the rest of its life! (Because that's what you do with cute things, right?)
" Well well, what have we got here? A nice little carpet laid out right in front of the door and it's actually made of a good fabric. I'll take it!" – was exactly what he was thinking when he snuck into the house through the cat's door and took the carpet from this poor, poor family.
It's true, raccoons are so cute, they get away with things like this! (sometimes it's just because people mistake them for skunks and are too afraid they'll spray on them though)
But don't worry, I'm sure the cute little fella has returned this lovely carpet afterwards. Right..?
Well, if he didn't, I'm sure he donated it to charity! Because cute animals do good things. (like making you smile after a long day of work!)
Being cute has many advantages. It makes people more prone to like you, you get more hugs and sometimes even more treats. But another thing is, that people don't get angry at you that fast – not even when you attempt to steal their sunglasses and run off with them. And not even, when you then try to smash these same sunglasses by throwing them down from a tree!
No, if you're cute enough, people still won't be mad at you after all of this. You know what, I bet you they'd probably even let you bite their elbow while you plot how you're going to steal their wallet next!
Oh my god that's just so cute! Don't you just want to tickle it's belly when it does that? I do.
What better way to brighten up your day than looking at some deranged cats do silly things!
Did I say deranged? What I actually meant to say was cute, but sometimes those two seem to stick together quite closely.
Just a heads up folks: Did you laugh or make 'aww'-noises during the time you were watching this video? If so you might have a seriously cute case of lovelipopsitis. Lovelipopsitis may be the result of watching too many cute videos, and may include – but is not limited to – signs such as going to the store to buy pink hair-dye, eating cupcakes existing only out of sugar and the uncontrollable need to buy stuffed animals.
If you recognise any of these signs, please contact your doctor asap.
Personally, I'm not at all into sports and I'm very specifically not into soccer. However, this cute dog has made the game a whole lot more interesting and fun to watch!
During the 67th minute the dog decided to add some more cuteness to the event by running onto the field and playing 'catch-the-dog' for a whole 3 minutes!
Cutest way to get your 3 minutes of fame I've ever seen!
A chicken has got to do what a chicken has got to do.
And sometimes it happens to include riding a turtle. What? They just happen to be cheaper than buses, although they might not be as fast. But hey, at least their scales must be pretty comfortable, right? And it looks much more stylish and cute than getting stuck in traffic. Also, you never have to turn on the air conditioning!
Being a cute chicken is pretty good.


text: Publications Search Results Users may wish to consult What's Included in the Bibliography. Results 1 - 1 Results per page: 25 50 100 Sort by: Pub Date (newest) Title Recent Additions Author Clear All Pub. Year Citation 2005 Lubbers, Marcel, Scheepers, Peer . Political versus instrumental euro-scepticism: Mapping scepticism in European countries and regions. European Union Politics. 6, (2), 223-242. Full Text Options: DOI Worldcat Google Scholar Export Options: RIS EndNote XML [1]


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- Balloonists' Prayer -
The Winds have welcomed you with softness.
The Sun has blessed you with its warm hands.
You have flown so high and so well, that God has joined you in your laughter,
and set you gently back again into the loving arms of Mother Earth .


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2 bed, 2 full bath. CORNER UNIT ONE STORY. SIDE TO PARK. SPLIT BEDROOM PLAN. VAULTED CEILLING. 20X20 FLOOR TILE. SHUTTEMore info
2 bed, 1 full bath. SPACIOUS FOURTH FLOOR UNIT CONVERTIBLE,NEWER APPLIANCES, KITCHEN REDONE, NICE CERAMIC FLOOR. UNIT OMore info
1 bed, 1 full bath. Come and relax by the Bay in this Beautiful 1/1 with great Ocean access and Community Dock. OWNER OMore info
1 bed, 1 full bath. Waterfront CO-OP at an amazingly affordable price! The condominium features a beautiful lap heatedMore info
3 bed, 2 full bath, 1 half bath. Great Starter Home In a great community. Spacious 3BD/2. 5BA corner unit. Tenant Occupied until 3/1More info
2 bed, 2 full bath. Great tri-level town home with a 2 car garage. Spacious bedrooms, guest bedroom has own access to gMore info
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Digital camera gifts for kids (Holiday Gift Guide)
There's nothing like a digital camera to put a smile on a kid's face. Here are some cool camera gifts to keep in mind as you hit the shops this weekend.
Gadget geek Janice Chen delivers real-world buying advice of the best digital photography gear to get.

Janice Chen is an editorial consultant and has been covering technology for over two decades. Serving as editor in chief at CNET and Computer Shopper magazine for many years, she oversaw product coverage for the CNET and ZDNet websites. She has appeared on most of the major morning TV news programs and was featured weekly on CNN Headline News' Hotwired segment recommending personal tech ranging from digital cameras to notebook PCs. Prior to that, she appeared with Anderson Cooper on a monthly technology segment for ABC World News This Morning. Quoted in numerous publications such as the New York Times, USA Today, and People magazine, Janice has also evaluated tech products for BusinessWeek, USA Weekend magazine, and Parenting magazine among others.

 Janice got her hands on a Nikon Coolpix 900 back in 1998 and has been a digital camera enthusiast ever since. A graduate of Cornell University, she resides in Maplewood, NJ, with her husband (a professional photographer who shot his last roll of film in 2003) and their two daughters.

There's nothing like a digital camera to put a smile on a kid's face. Here are some cool camera gifts to keep in mind as you hit the shops this weekend.
Leica's new 24x megazoom is a rebrand of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ150 announced in August.
If big-ticket electronics are out of your gift-giving budget, you can still impress your favorite digital photographer with an inexpensive camera accessory. Here's a list of great photo-related gifts, priced from $70 to $15.
With over 130 new compact digital cameras announced this year, there are models to suit all budgets and tastes. Here are my top picks to help you zoom in on the best options for everyone on your holiday shopping list.
Though 2011 saw a lot more action on the interchangeable lens compact front, for the best image quality and performance, digital SLRs still rule the roost. Here are my top picks for this holiday season.
Electronics retailers are out in full force touting big Black Friday deals. Check out the best of the digital camera deals here.
Previewed at the IFA 2011 show in Germany in September, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-3D1 is a new 3D-capable compact point-and-shoot camera available just in time for the holidays.
With a functional LCD, flash, and shutter release, this awesome Nikon D3 Halloween costume is making the blogosphere rounds.
A revolutionary new camera based on decades of research promises to turn digital imaging as we know it on its ear.
The newly announced Canon EOS-1D X promises to deliver the image quality goods of the 1Ds Mark III with all the sports-shooting speed of the 1D Mark IV.
This cool concept camera takes panoramic shooting to a funner level: Just toss and it shoots.
Fujifilm announces pricing and availability on its forthcoming high-end compact camera, the FinePix X10.
The announcement of a new iPhone 4S may have disappointed some, but improved camera features may make it a point-and-shoot killer.
Adobe announces six new touchscreen optimized apps for tablets, including Adobe Photoshop Touch for Android.
Nikon's flagship interchangeable lens compact camera, the new Nikon 1 V1, has a smaller sensor and lower resolution than similarly high-priced rivals, but packs the features into a small package.


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Topic Page
Nation Topics - Society
Sports Education Gender and Sexuality Health Law Media Race and Religion From the Archive
News and Features
The urban rebellion in Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine neighborhood that followed the April 7 death of yet another black man, Timothy Thomas, at the hands of police shocked city residents. Mayor Charlie Luken lamented the "violence" as "unthinkable" and at a press conference pleaded for it to stop. At times like these it is vital to think clearly about how social problems, especially violence, are defined. In Cincinnati the media identify the core problem as "police-community" relations. But reducing the myriad and interrelated forms of violence in the inner city to a problem of police-community relations misses an opportunity to understand such issues in a deeper and more systemic sense. We need to understand how violence has been waged against people of color for a very long time.
Since the late 1940s a series of moves on the part of government and the private sector have reinforced an American form of apartheid. Ushering in the explosion of the suburbs for the white middle class, the Federal Housing Authority's liberalization of the mortgage market, its regulations favoring new construction of single-family detached houses and its appraisal process helped insure that neighborhoods continued to house the same social and racial classes. Under "urban renewal," many black neighborhoods were razed to make way for freeways, sports arenas and corporate redevelopment. Global restructuring of the economy then gutted the black working class's job base in the manufacturing sector.
Add to these the rise to power of neoconservatives, who divest the state of responsibility for meeting social needs, evidenced by rollbacks of affirmative action, the elimination of welfare and cutbacks in housing, combined with more punitive measures like increases in police forces and prison-building and a continued militarized economy.
The "hypersegregation" of blacks in the inner cities is now a structural reality. As sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton note in American Apartheid, "One-third of all African Americans in the United States live under conditions of intense racial segregation.... No other group in the contemporary United States comes close to this level of isolation within urban society."
Recent census data show that Cincinnati is the ninth most segregated city in the United States, with Over-the-Rhine, about 77 percent black, being its poorest neighborhood. This extreme social and spatial isolation exacerbates the effects of poverty, making it difficult to sustain neighborhood institutions and social organizations. These trends take a particular form in Cincinnati. Consider that in 1996, at the request of an alliance of corporate, business and city power, the Urban Land Institute came to Over-the-Rhine bearing gifts of a homeownership agenda for a community where approximately 75 percent of the population have incomes well below the reach of the rental market, let alone homeownership. Consider Cincinnati Pops director Erich Kunzel's "dream" to build the Greater Cincinnati Fine Arts and Education Center near Music Hall, which, after originally promising no displacement, called for the removal of the Drop Inn Center, the area's largest homeless shelter and lead institution in the Over-the-Rhine People's Movement.
And consider the motion passed by the City Planning Commission last July not to fund additional low-income housing units on Vine Street in Over-the-Rhine, a motion that discriminates against a particular race and class and ignores the city's own Consolidated Plan, which identifies the need for 30,000 affordable housing units. Further, city records show that between January 1995 and the first quarter of 2000, 60 percent of the $8 million invested by the Department of Neighborhood Services in housing programs in Over-the-Rhine supported market-rate rather than affordable housing development.
Last, consider the mayor's about-face decision last summer not to support the $4.5 million tax-credit package of ReSTOC, a community-based, nonprofit housing cooperative, intended to finance construction of economically mixed housing in Over-the-Rhine, a project that qualified for state funding. The mayor then forced ReSTOC to sell one of the buildings in its package to a private owner to develop dotcom enterprises.
These examples of institutional violence have one thing in common: the way they market Over-the-Rhine as an idealized version of itself, effectively erasing it as a place for poor people of color. Revitalization efforts are selling an image that has no place for the poor who actually live there. "Development" means attracting people of higher incomes to live and play and work.
I am not suggesting that the neighborhood keep out newcomers, including people of higher means. The point is that the city fights to deny resources to community-based organizations while promoting renovation that caters to white, wealthier residents. And in this process, the buildings and urban ambience are sold like a stage set to folks who want to consume an urban night out. Over-the-Rhine is being Disneyfied, and this requires pushing people who don't fit the postcard image out of the way. No wonder Over-the-Rhine residents feel resentful.
Gentrification is often advocated as an antisegregation measure. This may be true in the short run, before poor residents are displaced. But community development today is rarely conceived outside the ideology of corporatism, with its lingo of public-private partnerships, enterprise and empowerment zones, tax incentives, and abatements and deregulatory legislation, all of which are ploys to advance privatization and subordinate social movements to the interests of business and the profit system. Community development has been reduced to a kind of plea bargaining with the powers that be, and thus what gets constructed as hope within the community is the desire to have a little more money funneled in its direction. That community institutions persist at all in these circumstances is an amazing testament to their perseverance in meeting desperate need.
Urban disruptions like the rebellion in Cincinnati are indictments of entrenched patterns of police-community relations and community development. Gentrification that produces displacement is an act of violence. Economic development that neglects to provide jobs for Over-the-Rhine residents is an act of violence. Building stadiums and supporting corporations at public expense while closing inner-city schools are acts of violence. We should not be surprised when communities erupt in righteous anger against the bonds of their oppression.
When a renowned abortion doctor opened a clinic in Ocala, Florida, he was seen as a public pest. So local authorities used the courts to get rid of him.
Thefts from other countries pale in relation to the looting of Russia, with
the indispensable assistance of the "Offshornaya Zona." The 1995 "loans for
shares" scheme transferred state ownership of privatized industries worth
billions of dollars to companies whose offshore registrations hid true owners.
More billions were stolen around the time of the August 1998 crash.
Insider banks knew about the coming devaluation and shipped billions in
assets as "loans" to offshore companies. The banks' statements show that their
loan portfolios grew after the date when they got loans from the Russian
Central Bank, which were supposed to stave off default. After the crash, it was
revealed that the top borrowers in all the big bankrupt banks were offshore.
For example, the five largest creditors of Rossiisky Credit were shell
companies registered in Nauru and in the Caribbean. As the debtors' ownerships
were secret, they could easily "disappear." Stuck with "uncollectable" loans
and "no assets," the banks announced their own bankruptcies. Swiss officials
are investigating leads that some of the $4.8 billion International Monetary
Fund tranche to Russia was moved by banks to accounts offshore before the 1998
The biggest current scam is being effected by a secretly owned Russian
company called Itera, which is using offshore shells in Curaçao and
elsewhere to gobble up the assets of Gazprom, the national gas company, which
is 38 percent owned by the government. Itera's owners are widely believed to be
Gazprom managers, their relatives and Viktor Chernomyrdin, former chairman of
Gazprom's board of directors and prime minister during much of the
privatization. Gazprom, which projected nearly $16 billion in revenues for
2000, uses Itera as its marketing agent and has been selling it gas fields at
cut-rate prices. Its 1999 annual report did not account for sales of 13 percent
of production. As its taxes supply a quarter of government revenues, this is a
devastating loss. Itera has a Florida office, which has been used to register
other Florida companies, making it a vehicle for investment in the US economy.
An activist think tank is fighting the right at the ballot box--and winning.
On April 26, French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin announced the creation of a memorial for the soldiers who died during France's bloody war against the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), which ended in humiliating defeat and the loss of the empire's most prized possession. It was among the most savage of colonial wars: Of the 1.7 million French soldiers who served in Algeria from 1954 to 1962, 30,000 never returned; between 300,000 and a million Algerians were killed, and hundreds of thousands were placed in concentration camps, where torture was routine. Until two years ago, when it finally acknowledged having fought a war in Algeria, the French government referred to the conflict as les événements--the events.
In case there were any doubts as to what these young men died defending, there was Paul Aussaresses, an 83-year-old general wearing an eye patch and the cross of the Legion of Honor. In an interview with Le Monde last November, Aussaresses confessed, without a note of remorse, to torturing and executing Algerian militants. Even so, no one, certainly not Jospin, was prepared for the incendiary memoir that Aussaresses was to publish ten days later.
The book, Special Services, Algeria 1955-1957, has riveted the French, stirring long-suppressed memories of the "war without a name" and generating calls for an official declaration of repentance and judicial action against its author. It is a remarkable document, both for what it reveals of France's crimes in Algeria and for what it reveals of the miscarriage of justice that took place after the war.
When Aussaresses arrived in Algeria in 1955, he was a hero, having carried out a series of daring intelligence missions across enemy lines for de Gaulle's Free French forces. In Algeria, he quickly acquired a mastery of the very tactics that he had feared would be applied to him had he been caught by the Gestapo. Electrodes to the eyes and testicles, half-drownings, beatings--he stopped at nothing in his efforts to get his suspects to crack. After torturing and killing his first Arab, he writes with a disturbing detachment that calls to mind Camus's Mersault: "I thought of nothing. I had no regrets over his death--if I had any regrets, it was because he did not talk."
Aussaresses's book sheds light on some of the most important unresolved mysteries of the war, notably the deaths of Larbi Ben M'Hidi, an FLN leader, and of Ali Boumendjel, a prominent Algerian attorney. The French have always maintained that both men committed suicide. In fact, Aussaresses meticulously arranged their deaths--and, one suspects, many others--to look as if they were suicides. Boumendjel, he reports, was thrown from a rooftop after having been tortured for forty-three days. Aussaresses drove Ben M'Hidi to a farm outside Algiers, where the prisoner was strangled to death.
The historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, an early opponent of the war, told Le Monde, "One must take this book for what it is, the memoirs of an assassin." True enough. But Aussaresses was not alone. He was no more a rogue agent than the Vichy collaborators Maurice Papon and René Bousquet were--or than Bob Kerrey and his men were in the jungle of Vietnam. Aussaresses is well aware of this fact. In torturing and executing suspects, he says he was simply employing the "special powers" that he had been granted in 1956 by the government of Socialist Prime Minister Guy Mollet, with the support of the Communist Party. According to Aussaresses, François Mitterrand, Mollet's justice minister, had "an emissary...in the person of the judge Jean Berard, who covered for us.... I had the best possible relationship with him and I never hid anything from him."
Aussaresses's book has inspired widespread revulsion; 56 percent of the French have expressed support for an official apology and legal action against officers who ordered torture. Prime Minister Jospin, who insists that torture was "an aberration," has firmly rejected the idea of a parliamentary inquiry, proposing further "scientific research" by historians. President Jacques Chirac, who served in Algeria and says he is "horrified" by the book, has initiated proceedings to strip the general of his uniform.
Unfortunately, nothing more is likely to come of the indignation roused by Aussaresses's book. There is a ten-year statute of limitations on war crimes in France, and the broader definition of "crimes against humanity" applies only to abuses committed since 1994. The generals of Algeria also enjoy the protection of amnesties granted in 1962 and 1968. In mid-May, a French court threw out a suit against Aussaresses for "crimes against humanity" by the International Federation for Human Rights. The general's actions, the court opined, are "in all likelihood covered by the amnesty of July 31, 1968." It will require extraordinary audacity for any French politician to challenge these legal obstacles. Meanwhile, Paul Aussaresses can talk about his crimes, which are also France's crimes, without fear of punishment. His freedom is a grim reminder that when nations fail to settle their accounts with torture, it is torturers who have the last laugh.
Here we go, starting on what promises to be a pleasantly engrossing tour of the landmarks of three centuries of Anglo-American intellectual feminism, guided by a seriously impressive scholar, Elaine Showalter of Princeton University.
When Philip Roth compiles lists of the writers he most admires, Tolstoy never seems to make it. There's Flaubert, Kafka, Bellow--the touchstones. Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Céline--the madmen. Henry Miller, of course; even Chekhov and Thomas Mann. But Tolstoy, when he appears in Roth's fiction at all, is usually something of a joke. In The Ghost Writer, young Nathan Zuckerman travels to meet his hero, the reclusive novelist E.I. Lonoff ("Married to Tolstoy" is how the novel describes the plight of Lonoff's wife); lying the first night in the sanctum where Lonoff composes his masterpieces, and knowing that a fetching student of Lonoff's is also staying at the house, Zuckerman is, shamefully, seized by erotic yearnings. He yields to them. "Virtuous reader," he reports, "if you think that after intercourse all animals are sad, try masturbating on the daybed in E.I. Lonoff's study and see how you feel when it's over."
As if this wasn't bad enough, four years later Roth began The Anatomy Lesson with a sexual rewriting of Anna Karenina's famous opening. "Happy families are all alike," Tolstoy wrote. "Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Everything at the Oblonskys' was in confusion." Roth's version: "When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she's not around, other women must do. Zuckerman was making do with four other women."
So perhaps it is as punishment for this needling that in his old age Roth has become Tolstoy. His last five novels have been Tolstoyan in scope, and, like Tolstoy, he has been celebrated for them. Like Tolstoy he is loathed by the official organs of religion--an archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church suggested that Tolstoy be executed for the antimarital rantings of "The Kreutzer Sonata," while here in America an influential rabbi demanded to know, "What is being done to silence this man?" after Roth's attacks on Jewish suburbia in Goodbye, Columbus. And if it so happens that the Jews are wrong, and Hell exists, there can be no question that the author of Sabbath's Theater will spend eternity there.
But the chief reason that Roth is Tolstoy is that he, almost alone of our contemporary novelists, so insistently has Something to Say, and is prepared, at times, to forsake all his literary instincts in order to say it. Tolstoy's digressions in War and Peace on the mechanisms of history infuriated such early readers as Flaubert ("he repeats himself and he philosophises!"), as well as everyone since. After completing his masterpiece, Anna Karenina, Tolstoy for some time wrote only philosophical and religious tracts. As for Roth, who came dangerously close to turning his last, very powerful novel, The Human Stain, into a political rant against the Clinton impeachment, he too has for the moment dropped most pretenses to fiction and produced, with The Dying Animal, something far closer to an essay.
It is an essay, naturally, about sex. Lenin claimed that Tolstoy was the mirror of the Russian Revolution; for the past forty years, Roth has been the mirror of the sexual one. In his work, the contradictions of that libidinal revolt have found their fullest expression. During the 1960s, Roth hailed its arrival--indeed, three years after the 1969 publication of Portnoy's Complaint, Irving Howe could damningly suggest that Roth was "a man at ease with our moment." But Portnoy, Zuckerman and the rest have also testified eloquently to the costs of such freedom. You may shatter convention, Roth showed, but be warned that society (with its thuggish enforcer, the superego) has the resources to defend itself, with extreme prejudice.
The same paradigm fits the slim plot of The Dying Animal. The narrator, 70-year-old David Kepesh, is a cultural arbiter and professor who has systematically been sleeping with everyone, including and especially his students, since leaving his wife and child in the 1960s. You will perhaps object that Kepesh doesn't have any kids, and you'll be right. Roth has never been scrupulous with his characters' biographies--Zuckerman's childhood, for example, what with the boxing lessons and ping-pong in Swede Levov's basement and the Communism, is beginning to look awfully crowded--and in this case he outfits Kepesh, who appeared in two previous, rather mediocre outings as a hesitant philanderer in The Professor of Desire and as a giant breast in The Breast, with a more virile résumé and an abandoned son from a different first marriage. Nor does he bother to explain how the mammillary Kepesh turned himself back into a man.
But it's still the same Kepesh, of all Roth's narrators the dullest and most methodical. Even when he ceased to be a man, Kepesh was a most reasonable breast. He is reasonable still, as he catalogues his sexual habits, rules and arrangements; of an affair with a middle-aged former student, he explains: "It was a joint venture, our sexual partnership, that profited us both and that was strongly colored by Carolyn's crisp executive manner. Here pleasure and equilibrium combined." Given this regimented administration of his own happiness, it is naturally satisfying to see Kepesh--"the propagandist of fucking"--caught up in all the old emotions after an affair with a particularly stunning student. "This need," he moans, referring not to lust but to attachment. "This derangement. Will it never stop?"
But before everyone runs out to buy this paean to the triumph of the bourgeois spirit, they should be warned that Roth takes Kepesh far more seriously than this plot summary indicates--takes him at his word. It should even be noted--if I may be allowed a quick critical crudity--that Kepesh's style is the closest among his narrators to the style of Roth's own essays and memoirs. His concerns are Roth's, and he shares many of the master's ideas about the world. For Kepesh is not merely a reflection of the sexual revolution, but also its historian.
And here I must stop myself--it is so easy to make fun of Roth. Sixty-eight years old and again with the sex. When Tolstoy published his attack on physical love in "The Kreutzer Sonata," young wits suggested that the Count's own kreutzer might be out of order. It is easy, in other words, to make fun of old men. I myself have done so. I thought--it seems to be the general consensus--that sex for Roth was a device with which to propel his fictions; that he could have used cars, or whales, or sports, and chose sex merely because it was historically ripe, as a subject, and for the simpler reason that it was the quickest way to épater ye olde bourgeoisie. Diaphragm! Cunt! "The Raskolnikov of jerking off"!
I no longer think so. It seems obvious that at this point Roth can do little with sex that he hasn't done already (though he tries in The Dying Animal, he tries). This continued fixation is fictionally fallow--as Roth writes, baldly, in The Dying Animal, "You know you want it and you know you're going to do it and nothing is going to stop you. Nothing is going to be said here that's going to change anything." Since sex is, in this view, overdetermined, it's like writing about gravity. (In fact, not having sex is far more promising--one of the things it promises being future sex.)
Yet Roth persists, and after forty years it can only be because he believes sex the most important topic he could possibly tackle, and now more than ever. So this book demands that we approach it with a straight face, even when a straight face seems the least natural response. Kepesh, of course, is professorial, telling of the Merry Mount trading post in colonial Massachusetts, raided by the Puritans because it was a bad influence on the young. "Jollity and gloom," he quotes Hawthorne, "were contending for an empire." He is also empirical, a one-man research institute, reporting the number of times (one) that he was the beneficiary of oral sex in college in the 1950s, and clinically tracing the progress made in the interim: "The decades since the sixties have done a remarkable job of completing the sexual revolution. This is a generation of astonishing fellators. There's been nothing like them ever before among their class of young women."
If this seems deliberately offensive, it is part of the general urgency, even desperation, that pulses through this book. Roth is running out of time; he must tell you as quickly as possible, he must convince you to change your life. Now, Roth has always considered the sexual revolution in quasi-world-historical terms. "The massive late-sixties assault upon sexual customs," he told an interviewer in 1974,
came nearly twenty years after I myself hit the beach fighting for a foothold on the erotic homeland held in subjugation by the enemy. I sometimes think of my generation of men as the first wave of determined D-day invaders, over whose bloody, wounded carcasses the flower children subsequently stepped ashore to advance triumphantly toward that libidinous Paris we had dreamed of liberating as we inched inland on our bellies, firing into the dark.
This is sweet and funny and light--and wholly innocent, it seems, of the damage done.
There is no such lightness in The Dying Animal. When the same idea (Roth as sexual revolutionary vanguard) resurfaces, it has an embattled quality to it, as if Roth is no longer certain what has happened, or who won. "Look," says Kepesh, in his demotic, direct address:
I'm not of this age. You can see that. You can hear that. I achieved my goal with a blunt instrument. I took a hammer to domestic life and those who stand watch over it. And to [my son]'s life. That I'm still a hammerer should be no surprise. Nor is it a surprise that my insistence makes me a comic figure on the order of the village atheist to you who are of the current age and who haven't had to insist on any of this.
The shift in tone from the interview is remarkable. The confidence is gone; the winds of history are shifting. Not only have the young forgotten their benefactors, they've started to cede the freedoms won for them--"now even gays want to get married," says Kepesh. "I expected more from those guys." And the deflowered order has been replaced by a new form of surveillance, which Kepesh scrupulously documents during a student conference: "we sat side by side at my desk, as directed, with the door wide open to the public corridor, all eight of our limbs, our two contrasting torsos visible to every Big Brother of a passerby." The revolution for which Kepesh fought so ruthlessly has been betrayed.
Which is a well-known habit of revolutions. Roth might have predicted, in fact, that women could not merely come alive as autonomous sexual beings without also developing ways of defending themselves against groping professors. He might even have predicted that this defense would at times grow absurd, that it would seek regimentation not only for physical but for verbal relations, that it would create a vocabulary of misunderstanding so dense it may take the passing of an entire generation before men and women can speak to one another again.
That all this might have been predicted in no way suggests that Roth is wrong to raise his voice in protest. It is striking, indeed, that a writer forever accused of it has now turned himself so vehemently against vulgarity--against the very leveling and coarsening of our conversation. Toward the end of The Dying Animal, Roth's former lover is beset by tragedy: "She began telling me about how foolish all her little anxieties of a few months back now seemed, the worries about work and friends and clothes, and how this had put everything in perspective," says Kepesh, "and I thought, No, nothing puts anything in perspective."
No, because there is no privileged view, no heights from which to look. This is the endpoint of the nihilist's wisdom. And Roth, after a circle of great radius, comes again to look like Tolstoy, like a writer who turns the light of his reason upon all the expressions and conventions by which we thoughtlessly live. How out of place he seems at a time when most fiction, competent as it is, has taken to being demure about its own necessity; when most writers are such professionals. Updike, DeLillo, Pynchon, of his generation, are all at least as talented as Roth; DeLillo is as timely, as ready to philosophize and to use the word "America." But no one is as urgent, as committed to the communication of his particular human truth.
The Dying Animal is not a great work in the way that The Human Stain, American Pastoral, Operation Shylock and, especially, Sabbath's Theater were great works. But it completes the picture--the picture of what a writer can be. Where DeLillo's recent novella, The Body Artist, was remarkable for its departure from his customary mode, The Dying Animal is remarkable for its fealty to the ground Roth has always worked. It cedes nothing, apologizes for nothing; it deepens, thereby, the seriousness of all his previous books.
"Because [sex] is based in your physical being, in the flesh that is born and the flesh that dies," says Kepesh.
Only [during sex] are you most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself. It's not the sex that's the corruption--it's the rest. Sex isn't just friction and shallow fun. Sex is also the revenge on death. Don't forget death. Don't ever forget it. Yes, sex too is limited in its power. I know very well how limited. But tell me, what power is greater?
You could answer (virtuous reader), as you have answered Roth so many times before, that art, and its promise of eternity, is greater; or politics, and its promise of justice, is greater; or religion, and its promise of spiritual peace, is more powerful. You could answer Roth thus, but one of you would have to be lying.
Over the past two years, it has become commonplace to read that the casualties among Kosovo Albanians were not sufficiently high to warrant the NATO intervention that put an end--at some remove--to the rule of Slobodan Milosevic. Without saying so explicitly, many liberal and "left" types, and many conservatives and isolationists, have implied that the Kosovars did not suffer quite enough to deserve their deliverance. The dispute revolves around two things; the alleged massacre at Racak (which may or may not have been a firefight provoked by the Kosovo Liberation Army) and the relative emptiness of certain identifiable "mass grave" sites.
As to Racak, it might be argued that Western policy-makers seized too fast on the evidence of a Bosnian-style bloodbath, but--in view of what had been overlooked or tolerated for so long in Bosnia--it would be tough to argue that a "wait and see" policy would have been morally or politically superior. Wait for what? Wait to see what? And, since most of those who cast doubt on Racak were opposed on principle in any case to any intervention, as they had been in Bosnia, the force of their objection does not really depend on the body count, or on the issue of who shot first. For those of us who supported the intervention, with whatever misgivings, it was plain enough that Milosevic wanted the territory of Kosovo without the native population, and that a plan of mass expulsion, preceded by some exemplary killings, was in train. The level of casualties would depend on the extent of resistance that the execution of the plan would encounter.
The bulk of the European and American right had announced in advance that the cleansing of Kosovo by Milosevic was not a big enough deal to justify military action; this seems to remain their view. It was also, according to former NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark in his new memoir, the institutional view of the Pentagon. It would therefore have been the right's view, whatever happened or did not happen at Racak. It would presumably also have been their view even if the United Nations had passed a resolution authorizing the operation, over the entrenched objections of Boris Yeltsin and Jiang Zemin. (The Genocide Convention, which mandates action by signatory powers whenever the destruction of a people in whole or in part is being committed, takes precedence in the view of some.)
So we'll never know if another Rwanda was prevented or not, since another Rwanda did not in fact take place. However, on the issue of the mass graves there is now, as a result of the implosion of the Milosevic regime, more forensic evidence to go on.
At the time of the war itself I received a letter from a Serbian student of mine, a political foe of Milosevic but by no means a NATO fan. He told me that his family in Serbia had a friend, a long-distance truck driver whom they trusted. This man had told them of entering Kosovo with his refrigerated vehicle, picking up Albanian corpses under military orders and driving them across the "Yugoslav" border as far as the formerly autonomous province of Voivodina, where they were hastily unloaded. He'd made several such runs. At the time, I decided not to publish this letter because although it appeared to be offered in good faith it also seemed somewhat weird and fanciful, and because rumors of exactly this sort do tend to circulate in times of war and censorship.
In early May of this year, the Belgrade daily newspaper Blic, now freed from the constraints of censorship, published a report about a freezer truck, loaded with Albanian cadavers and bearing Kosovo license plates, that had been pulled from the river Danube in April 1999. The location was the town of Kladovo, about 150 miles east of Belgrade. Local gravediggers told of being hastily mobilized to load the bodies onto another truck, and to keep their mouths shut. The man who found the truck, Zivojin Djordjevic, was interviewed on Belgrade Radio B92. "It was a Mercedes lorry--the name of the meat-processing company from Pec was written in Albanian on the cabin. The license plates were from Pec.... When the lorry was pulled out and the doors of the freezer opened, corpses started sliding out. There were many bodies of women, children and old people. Some women had Turkish trousers, some children and old people were naked."
To this macabre tale, identifiable people have put their names. The director of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade, Natasha Kandic, has been collecting information about comparable incidents in the period between late March and mid-June 1999, with piles of corpses removed from cemeteries or graves in Kosovo and either reburied secretly or incinerated. This is not improvised wartime atrocity propaganda; it is the careful finding of patient human rights investigators after the fact.
One cannot yet say the same about another story, which concerns the mass burning of bodies in the blast furnaces of the Trepca steel plant. The eyewitnesses here are, so far, only a driver named "Branko" and a Serbian "special forces" officer named "Dusko." They suggest that, in that terrible spring, as many as 1,500 murdered Albanian civilians were fed into the mills and furnaces of the steel complex. It would be premature to credit such unconfirmed and lurid reports, even though investigators from the Hague tribunal have already spoken about evidence being destroyed at the nearby Trepca mines. And at first, I didn't quite believe the freezer-truck tale either.
In the relatively new atmosphere of post-Milosevic Serbia, the armed forces have charged some 183 soldiers for crimes committed in Kosovo. This might be part of an "isolated incident" strategy, or it might be the beginning of a real investigation. If the reports now in circulation prove to be true, it would mean (given the complicity of border guards, steelworks managers, traffic cops and cemetery authorities) there was a state design both to the original murders and the secret interments. Such a discovery would help constitute the emancipation of Serbia as well as of Kosovo. But it would owe very little to those who described the belated Western intervention as an exercise in imperialism based upon false reporting. We shall see.
They were kidnapped on the street, or summoned to the village square, or lured from home with false promises of work, to be forced into the Japanese military's far-flung, highly organized system of sexual slavery throughout its occupied territories in the 1930s and 1940s. Of some 200,000 so-called comfort women only a quarter survived their ordeal; many of those died soon after of injuries, disease, madness, suicide. For years the ones who remained were silent, living marginal lives. But beginning in 1991, first one, then a trickle, then hundreds of middle-aged and elderly women from Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines and other former Japanese possessions came forward demanding that the Japanese government acknowledge its responsibility, apologize and make reparations. Despite a vigorous campaign of international protest, with mass demonstrations in Korea and Taiwan, Japan has hung tough: In 1995 Prime Minister Tomiichi Muayama offered "profound"--but unofficial--apologies and set up a small fund to help the women, to be financed on a voluntary basis by business; this past March, the Hiroshima high court overturned a modest award to three Korean women. As if official foot-dragging weren't demeaning enough, a popular comic-book history of Japan alleges that the comfort women were volunteers, and ultraright-wing nationalists have produced middle-school textbooks, approved for use in classrooms, that omit any mention of the government's role in the comfort-woman program.
Frustrated in Japan, the comfort women have now turned to the US Court of Appeals for the Washington, DC, Circuit. Under the 212-year-old Alien Tort Claims Act, foreigners may sue one another in US courts for human rights violations; the women are also relying on a law against sexual trafficking passed last year by Congress. In mid-May, however, the State Department asked the Justice Department to file a brief expressing its sympathies with the women's sufferings but urging that the case be dismissed as lacking jurisdiction: Japan has sovereign immunity, under which nations agree to overlook each other's wrongdoings, and moreover, treaties between it and the United States put finis to claims arising from the war.
In other words, it's all right to seize girls and women and put them in rape camps--aka "comfort stations"--for the amusement of soldiers far from home, as long as it's part of official military policy. War is hell, as the trustees of the New School noted in their letter absolving their president, Bob Kerrey, of the killing of as many as twenty-one Vietnamese women and children. If it's OK to murder civilians, how wrong can it be to rape and enslave them?
"The Administration's position is particularly terrible and irresponsible when you consider the evolution of attitudes toward wartime rape over the last ten years," says Elizabeth Cronise, who with Michael Hausfeld is arguing the comfort women's case. Indeed, sexual violence in war has typically been regarded as the inevitable concomitant of battle, part of the spoils of war, maybe even, for the evolutionary-psychology minded, the point of it: Think of the rape of the Sabine women or the plot of the Iliad, which is precipitated by a fight between Achilles and Agamemnon over possession of the captured Trojan girls Chryseis and Briseis, although my wonderful old Greek professor Howard Porter didn't quite put it like that. It was only this past February that an international tribunal brought charges solely for war crimes of sexual violence, when three Bosnian Serbs were convicted in The Hague of organizing and participating in the rape, torture and sexual enslavement of Muslim women.
But even by these ghastly standards, the case of the comfort women stands out for the degree of planning and organization the Japanese military employed. Noting, for example, that subject populations tended to resent the rape of local women, authorities typically shipped the women far from home; although the women saw little or no money, "comfort stations" were set up as brothels with ethnically graduated fees, from Japanese women at the top to Chinese women at the bottom. The system was not, strictly speaking, a wartime phenomenon: It began in 1932, with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, and continued after the war's end. In fact, according to Yoshimi Yoshiaki, whose Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II (Columbia) is crucial reading, the Japanese military authorities set up comfort stations for the conquering American troops. As Cronise points out, even if the United States has closed the books on Japan's wartime atrocities, it could still side with the comfort women on the grounds that many of them were enslaved during peacetime.
"The government's position is technically defensible," says Widney Brown, advocacy director for women's rights at Human Rights Watch. "What's not defensible is the Department of Justice's giving as a reason that it doesn't want to jeopardize relations with Japan." Incredibly, the Justice Department is arguing just that, along with the further self-interested point that a ruling in favor of the comfort women would open the United States to human rights lawsuits in other countries. (Remember that the United States has sabotaged the International Criminal Court.) Says Brown, "It shows a failure to understand the significance of the comfort women case as a major step in the development of human rights for women. After all, their case could have been brought up in the Far East tribunal right after World War II, but it wasn't. This is a major chance to move beyond that. You could even argue that the view of women as property--if not of one man, then another--was what prevented sexual slavery from being seen as a war crime until now."
The US lawsuit may well be the comfort women's last chance. Now in their 70s and 80s, most will soon be dead, and since few married or had children, there won't be many descendants to continue the fight for reparations. By stonewalling, the Japanese government will have won. And the Bush Administration will have helped it. All that's missing is the call for healing and mutual forgiveness.
Once in a while you come across a book that is so original, so persuasive, so meticulously researched and documented that it overrides some of your most taken-for-granted assumptions and beliefs. Devices and Desires is such a work. The author, Andrea Tone, associate professor of history at Georgia Tech, belongs to a small band of new historians who are reassessing the lives of nineteenth-century women through attention to their personal (and I do mean very personal) health aids. An earlier example would be Rachel Maines's The Technology of Orgasm, published by Johns Hopkins in 1999, which describes and illustrates the 1880s-style vibrators that doctors freely used in their offices--and women in their homes--for relief of pelvic congestion and the female "hysteria" associated with it.
Devices and Desires opens in 1873 when, through the machinations of Anthony Comstock--star agent for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV)--Congress unexpectedly voted to make contraceptives illegal. Many Americans disapproved, and when the news reached Ireland, George Bernard Shaw coined the word "Comstockery," which, he predicted, would become "the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States."
It may be that talk of the new law made contraception known to some folks who had never heard of it before. It may be that, as with Eve's forbidden fruit, the ban made pregnancy prevention seem more alluring or naughty--or more fun. Then too, the "bootleg" business environment that ensued was relatively welcoming to entrepreneurial immigrants, smart single mothers with families to support and other ambitious "outsiders." "As with condoms," Tone observes, "creating diaphragms was easy and inexpensive, an ideal venture for those with little money and a penchant for risk." In any case the business of contraception flourished in the Comstock era, embracing scores of diverse devices and spermicides for women and men. Hundreds if not thousands of small entrepreneurs and distributors profited, as did as an impressive handful of industrial giants, including the arch-hypocrite Samuel Colgate, millionaire heir to the New Jersey-based soap firm, who served as president of Comstock's NYSSV while openly promoting Vaseline to "destroy spermatozoa, without injury to the uterus or vagina."
Other well-established companies that made, distributed and freely advertised contraceptives--ranging from intrauterine devices (IUDs) to vaginal pessaries (appliances intended to support the uterus that could also prevent the passage of sperm), and from douching syringes, suppositories and foaming tablets to sponges and male caps--included some still familiar names: B.F. Goodrich, Sears, Roebuck & Co. and Goodyear. "The B.F. Goodrich Company," notes Tone, "manufactured three soft-rubber IUDs--one pear- and two donut-shaped, each available in five sizes--and twelve hard-rubber models. Two of the latter models were one-size-fits-all rings." Physicians were leading players in the commercialization of mass-produced IUDs--constructed from rubber, metal, ivory and even wood--although some models were promoted for do-it-yourself insertion.
Tone's exhaustive research led her--like an ace detective or shoe-leather crime reporter--through an eight-year coast-to-coast investigation of Post Office Department records, Federal Trade Commission transcripts (some with decaying diaphragms and condoms glued to the pages), American Medical Association (AMA) Health Fraud Archives, records of the NYSSV, credit reports from nineteenth-century Dun and Co. collections, patents, love letters, arrest records, trial records, advertisements and trade catalogues--as well as "entrapment" letters, some drafted by Comstock himself. (He or another agent would pose as being in desperate need of birth control, get the goods and make the arrest.) Established companies, Tone discovered, run by "honest, brave men" who supported Comstock and NYSSV, were never targets for such treatment, which was reserved for smaller entrepreneurs--especially immigrants ("sly" Jews) and women ("old she villains").
Even so, many of those arrested were let off or punished lightly, while the entrapping agents and prosecutors ran the risk of being scolded and humiliated by judges and juries who doubted the advisability, and constitutionality, of such far-reaching Congressional interference into personal matters. Over time, what Tone calls a "zone of tolerance" was created to buffer the flourishing contraceptives trade and its practitioners. In fact, Shaw's prediction that Comstockery would become a "standing joke" was soon realized here in the United States, even, it would seem, in Congress itself.
The hugely ambitious Comstock Act, however, was hardly about contraceptives alone. It stated:
No obscene, lewd or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, print or other publication of an indecent character, or any article or thing designed to be intended for the prevention of conception or the inducing of abortion, nor any article or thing intended or adapted for any indecent or immoral use or nature, nor any written or printed card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement or notice of any kind giving information, directly or indirectly, where, or how, or of whom, or by what means either of the things mentioned may be obtained or made...shall be carried in the mail.
You do the math. A small army of Post Office inspectors (known as special agents) were required to enforce such an effort. But Congress refused to drum up a serious budget for the measure when Comstock went into effect and made light of the ambitious national program by raising the number of inspectors--nationwide--from fifty-nine to only sixty-three. Looking at the postal arrest figures from May 1875 through April 1876, Tone counted a total of 410 apprehensions, of which only twenty-seven were for violations of the Comstock law.
Nonetheless, in later generations we took it for granted that from passage of the Comstock Act until the post-World War I rise of Margaret Sanger, the average American had little or no access to what we now call "family planning" (a term, Tone informs us, suggested in the 1960s by Malcolm X--"because Negroes [are] more willing to plan than to be controlled"). And while it's true that some of the contraceptives available at the time were ineffective, dangerous or both, others, including condoms, cervical caps (apt to be euphemistically advertised as pessaries in the Comstock era), diaphragms, sponges and some spermicides were often pretty good and relatively inexpensive. Tone notes that in this sea of alternatives many determined wives and husbands doubled, tripled or quadrupled on protection. Given this environment, it's not surprising that after 1880 the national fertility rates for both white and black women declined rapidly, reaching an all-time low in 1940--twenty years before Enovid, the first birth-control pill, came to market and only three years after the AMA's 1937 resolution to "endorse" contraception and recommend it for inclusion in the standard medical school curriculum.
Between 1880 and 1940 the average fertility rate of whites dropped from 4.4 children per woman to 2.1. For blacks it dropped from 7.5 children to 3. Given these incontrovertible facts--a flourishing contraceptives industry paired with a steady decline in births--how could we have come to believe otherwise, that our great and great-great grandmothers were, so to speak, up the fertility creek without a paddle?
Some of the historical distortion must be attributed to the work of Margaret Sanger, who originally dreamed of female empowerment through woman-oriented contraceptive technologies. She viewed birth control as a woman's right and responsibility, and wrote in 1922 that "the question of bearing and rearing children is the concern of the mother and potential mother.... No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her own body." Condoms "compromised this objective by placing women's procreative destiny in men's hands." Until her death in 1966 Sanger promoted the manufacture first of diaphragms and later the pill, never quite answering objections from other feminists--in the 1920s and again in the 1960s--that this transferred power over women's bodies to doctors who were overwhelmingly (in the case of gynecologists, 97 percent) male. Sanger came to believe so strongly in medically controlled contraception that in a 1952 letter she stated that her greatest achievement had been "to keep the movement strictly and sanely under medical auspices."
This was an about-face from her earlier position. In her extraordinary 1915 pamphlet, Family Limitation, a home guide to contraception, Sanger, as Tone explains, "envisioned a world of grassroots birth control where women from all walks of life could use contraceptives without reliance on doctors, a populist approach she would soon abandon." Family Limitation discussed douches, condoms and cervical caps. (The essential difference between a pessary or cap and a diaphragm is that the generally thimble-shaped caps fit over the cervix by suction and are less likely to be displaced. The diaphragm, however, more or less divides the vagina vertically into two compartments, protecting the cervix from the arena where sperm is deposited. Both methods can benefit from outside help with fitting and correct technique, but the cap has a better record of over-the-counter success, and was long distributed by this means in France, England and the United States.) Sanger ultimately recommended caps, which she felt could be most easily and discreetly used and controlled by women. She distributed 100,000 copies of her pamphlet, imploring women to learn how to insert caps into their own bodies and then to "teach each other" how to as well.
When Sanger and her sister Ethel opened their first clinic in 1916 they instructed women, eight at a time, on how to use over-the-counter (OTC) contraceptives, including condoms, suppositories and rubber pessaries. When police, inevitably, raided the clinic, they found boxes of Mizpah pessaries. An effective OTC contraceptive, this flexible rubber cap was sold by druggists and mail-order vendors for the alleged purpose of treating such medical conditions as a displaced (or prolapsed) uterus. But as Tone writes: "Family Limitation got Sanger into more trouble. In 1915, she found herself back in Europe dodging American law while continuing her contraceptive education.... The trip across the Atlantic was risky. War had broken out." Back home, her husband, William Sanger, had his own problems. And as fate would have it, so did Anthony Comstock. William Sanger had been arrested by Comstock for distributing Family Limitation. And Comstock, who caught a cold in the courtroom during the trial, died soon after of pneumonia.
After her divorce from William, Margaret admitted she was looking for "a widower with money." James Noah Henry Slee, twenty years her senior, was "a well-heeled member of Manhattan's business elite...part of the same establishment Sanger had vilified in her younger, more radical years." They married in 1922 and with his backing, Tone explains,
Sanger embarked on a new chapter of her career, one that distanced the birth control movement from its radical origins and placed it on a more conservative path.... She recognized...that medical science enjoyed increasing prestige and political clout...she sought birth control allies through an ideology that trumpeted women's health over their civil liberties and cast doctors, not patients, as agents of contraceptive choice.
Sanger switched her preference to the diaphragm, particularly the Holland-Rantos brand, which sold exclusively to doctors. (This company, established in 1925, was funded by none other than Mr. Margaret Sanger, James Noah Henry Slee.) Sanger next prevailed on her besotted bridegroom to hire a distinguished, high-salaried doctor to promote their new company:
1925 is to be the big year for the break in birth control...the medical profession will take up the work...I shall feel that I have made my contribution to the cause and...I can withdraw from full-time activity.... If I am able to accomplish this victory...I shall bless my adorable husband, JNH Slee, and retire with him to the garden of love.
Sanger did not retire. In the following years she worked ceaselessly toward her goal of getting the AMA to endorse birth control. Her "signature" story, often bringing audiences to tears, concerned Sadie Sachs, a young immigrant mother of three, married to Jake, a truck driver. When Sadie begged a doctor to give her birth control he cruelly retorted, "Tell Jake to sleep on the roof." Sadie later died of septicemia following a self-induced abortion. Sanger was now in the business of helping the public forget that some of the widely available OTC methods worked very well for many people. As Tone points out, if Sadie could afford a physician visit, she could surely afford the far lower price of a contraceptive.
In addition to the move toward medicalization, our collective memory may have been dealt a brainwashing by panic-driven "eugenicists." As Sanger moved up socially she supported birth control for some elitist reasons, such as "the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit [and] of preventing the birth of defectives." But this was mild compared with the phobic reasoning of some of our greatest national leaders, who also feared the newcomers from Europe. Falling birthrates among our native born and the widespread immigration of foreigners from southern and eastern Europe (over 23 million people arrived on America's shores between 1880 and 1920) led Teddy Roosevelt to warn in 1912 that if middle-class American women used fertility control it "means racial death." In 1927 Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, our great champion of civil liberties, stunned many of his admirers when, in Buck v. Bell, he agreed to uphold a Virginia eugenics statute legalizing the coerced sterilization of "socially inadequate persons." Carrie Buck, the plaintiff, was young, single and white, the "daughter of an imbecile," the mother of an "illegitimate feeble minded child." Holmes agreed to the cutting of Buck's fallopian tubes, proclaiming, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Tone adds that during the Nuremberg trials following World War II, accused Nazi war criminals cited Buck v. Bell to justify the forced sterilization of some 2 million Germans.
Here in the United States, the eugenics and population control movements promoted--and continue to promote--the need to develop contraceptives that take prescription (and often removal) out of the woman's hands. For example, in interviews with 686 low-income users of Norplant--a hormonal contraceptive, intended to last for five years, that consists of six matchstick-sized capsules implanted in a woman's arm--researchers at Columbia University's Center for Population and Family Health learned that 40 percent anticipated or experienced "cost barriers" that could impede the removal of Norplant. They urge that family-planning clinics "follow a policy of Norplant removal on demand, regardless of the patient's ability to pay." Some feminists charge that the effectiveness of OTC methods (carefully used) is still downplayed in quasi-official figures, a dangerous public health mistake in this age of galloping STDs.
Meanwhile, the effectiveness of doctor-controlled methods has been exaggerated, as the FDA has acknowledged. Previously, it gave out "ideal" figures for oral-contraceptive effectiveness, in contrast to discouraging clinic "use" figures for barrier methods. In the new round of product labeling this has been partially corrected; actual-use figures for the Pill are placed in a truthful range of 92-95 percent, not at the falsely optimistic 99 percent-plus.
Devices and Desires is replete with riveting histories of women and men who labored--legally and illegally--in the ever-challenging arena of conception control, from the Comstock era through today, and includes portraits of the men who developed Enovid, the first pill, as well as those behind the notorious IUD, the Dalkon shield. Those who read this fascinating book will have a far keener and more credible sense of what has happened and where we are now. Most women are still unsatisfied with their contraceptive choices, and as Tone concludes,
It is ironic that in a post-Roe v. Wade world that celebrates reproductive choice, the most frequently used contraceptive in the country--by a wide-margin--is female sterilization. In a very real sense Americans are still waiting for the heralded "second contraceptive revolution" to arrive.... In the absence of universal health care or prescription drug coverage, one way out of the contraceptive conundrum may be the development of more affordable over-the-counter methods, which would increase men's and women's options without tethering contraceptives to the medical marketplace from which millions are excluded.... Today to meet the needs of women and men who lack sufficient resources, we must supplement reliable medical methods with inexpensive over-the-counter options.
In the 1960s, the introduction of the Pill, revival of the ever-treacherous IUD and "stealth sterilization" of welfare moms--whose tubes were tied, without permission, after giving birth--placed contraception still more firmly in doctors' hands. In the parlance of that decade the "greasy kid stuff," including condoms, was left in the dust. Because of overpopulation fears, the new technologies enjoyed a diplomatic immunity--at women's expense. At an annual meeting of medical school deans, Nobel laureate Dr. Frederick Robbins declared, "The dangers of overpopulation are so great that we may have to use certain techniques of conception control that may entail considerable risk to the individual woman." Original Pills contained 150 micrograms of estrogen; today we know that 20 suffices. Millions of women served as guinea pigs for high-dose pills and IUDs, and thousands died. In 1970, at Senate hearings, Dr. Louis Hellman, chairman of the FDA advisory committee that twice declared the Pill safe, admitted that in his equation of benefit versus risk he "put population first, before benefits to the individual woman's health."
As women demanded to "take our bodies back" from deceitful doctors, the spirit of Comstock rose up again. In 1973 Our Bodies, Ourselves, Ellen Frankfort's Vaginal Politics and my book Free and Female were banned in Cleveland and Washington, DC. In 1979 shipments of cervical caps that independent women's self-help clinics imported from England were seized by FDA agents. Senator Ted Kennedy helped to get the caps released, but the FDA restricted their use to "investigational device" (ludicrous--the same caps had been in continuous use in England for a century), thus subverting the grassroots revival of the cap. Who can say who put the FDA up to this, but perhaps some future Andrea Tone-type women's history sleuth will get to the bottom of it.
Meanwhile, one of my hopes for Tone's extraordinary book is that it might encourage many people--men as well as women--to reconsider the barrier methods, respect them more and possibly learn to enjoy them, as some say they do. In contrast to the steady decline of teenage pregnancy, the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases in young adults is increasing at a truly alarming rate. For example, estimates are that 46 percent of female college students are now infected with human papilloma virus (HPV), which can cause both genital warts and cervical cancer. Are student health services reliably advising their clients of this? My informants say no.


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Guide to the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of conditions from A to Z.
Pericarditis is inflammation of the pericardium, the thin sac (membrane) that surrounds the heart. There is a small amount of fluid between the inner and outer layers of the pericardium. Often, when the pericardium becomes inflamed, the amount of fluid between its two layers increases. This is called a pericardial effusion. If the amount of fluid increases quickly, the effusion can impair the ability of the heart to function properly. This complication of pericarditis is called cardiac tamponade and is a serious emergency.
The following are the most common indicators of pericarditis. However, individuals may experience symptoms differently. Symptoms may include:
Chest pain that:
Can especially be felt behind the breastbone, sometimes felt beneath the clavicle (collarbone), neck, and left shoulder.
Is a sharp, piercing pain over the center or left side of the chest that increases if the person takes a deep breath and usually decreases if the person sits up or leans forward.
Pain when swallowing
Palpitations (irregular heart beats)
The symptoms of pericarditis may resemble other conditions or medical problems. Consult your health care provider for a diagnosis.
Usually, the cause of pericarditis is unknown, but may include any or all of the following:
Infection (viral, bacterial, fungal, parasitic)
Autoimmune disorders (i.e., systemic lupus erythematosus, rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma)
Inflammation after a heart attack
Chest trauma or injury
Cancer, tuberculosis, or kidney failure
Medical therapies (certain medications, radiation therapy)
Heart surgery
Your health care provider will determine your specific treatment, based on:
Your age, overall health, and medical history
Severity of the disease
Cause of the disease
Your tolerance for specific medications, procedures, or therapies
Expectations for the course of the disease
Your opinion or preference
The goal of treatment for pericarditis is to determine and eliminate the cause of the disease. Treatment may include:
Medication (i.e., analgesics, anti-inflammatory drugs, or antibiotics)
Aspiration or removal of excess fluid
Pericarditis may last from two to six weeks, and there may be a recurrence of the disorder.
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does nvnews have a newsletter? i tried finding the link for some time on the front page and my efforts were fruitless. if nvn does have a newsletter, i suggest making it more easily accessed. if it does not have one, i would personally love one if possible :D.
Re: newsletter
I think we need Christmas cards. Who's up for Christmas cards? Anybody? Bueller?
Re: newsletter
Birthday gift certificates for 97% off any computer part of our choice. :)
Re: newsletter
i guess i'm the only one who puts value on such a primative thing :rolleyes:
i think i will try to start a movement to try and get as many tech places as possible to get a newsletter. i love newsletters, they are like the best candy in the world -- and it's a great deal why i like xbitlabs so much.
Re: newsletter
Why? Most ppl consider newletters = spam. Myself included.
Re: newsletter
If you visit the site on a regular basis why in the world would you need a newsletter?
Re: newsletter
don't need one, i like them is all. the beauty of a newsletter is that it's your choice to sign up for them. if you consider it spam, don't sign up for it.
i go straight to the forums myself when visiting here; but check the front page every so often (with the exception of the rss checker i put in tittydog) to check for updates. a newsletter is a bit more informative and generally gives you the information when it's ready so to speak.
like i said, i personally prefer the rss feed for nvnews, but for other users they may prefer a news letter. usually newsletters are very easy to set up and maintain themselves too, so i really don't see a disadvantage to it.
anyway, just a thought or three... i certainly am not going to be offended by you not making a newsletter as per my suggestion; but the threadcrapping did perk my anger ears a slight bit.
Re: newsletter
i dont think a newsletter is such a bad idea. i love this site, and i surf it like crazy. to help my obsessive complusive disorder-ness of this site.. a newsletter would be great just sitting in my inbox. :)
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Respond to Review of Loving Hut - Plzenska
by BartekBondzior
Review: One of the best vegan restaurant in Prague. English speaking staff, very friendly and helpful, at first we were a bit disoriented because of the self-service section, but one of the workers gave us english menu and we ordered from the menu. The food was really good quality considering the price. They were also open till 11pm.
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Are you looking for EU law content on this topic? This topic is part of the the EU law service. Here you can find a list of the most recent legal updates about Enlargement, as well as any related legislation trackers.
European Commission 2015 Work Programme: enlargement
On 16 December 2014, the European Commission adopted its Work Programme for 2015. This update lists the initiatives scheduled in the area of enlargement.
Enlargement: European Commission adopts 2014 Enlargement Package
On 8 October 2014 the European Commission adopted its annual Enlargement Package, including a Communication, Enlargement Strategy and Main Challenges 2014-15 and Progress Reports for the seven countri ...
Enlargement: EU grants Albania candidate status
On 24 June 2014, the General Affairs Council granted candidate status to Albania.
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Related quotes
"I am the captain of this ship! I have control of what's goes on or in. For I am the master of My thoughts. And No doubt or fear is welcome aboard!..."
"We are not Afraid of making Choices but the real thing that we are really afraid of is the Monster that would result from the Choice we make."
"I refuse to live My life under the shadows of doubts or fears! For I know who I am and I know where I'm going!..."
"I'm not gonna live My life under the shadows of fear! I will not, I refuse! For I know who I am and I know where I'm going!..."
"The power to overcome the thing you greatly fear is by learning never to leave the thing you fear alone."


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The growing need for research workers and scientists has opened new doors for women. Helen Hill Miller, who for many years was Washington correspondent for the London Economist, describes some of the work being done in science both by single women and by those who successfully combine marriage and a career.
Darwin's theory of natural selection, which was published practically simultaneously with the establisment of the ATLANTIC, opened new worlds to science. Dr. Evelyn Witkin, a brilliant young biologist at State University of New York College of Medicine in New York City, tells how genetics, a branch of science not yet born in Darwin's day, has carried forward our understanding of evolution.
A review of Jack Kerouac's On the Road