Agence France Presse, March 21, 2001 Jiang Zemin told Tiananman Papers were work of CIA: editor Chinese President Jiang Zemin was told secret documents detailing the Chinese Communist Party's handling of the Tiananmen Square massacre were the work of the CIA, one of the American editors of the papers said Wednesday. Perry Link said hardliners in Beijing had informed Jiang that he and co-editor Andrew Nathan were Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents hiding behind the clothing of scholars. "This doesn't bother me personally but (I am concerned) when I think the leader of one of the most powerful and important countries in the world genuinely has that bad information," Link, a professor of Chinese at Princeton University in the United States, said... The documents were leaked out of China and compiled by a Chinese pro-reformer in the United States, who in the book uses the pseudonym Zhang Liang, and edited by Link and Nathan. China's rulers have launched a vitriolic attack on the book and described the documents are fabricated. But Link said the release of the extended Chinese-language version of the book next month would add credibility to the documents and force China's leaders to confront the truth about the crackdown... However Link said Zhang and other pro-reformers involved in leaking the documents believed it mattered less how many people read the book, as long as China's leaders did. "They want to raise the question of political reform that was going somewhere in the '80s and was suddenly cut off on June 4."
The Vancouver Sun, March 21, 2001 Hot type, hot debate Two American scholars have caused controversy by claiming that Johann Gutenberg, the historical father of printing, did not invent the method of casting type with which he has been credited since the 15th century. A computer helped unravel the mystery. Mark Twain said it: "The whole world admits unheristatingly, and there can be no doubt about this, that Gutenberg's invention is the incomparably greatest event in the history of the world." But now two American scholars have caused an international sensation by claiming that the father of printing never used one of the crucial inventions: the means of making identical types that can be used over and over again... But according to a pioneering study, Gutenberg did not cast his type like this after all. By using the most sophisticated computer analysis so far of early printed letters, Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Paul Needham have shown that his types are not regular enough to have been made this way.... Needham wanted to establish objectively what the ideal set of Gutenberg's 250-odd types would have looked like, so in 1998 he asked for help from 22-year-old Blaise Aguera y Arcas. A recent Princeton graduate in biophysics, Aguera y Arcas had a formidable reputation for writing software, and after magnifying and enhancing the printed letters, he wrote a series of programs to analyse them... The problem was that there were no matches. Characters printed from types cast from the same matrix ought to be near identical. When one is electronically superimposed on another, there should be no discrepancies. But those in the Calixtus Bull were all different. "For instance," says Aguera y Arcas, "we saw hundreds of unique i's -- unique in ways that are not suggestive of damage. Damage can't change the angles of parts of the letters."
AScribe Newswire March 20, 2001 Tuesday Novelist Toni Morrison to Deliver Smith College Commencement Address Acclaimed novelist Toni Morrison will be the speaker at Smith College's 123rd commencement ceremony on Sunday, May 20. Morrison, who is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, is the author of seven major novels...which have received extensive critical acclaim. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 as well as the National Book Critics Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Humanities Medal and the Library of Congress Bicentennial Living Legend Award.
The Christian Science Monitor March 20, 2001 Teach for America's quiet visionary For someone who managed to turn her senior thesis into a 5,000 alumni-strong force of teachers, Wendy Kopp is surprisingly introverted. When asked what she's learned about herself during a decade running Teach for America, she stalls: "This is why I thank heaven I'll never have to interview for a job," she says as she lets out a hybrid sigh-laugh during a recent phone interview. In her forthcoming book, "One Day, All Children" (PublicAffairs), Kopp reveals her own brand of leadership - a talent for management combined with an unwavering conviction about the value of TFA's mission to place top graduates in disadvantaged schools. Kopp's diligence centered on her belief that a corps of teachers made up of top graduates would change the lives of disadvantaged students. This reality struck Kopp when she was a student at Princeton University. Her roommate, who had attended high school in the South Bronx, struggled with the academic pace of college even though she was "brilliant," Kopp says.
THE HARTFORD COURANT March 20, 2001 New Cells, New Memories The new cells that our brains produce help us make new memories, according to a study published in the journal Nature last week. Researchers at Rutgers and Princeton universities succeeded in slowing down the formation of new cells in the brains of rats, and then compared their ability to memorize certain tasks to the ability in rats with normal rates of new brain cell formation. The rats lacking new cell formation were no longer able to form certain types of memories. The researchers suggested that the findings show the brain has more recuperative powers than previously thought and give cause for optimism that new treatments for brains damaged by stroke or trauma may be found.
American Health Line March 19, 2001 MAKING ART FROM 'LOSS' Princeton University professor Edmund White recently published "Loss Within Loss: Artists in the Age of AIDS," a collection of essays about writers, painters, sculptors, architects and composers, among others, with AIDS. White cites the classical compositions by Chris DeBlasio, the writings of Paul Monette and the visual art of Ross Bleckner as "particularly strong" AIDS-related pieces. In the theatrical world, Tony Kushner's two-part play "Angels in America" is the "most honored" drama about the epidemic. The Post writes that the 1993 Academy Award-winning film "Philadelphia," despite receiving criticism for being "saccharine" and "politically correct," launched a "suffering gay character into the mainstream, and that put a human face on the disease that, for many, had not been there before."
The Times March 19, 2001, Monday What price a life? There has never been a worse time to be a titan of the pharmaceutical industry. Emboldened by massive publicity for campaigns against Huntingdon Life Sciences, animal rights protesters are turning to bigger fish, such as GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). Oxfam recently launched an astonishingly outspoken campaign condemning drug companies -and the Western governments that support them -for not supplying cheap medicines to the world's poorest nations. The ten largest drug companies in America enjoyed collective sales of about $ 179 billion last year, creaming off $ 121 billion of that as gross profit. Those margins are unmatched by virtually any other industry and are simply too high to get away with, according to Professor Uwe Reinhardt, a medical economist at Princeton University in New Jersey. "They (the drug companies) have had almost too good a ride," Reinhardt observes. "They have had the run of the market for too long and they are in for something of a shock."
BIOWORLD Today, March 15, 2001 DOES NEW NEURON INFLUX AID RECOLLECTION? TEEMING BRAIN CELLS SUPPORT HIPPOCAMPAL MEMORY TRACES IN PAVLOVIAN-CONDITIONED RATS. ... Does this plethora of new neurons, multiplying daily in the thousands, result in enhanced memory? Today's issue of Nature, dated March 15, 2001, reports an affirmative answer, albeit limited to rats and to one specific type of memory. Its title: "Neurogenesis in the adult is involved in the formation of trace memories." This seminal finding emerges from a joint research project between two behavioral neuroscientists, Elizabeth Gould, at Princeton University, and Tracey Shors, at Rutgers University. The two are co- senior authors of the paper. "It appears," Shors told BioWorld Today, "that the new neurons become involved in memory about a week to two weeks after they are generated, and they are involved in memories normally handled by the hippocampus. "What we wanted to know," she recounted, "is the function of these new neurons that are generated in the adult brain. It looks as if they have a role in the acquisition of certain types of new memories, and that's what we determined. ... Shors made an added point: "The fact that the brain has this self- renewing capacity is fairly encouraging for the prospect of brain repair. And one could imagine treatment strategies that enhance proliferation of cells, and might be somehow beneficial." ... In their ongoing research, the co-authors have "another interesting story to tell. It has to do," Shors concluded, "with sex differences. Females make more cells than males, and also learn certain memory tasks more than males. We're trying to determine the reason why." ...
The Times Union, March 15, 2001 Cancer researcher wins region's 'Nobel' HIGHLIGHT: Arnold J. Levine, co-discoverer of gene that fends off disease, is first to earn Albany Med honor NEW YORK -- Arnold J. Levine, a pioneering cancer researcher and president of Rockefeller University, became the first recipient Wednesday of the $ 500,000 Albany Medical Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research. ... Levine, 62, is credited with the co-discovery in 1979 of the p53 protein, a gene that is believed to prevent many common cancers by keeping damaged cells from multiplying. He made the finding at about the same time as David Lane of the University of Dundee in Scotland. Since then, researchers have learned that an estimated 55 percent of all human cancers, including those of the breast, lung and colon, contain a defective p53 protein. ... Levine, a former professor at Princeton University, was selected from more than 70 nominations for the $ 500,000 award, established to recognize work that has ''led to significant advances in the fields of health care and scientific research with ... benefits to patient care.'' ...
Aerospace America, March 2001 Setting in for the 107th Congress After witnessing one of the most heated battles in U.S. history for control of the presidency and the Congress, Capitol Hill saw a flurry of activity in January: As the new Congress put the finishing touches on tapping members for key committee assignments, confirmation hearings on the new Bush administration's cabinet nominees began. ... On January 20, Donald Rumsfeld was sworn in as the 21st secretary of defense at the Old Executive Office Building. He had held the same position from 1975 to 1977 under President Gerald Ford. "I am grateful to the president for the opportunity to serve again as secretary of defense. I look forward to working with the dedicated and talented men and women who serve in the armed forces and in the civilian ranks of the department," Rumsfeld said after the ceremony. Rumsfeld, a 68-year-old Chicago native, graduated from Princeton University in 1954, then joined the Navy as an aviator. ...
South China Morning Post March 15, 2001 Pg. 18 Qian to take Bush's pulse Greg Torode THE VISIT OF Vice-Premier Qian Qichen to Washington starting on Sunday has been billed as a desperate dash to thwart significant sales of new military weapons to Taiwan. This is true, but the visit is much more than that. Mr Qian will be the highest-level mainland official to visit the American capital since Premier Zhu Rongji met former United States president Bill Clinton in the Oval Office nearly two years ago. "This trip is very important for the Chinese leadership," said Perry Link, a China scholar at Princeton University. "I do think they feel uncertain because they are dealing with a new administration and a successful trip can only lessen the chances for misunderstandings. Underneath everything will sit the invitation for a summit . . . This is seen as very important to Mr Jiang and his supporters." |
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