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With doctors too busy, emergency rooms getting a lot more use

PHILADELPHIA _ It's always open. You don't need an appointment. And it's got all the medical experts and fancy equipment it takes to figure out what's wrong with you.

It's the emergency room. And it's where growing numbers of Americans are turning for everyday medical treatment, despite the concerns of insurers and other experts who say hospital ER care is expensive and fragmented.

Numbers that are just emerging show that, after a few years on the downswing, use of emergency departments is rising both nationally and locally.

ER charges are higher because so many patients have no insurance and pay nothing. But some doctors argue that it could be cheaper to centralize after-hours care at hospitals, rather than try to keep every primary-care office open nights and weekends.

Uwe Reinhardt, a Princeton University health economist, thinks they have a point.

"Using the emergency room for routine procedures is actually quite efficient," Reinhardt said.

Supernova yields clue to universal question

Accelerated cosmic expansion long suspected

Astronomers have spotted a faraway exploded star that helps confirm that the universe is growing at an ever-faster rate.

At 11 billion light-years away, the stellar explosion, or supernova, is the most distant ever seen. Details of its appearance, compared with those of closer supernovas, strengthen astronomers' suspicion that the universe is full of a mysterious "dark energy" that pushes it apart.

Paul Steinhardt, a leading dark energy theorist at Princeton University, said although the supernova work was intriguing, it's hard to tell what this one example might say about dark energy.

"We won't know more until we get a collection of supernovas at those distances," he said.

Paul Krugman is best known as a former economics columnist for Slate. (OK, maybe he was already pretty well-known when he started writing for Slate and is better known now as a New York Times economics op-ed columnist.) Like Kudlow, Krugman also worked for the Reagan White House for what he describes as an eye-opening year on the Council of Economic Advisers. Unlike Kudlow, he did not come away with the same fervor for tax cuts. Krugman's Times columns have been the scourge of Bush's economic policies (Mr. Bush's advisers continue to search for reasons that doing the responsible thing is actually a bad idea.), especially the proposed tax cut. Krugman is a professor at Princeton University.

PRINCETON PRESIDENT ON HCA BOARD

AMERICAN HOMEPATIENT REPORTS EARNINGS LOSS AND REMAINS IN DEFAULT

HCA announced that Harold T. Shapiro, president of Princeton University, has been named to the company's board of directors.

Shapiro replaces Elaine Chao, who left Nashville-based HCA's board to become the U.S. labor secretary.

Supernova Observations Bolster 'Dark Energy' Theory

Findings Could Alter Conception of Universe

Astronomers yesterday reported strong new evidence buttressing the controversial theory that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.

The key to the discovery is light from the most distant exploding star ever detected, more than 10 billion light years away in the early universe. A painstaking analysis of this light, if it holds up, transforms the notion of the accelerating universe from startling and radical to the most reasonable, conservative scenario of how the cosmos is evolving, the researchers said.

"It's remarkable, indeed. And if additional supernovas at these high redshifts [or distances] yield consistent results, this will convince most astronomers that dark energy does exist," said astrophysicist Neta Bahcall of Princeton University, not a member of the discovery team.

Progress encroaches on hallowed ground

Battlefields: Civil War sites across the South are in danger of fading away into suburban sprawl.

MARIETTA, Ga. -- More than 135 years after the Civil War, battlefields from Virginia to Texas are under siege, but this time from a more modern and consuming enemy -- suburban sprawl. In a bitter and surging war that has pitted preservationists against developers, the South is on the verge of losing again.

Since serious efforts began more than a decade ago to protect America's battlefields, preservationists have acquired more than 11,000 acres of endangered land at 63 sites in 16 states. Yet, more than 20 percent of the 384 significant battlefields have succumbed to urban sprawl since 1993. According to preservationists, an acre of Civil War battleground land is lost to development every 10 minutes.

"Many of the parks have public roads going through them, so you can't put a fence around them and a gate that locks. Most of the parks are short-handed. They don't have money for security and policing. It's a perennial problem," said James McPherson, a history professor at Princeton University and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era."

"Some places where a lot of fighting took place, such as Atlanta and Nashville, the sites are pretty much gone. The only thing that can be done maybe is put up some markers in the back yard of somebody's condominium."

Palestinians told to prepare for the worst as 'policy of restraint' ends

Passions were inflamed by a week of Palestinian bomb attacks, Israeli missile strikes on Gaza and the West Bank, and demands by Ameican President George W Bush that the Palestinians in particular do more to halt the violence.

Meanwhile, Gulf Arab allies of the United States stepped up criticism of the Bush administration over what they said was its blind support for Israel against Palestinians.

The US State Department denied Palestinian claims that Israel's military crackdown had a green light from Washington. Earlier last week a US investigator of alleged Israeli human rights violations in the Palestinian territories criticised Washington for vetoing a plan to send unarmed UN observers to protect civilians there.

Richard Falk, US member of a three-man team sent to look in to Israeli behaviour, said he and his colleagues hoped Washington would change its mind over the veto. "One needs an international monitoring presence and there is a moral and legal responsibility on the part of the United Nations to establish such a presence," said Falk, professor of International Relations at Princeton University. In a report issued last week, the team, which included South African professor John Dugard, and former Bangladeshi Prime Minister Kamal Hossain, said Israel was guilty of widespread rights violations in the current conflict.

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