Princeton in the News

April 15 to 21, 1999

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Financial Times (London)
Copyright 1999 The Financial Times Limited

April 21, 1999, Wednesday

HEADLINE: Making waves:
Sales of the company's earthquake monitoring equipment are going from strength to strength

Cansum Guralp, whose company has won a Queen's Award for export, knows all about making waves. He makes advanced seismic detectors for monitoring earthquakes under the sea and on land.

Guralp Systems is a natural candidate for an export award: the UK accounts for less than 1 per cent of sales. More than 40 countries use Guralp's sensors but the largest markets are the US, with 44 per cent of sales, Japan with 20 percent, Europe with 16 per cent and South America with 5 per cent. ...

Most of the company's sales are to universities and government institutions but, in a project with Princeton University, the company designed an instrument for use in US high schools as a teaching aid which can be hooked up to a personal computer....


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
April 21, 1999, Wednesday

HEADLINE: Radcliffe Packing Up and Going to Harvard
BYLINE: By CAREY GOLDBERG
DATELINE: CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 20

After more than 100 years of arm's-length interaction between the his-and-hers institutions at the pinnacle of academic prestige, Radcliffe College has agreed to be fully absorbed into Harvard University, officials announced today.

Radcliffe, which lost much of its initial mission as a women's annex when Harvard turned fully coeducational in the 1970's, is to be renamed the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and expand its study of women and gender, among other subjects, bolstered by an infusion of $150 million from Harvard.

But the change in Radcliffe's status means it will give up its vestigial claims on undergraduate women at Harvard -- it had still, technically, accepted their applications and put its seal on their diplomas, even though they studied at Harvard -- and act as a center for scholarship much like a similar institute at Princeton University, officials said. ...


The Ottawa Citizen
Copyright 1999 Southam Inc.
April 21, 1999

HEADLINE: Prize-winning Ottawa scientist chases particles for 'sport': A U of O physicist is giving away his $3,000 award to set up a scholarship fund. Tom Spears reports
BYLINE: Tom Spears

Emery Fortin has spent 30 years chasing tiny particles smaller than atoms that break apart almost as soon as they form.

It seemed appropriate, somehow, that when he won a prize last night for his work, the University of Ottawa physicist announced he'll give it away as soon as he receives it.

The $3,000 cheque from the university's Award for Excellence in Research is going to support a scholarship fund. He didn't feel right pocketing the cash.

''Anyway, I didn't do it for the money, but for the sport,'' he said yesterday. ...

His results were published in 1997 by the journal Science, which said that ''only time and imagination can tell what new applications may arise from this novel effect.'' The journal suggested excitons might move down a fibre-optic cable more efficiently than light itself.

''I have been approached by the U.S. army to go and discuss this, because of course when they hear about a directed beam of energy (like lasers), they think ahead.

''They're quite clever. They don't invite you to the Pentagon, you know. They have one office at Princeton University-- just the place to flatter any university professor.''...


Financial Times (London)
Copyright 1999 The Financial Times Limited

April 21, 1999, Wednesday

HEADLINE: Making waves:
Sales of the company's earthquake monitoring equipment are going from strength to strength

Cansum Guralp, whose company has won a Queen's Award for export, knows all about making waves. He makes advanced seismic detectors for monitoring earthquakes under the sea and on land.

Guralp Systems is a natural candidate for an export award: the UK accounts for less than 1 per cent of sales. More than 40 countries use Guralp's sensors but the largest markets are the US, with 44 per cent of sales, Japan with 20 percent, Europe with 16 per cent and South America with 5 per cent. ...

Most of the company's sales are to universities and government institutions but, in a project with Princeton University, the company designed an instrument for use in US high schools as a teaching aid which can be hooked up to a personal computer....


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
April 21, 1999, Wednesday

HEADLINE: Radcliffe Packing Up and Going to Harvard
BYLINE: By CAREY GOLDBERG
DATELINE: CAMBRIDGE, Mass., April 20

After more than 100 years of arm's-length interaction between the his-and-hers institutions at the pinnacle of academic prestige, Radcliffe College has agreed to be fully absorbed into Harvard University, officials announced today.

Radcliffe, which lost much of its initial mission as a women's annex when Harvard turned fully coeducational in the 1970's, is to be renamed the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and expand its study of women and gender, among other subjects, bolstered by an infusion of $150 million from Harvard.

But the change in Radcliffe's status means it will give up its vestigial claims on undergraduate women at Harvard -- it had still, technically, accepted their applications and put its seal on their diplomas, even though they studied at Harvard -- and act as a center for scholarship much like a similar institute at Princeton University, officials said. ...


The Ottawa Citizen
Copyright 1999 Southam Inc.
April 21, 1999

HEADLINE: Prize-winning Ottawa scientist chases particles for 'sport': A U of O physicist is giving away his $3,000 award to set up a scholarship fund. Tom Spears reports
BYLINE: Tom Spears

Emery Fortin has spent 30 years chasing tiny particles smaller than atoms that break apart almost as soon as they form.

It seemed appropriate, somehow, that when he won a prize last night for his work, the University of Ottawa physicist announced he'll give it away as soon as he receives it.

The $3,000 cheque from the university's Award for Excellence in Research is going to support a scholarship fund. He didn't feel right pocketing the cash.

''Anyway, I didn't do it for the money, but for the sport,'' he said yesterday. ...

His results were published in 1997 by the journal Science, which said that ''only time and imagination can tell what new applications may arise from this novel effect.'' The journal suggested excitons might move down a fibre-optic cable more efficiently than light itself.

''I have been approached by the U.S. army to go and discuss this, because of course when they hear about a directed beam of energy (like lasers), they think ahead.

''They're quite clever. They don't invite you to the Pentagon, you know. They have one office at Princeton University-- just the place to flatter any university professor.''...


THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
Copyright 1999 Telegraph Group Limited
April 20, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: City: Would-be priest finds his true calling again
BYLINE: By Rebecca Barrow

JIM O'Donnell, former City high-flyer who resigned to become a Catholic priest, is set to return to the Square Mile after just a year out of the fold.

The 37-year-old, who was famed for his party trick of drinking a bottle of whisky in one, will join Salomon Smith Barney on July 1. He has been appointed managing director and deputy head of equities in Europe.

It is another surprise move from Mr O'Donnell, former chief executive of securities at HSBC Investment Bank, who stunned colleagues in November 1997 when a memo circulated the office announcing his career move.

In a statement, Mr O'Donnell made no reference to his decision to leave the Church. He said: "I believe that the US securities firms will continue to dominate the global investment banking platform. This is where I wanted to resume my career."

Mr O'Donnell, a former American football player, graduated in 1983 from Princeton Universitywith a BA Honours in comparative religion. After university he worked for Merrill Lynch, Drexel Burnham Lambert and NatWest Securities before moving to HSBC in March 1995. ...


AP Worldstream
Copyright 1999 Associated Press
April 20, 1999; Tuesday

HEADLINE: Conflict shakes Greek tightrope between NATO and Serbs
BYLINE: BRIAN MURPHY
DATELINE: ATHENS, Greece

For NATO member Greece, the main showdown isn't with Yugoslavia. It's within.

Public opinion in the country is almost totally unified against the air attacks. Greeks worry about being snared in a wider Balkan war and find kinship with Serbs as fellow Christian Orthodox, whose leaders often promote age-old paranoia about losing ground to Muslims and bowing to the West.

The Greek government has so far managed to walk the tightrope between domestic dissent and alliance obligations, but with the attacks showing no sign of easing, the balancing act may become harder to perform. ...

Michael Doyle, a professor of political affairs at Princeton University, said NATO's policy may be to keep Greece ''as uninvolved as possible in Kosovo.''


The Boston Globe
Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company
April 20, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: LeMay moves to forefront;'99 BOSTON MARATHON
TOP AMERICAN MALE

BYLINE: By Susan Bickelhaupt, Globe Staff

Joe LeMay of Danbury, Conn., knew he wasn't the odds-on favorite to be the first American to cross the finish line in yesterday's Boston Marathon. Which was fine with him.

"I kept my eye on Rod DeHaven, the guy who everybody thought would win," said LeMay.

DeHaven indeed was the front-runner among US athletes for much of the race, running with the lead pack for most of the way, just a bobbing head to his fellow Americans. ...

Then, just before Heartbreak Hill, LeMay figured it was time to make his move. He surged ahead and joined the leaders, and although he was not fast enough to stay with eventual winner Joseph Chebet, he was fast enough to leave DeHaven behind.

LeMay earned no prize money as top American male, but his 13th-place overall finish was good for $1,800. And his time of 2 hours 16 minutes 11 seconds was good enough to earn him a spot in the US Olympic marathon qualifier next February. ...

LeMay, who started running competitively when he was 14, has excelled at both 10,000 meters and the marathon. His fastest marathon was in Chicago in 1996, when he finished in 2:14:58, and he still holds the record at Princeton University for 10,000 meters, at 28:59. ...


The Christian Science Monitor
Copyright 1999 The Christian Science Publishing Society
April 20, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: 1, 2, 3, 4: We don't want your global warming
BYLINE: Brad Knickerbocker, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
DATELINE: ASHLAND, ORE.

College campuses are once again alive with the sounds of student

University sit-ins, college teach-ins, political art, guerrilla theater - it sounds like a flashback to student protests of the Vietnam War, or more recent-ly apartheid in South Africa.

Many students around the country, sometimes thought of these days as apolitical or interested only in snagging that high-paying job after graduation, are riled up once again. ...

In recent months, there have been demonstrations and sit-ins calling for an end to "sweatshop" conditions abroad at the University of Wisconsin, Boston University, the University of North Carolina, and Princeton University. ...


Daily News (New York)
Copyright 1999 Daily News, L.P.

April 20, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: IT'S BACK TO STREET FOR PRIEST
BYLINE: By AMY FELDMAN

After less than a year of studying to become a priest and taking a vow of poverty, Jim O'Donnell, Wall Street's best-known career-switcher, is returning to the monied fray.

O'Donnell, the 37-year-old former chief executive of HSBC Securities, who left that spot last summer to study for the Catholic priesthood, said yesterday he would return to Wall Street in July as Salomon Smith Barney's London-based deputy head of equities.

"I believe that the U.S. securities firms will continue to dominate the global investment banking platform and this is where I wanted to resume my career," O'Donnell said in a statement.

He declined further comment about his decision to leave the priesthood through a spokeswoman at Salomon Smith Barney.

In his decision to study for the priesthood, O'Donnell a Long Island native who is unmarried and holds a bachelor's degree in comparative religion from Princeton Universitygave up a salary believed to be more than $ 2 million and a harried investment banker's lifestyle that included flying around the world first class. ...


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
April 20, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: SCIENTIST AT WORK: Abhay Ashtekar; Taste-Testing a Recipe for the Cosmos

BYLINE: By JAMES GLANZ
DATELINE: SANTA BARBARA, Calif.

Dr. Abhay Ashtekar, the leader of a worldwide effort to unify the two most profound, abstract and mathematically baroque theories of physics discovered in this century, is sprinkling frozen mango cubes on scoops of vanilla ice cream.

After a meal of fish and tamales during which he puttered about his kitchen in a green apron emblazoned with bright flowers and the words "golden poppies," Dr. Ashtekar serves the dessert to his wife, Christine Clarke, and two visitors while needlessly apologizing for his cooking skills....

His passion boils down to this: An attempt at creating a sort of cosmic nouvelle cuisine by merging Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity with the laws of quantum mechanics, which were first worked out in the 1920's by a number of physicists including Erwin Schrodinger, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and Einstein. No recipe exists, and only a few of the ingredients are known. ...

"We have two wildly successful theories that have defined 20th-century physics," said Dr. Gary Horowitz, a physicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where the workshop is being held through July. "These theories are fundamentally incomplete and inconsistent with each other, and we justcan't go on like that."

Relativity theory describes how the gravity of everything from subatomic particles to massive stars distorts and curves the four dimensions of space-time, like coconuts rolling on a rubber sheet. That changing curvature, in turn, determines exactly how the objects orbit about one another or fall together. A large enough congregation of matter can collapse to a point of infinite density, called a singularity, and shroud itself in a sphere of darkness -- a black hole, whose gravity is so powerful that nothing can escape from it, not even light.

On the other hand, standard quantum mechanics tells the tale of a "flat" space in which particles refuse to orbit smoothly; instead, they can hop suddenly from one spot to another, carrying with them only specific, sharply defined amounts of energy called quanta, like tourists holding no bills smaller than a 20. And far from respecting the crisp determinism of classical relativity, these particles sometimes exist not at definite positions but rather as fuzzy clouds of probability.

In culinary terms, these two kinds of physics have remained as distinct as a Tex-Mex barbecue and a New Age vegetarian picnic taking place in the same park. But most physicists, like Dr. Ashtekar, believe that since there is just one universe, there should be just one fundamental way of describing it. ...

That approach has led to a daring conception of space-time that shares characteristics with both the quantum world and general relativity. On incredibly tiny scales -- 10-33 centimeters, or smaller than a trillionth of a trillionth of the diameter of an atom -- space-time becomes jagged and discontinuous. At those scales, Dr. Ashtekar said, space dissolves into a sort of polymer network, "like your shirt," which looks continuous from a distance but is actually made of one-dimensional threads. ...

But because it uses relativity theory as its jumping-off point, the approach dreamed up by Dr. Ashtekar and his colleagues is "the most in the spirit of Einstein," said Dr. Thomas Thiemann, a physicist at the Albert Einstein Institute, a part of the Max Planck Society in Potsdam, Germany. ...

It was not, yet, and when infinities reared their head in supergravity, some of its ideas were salvaged and woven into string theory.

Dr. Ashtekar's approach, which drew in part on work in the 1960's by Dr. John Wheeler of Princeton University, began with Einstein's equations directly. Following his mathematical taste buds rather than accepted formalisms, Dr. Ashtekar searched for some way to transmute the theory's geometric spirit into the fuzzy quantum world.


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
April 20, 1999, Tuesday

NAME: Alan B. Krueger
HEADLINE: A Real-World Economist; Krueger And Empiricists Challenge Theorists

BYLINE: By LOUIS UCHITELLE
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.

As he pulled up the charts one after another on his office computer, Alan B. Krueger grew enthusiastic. Children do better all through their schooling, he declared, if by fourth grade they have spent just one year in a class of only 15 students. The tall green bars and rising red lines on Mr. Krueger's charts told the story in simple-to-understand detail. Poor children in particular are helped by early attention from a teacher.

"Small classes later on may have less impact," Mr. Krueger said, rehearsing the punch line of a speech he would give a few days later. "I infer that very young children become socialized in a small class. They learn how to behave in school. They are more likely to take the S.A.T. exams in high school, and to earn more later as workers."

Empirical economists talk that way, as if each finding is a nugget of fresh, significant insight. Many are. No group within the profession is challenging accepted wisdom more vigorously. But Mr. Krueger does so rather cautiously. For all his enthusiasm, he is reluctant to prescribe small classes as national policy without more research.

There is a reason for his hesitation. Empirical economists may be increasingly pressing theorists, but abstract thinkers still dominate academic economics with their explanations of how people and markets behave. Theory, for example, says that employment should fall when the minimum wage rises, but empiricists have uncovered exceptions. And for all the profession's emphasis on education as the key to higher earnings, economic theory fails to provide a blueprint for improving learning. Empiricists are trying to fill the breach with studies like Mr. Krueger's.

Many are less than a decade out of graduate school, which makes Mr. Krueger, a 38-year-old Princeton University professor and the editor of the prestigious Journal of Economic Perspectives, already an elder statesman of the growing empirical movement. It is bringing to economics what amounts to a reality check. ...

Mr. Krueger is frequently mentioned as a candidate for this year's award, to be selected this month. So is Andrei Shleifer of Harvard, a Russian-born empiricist, whose specialty is the study of financial markets operating in different legal and political settings. There are other possibilities as well for perhaps the most prestigious award in economics short of the Nobel. ...

Chart: "Alan Bennet Kruger"
BORN: Sept. 17, 1960, Newark.
HOMETOWN: Livingston, N.J.
EDUCATION: Livingston High School; B.S. Cornell University, 1983; A.M., economics, Harvard University, 1985; Ph.D, economics, Harvard University, 1987.
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS: 1987-92, assistant professor of economics and public affairs, Princeton University; 1994-95, chief economist, United States Department of Labor; 1992-present, Bendheim professor of economics and public affairs, Princeton University.
FAMILY: Married to Lisa Krueger; one son, Benjamin, 8; and one daughter, Sydney, 6.
HOBBIES: Tennis, family activities and travel.


The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC)
Copyright 1999 The News and Observer
April 20, 1999 Tuesday

DR. N.F.J. (SY) MATTHEWS RALEIGH - Dr. N.F.J. (Sy) Matthews, Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University, died after a long illness on Sunday, April 18, 1999. ...

Dr. Matthews was born on August 9, 1931, in Clinton, NC. ... He received his doctorate from Princeton Universityin 1964 and accepted appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering at North Carolina State University in that same year. ...


The San Francisco Chronicle
Copyright 1999 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
APRIL 20, 1999

OBITUARIES
HEADLINE: Malcolm Cravens

A funeral Mass will be celebrated Thursday for Malcolm Cravens, a prominent Bay Area insurance executive who died of cancer Saturday at his San Francisco home. He was 91.

Mr. Cravens was born in Houston. He was educated at the Hotchkiss School, where he was president and top scholar of his class, and at Princeton University, where he was awarded the Bullitt prize in mathematics, his major....


University Wire
Copyright 1999 Daily Princetonian
April 20, 1999

HEADLINE: Princeton U. alumnus sails to prestigious position in Navy
BYLINE: By Ivilisse V. Eguerra, Daily Princetonian
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.

Last Tuesday, Princeton UniversityDirector of Campaign Relations Kirk Unruh '70 hung up the phone after congratulating Pulitzer Prize winner Scott Berg '71, only to be on the phone again literally seconds later. This time, however, Unruh was the one receiving congratulations: He had been selected for promotion as rear admiral in the Naval Reserve.

"It was really quite a morning," Unruh said. "I had just gotten off the phone with Scott Berg, congratulating him for winning the Pulitzer Prize. I was feeling genuinely happy for his achievement when I got a call 10 seconds later from Admiral John Todushek saying I'd been selected for promotion." ...


University Wire
Copyright 1999 Daily Northwestern
April 20, 1999

HEADLINE: U.S. attitude toward Iraq is killing children
BYLINE: By Erin Fitch, Daily Northwestern
SOURCE: Northwestern U.
DATELINE: Evanston, Ill.

For more than a century, students in the United States have been vital agents of social change, with a history of working for peace and justice. In the 1960s students spurred debates in Congress about the war in Vietnam and led the protests for peace. They struggled against discrimination and racism during the Civil Rights Movement and the fight to end apartheid in South Africa.

In the 1990s there is another war we must end, another struggle for peace and justice in which we as students must make our voices heard.

For more than eight years, our government has been waging a silent war against the people of Iraq. This month, the U.S.-led sanctions will kill 4,500 children in Iraq, according to UNICEF reports. This policy will kill 250 people today, as it did yesterday, and it will tomorrow. ...

Richard Falk, professor of international law at Princeton University, argues that the sanctions constitute a crime against humanity and that U.S. officials are complicit in these crimes. ...


USA TODAY
Copyright 1999 Gannett Company, Inc.
April 20, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: Reversible contraception will fail 10% of users a year, studies find
BYLINE: Kim Painter

About one in 10 women relying on reversible contraception -- which includes all methods except sterilization -- will get pregnant within a year, say two studies updating birth-control effectiveness.

And a typical woman, using a mix of reversible methods followed eventually by sterilization of herself or her partner, can expect 1.3 unintended pregnancies over her reproductive life, says one of the studies published today in Family Planning Perspectives. ...

This continuing gap between what researchers call "perfect use" and "typical use" shows that "we still don't have an array of methods that average women find particularly easy to use," says James Trussell, a Princeton Universityresearcher. ...

Trussell's study took failure rates directly from the government survey; the second study, from researchers at the Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York, adjusted those figures for undercounted abortions that made original failure rates too low for some methods. ...


The Washington Times
Copyright 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
April 20, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: Studies of contraceptive failure rates find average 10% chance of pregnancy
BYLINE: Julia Duin; THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Women using contraceptives still have a 10 percent chance of getting pregnant, according to two new studies published by the Alan Guttmacher Institute. Young, unmarried and poor women are having the highest contraceptive failure rates, the studies conclude.

Six out of 10 pregnancies resulting from contraceptive failure end in abortion, according to AGI, the research arm of Planned Parenthood. As of 1996, the most recent year for which figures were available, Americans had 1.37 million abortions a year.

The AGI study is called "Contraceptive Failure Rates." The other study, produced by Princeton University, is called "Contraceptive Failure: Method-Related Discontinuation and Resumption of Use."

Both studies were published in the March/April issue of Family Planning Perspectives, AGI's bimonthly journal. Both were based on the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, conducted by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics. ...

"Natural family planning is difficult to use correctly and consistently," said James Trussel, a co-author of the Princeton report. "Those call for prolonged periods of abstinence and it is difficult for normal people to obey those rules." ...


THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
Copyright 1999 Telegraph Group Limited
April 20, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: City: Would-be priest finds his true calling again
BYLINE: By Rebecca Barrow

JIM O'Donnell, former City high-flyer who resigned to become a Catholic priest, is set to return to the Square Mile after just a year out of the fold.

The 37-year-old, who was famed for his party trick of drinking a bottle of whisky in one, will join Salomon Smith Barney on July 1. He has been appointed managing director and deputy head of equities in Europe.

It is another surprise move from Mr O'Donnell, former chief executive of securities at HSBC Investment Bank, who stunned colleagues in November 1997 when a memo circulated the office announcing his career move.

In a statement, Mr O'Donnell made no reference to his decision to leave the Church. He said: "I believe that the US securities firms will continue to dominate the global investment banking platform. This is where I wanted to resume my career."

Mr O'Donnell, a former American football player, graduated in 1983 from Princeton Universitywith a BA Honours in comparative religion. After university he worked for Merrill Lynch, Drexel Burnham Lambert and NatWest Securities before moving to HSBC in March 1995. ...


AP Worldstream
Copyright 1999 Associated Press
April 20, 1999; Tuesday

HEADLINE: Conflict shakes Greek tightrope between NATO and Serbs
BYLINE: BRIAN MURPHY
DATELINE: ATHENS, Greece

For NATO member Greece, the main showdown isn't with Yugoslavia. It's within.

Public opinion in the country is almost totally unified against the air attacks. Greeks worry about being snared in a wider Balkan war and find kinship with Serbs as fellow Christian Orthodox, whose leaders often promote age-old paranoia about losing ground to Muslims and bowing to the West.

The Greek government has so far managed to walk the tightrope between domestic dissent and alliance obligations, but with the attacks showing no sign of easing, the balancing act may become harder to perform. ...

Michael Doyle, a professor of political affairs at Princeton University, said NATO's policy may be to keep Greece ''as uninvolved as possible in Kosovo.''


The Boston Globe
Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company
April 20, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: LeMay moves to forefront;'99 BOSTON MARATHON
TOP AMERICAN MALE

BYLINE: By Susan Bickelhaupt, Globe Staff

Joe LeMay of Danbury, Conn., knew he wasn't the odds-on favorite to be the first American to cross the finish line in yesterday's Boston Marathon. Which was fine with him.

"I kept my eye on Rod DeHaven, the guy who everybody thought would win," said LeMay.

DeHaven indeed was the front-runner among US athletes for much of the race, running with the lead pack for most of the way, just a bobbing head to his fellow Americans. ...

Then, just before Heartbreak Hill, LeMay figured it was time to make his move. He surged ahead and joined the leaders, and although he was not fast enough to stay with eventual winner Joseph Chebet, he was fast enough to leave DeHaven behind.

LeMay earned no prize money as top American male, but his 13th-place overall finish was good for $1,800. And his time of 2 hours 16 minutes 11 seconds was good enough to earn him a spot in the US Olympic marathon qualifier next February. ...

LeMay, who started running competitively when he was 14, has excelled at both 10,000 meters and the marathon. His fastest marathon was in Chicago in 1996, when he finished in 2:14:58, and he still holds the record at Princeton University for 10,000 meters, at 28:59. ...


The Christian Science Monitor
Copyright 1999 The Christian Science Publishing Society
April 20, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: 1, 2, 3, 4: We don't want your global warming
BYLINE: Brad Knickerbocker, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
DATELINE: ASHLAND, ORE.

College campuses are once again alive with the sounds of student

University sit-ins, college teach-ins, political art, guerrilla theater - it sounds like a flashback to student protests of the Vietnam War, or more recent-ly apartheid in South Africa.

Many students around the country, sometimes thought of these days as apolitical or interested only in snagging that high-paying job after graduation, are riled up once again. ...

In recent months, there have been demonstrations and sit-ins calling for an end to "sweatshop" conditions abroad at the University of Wisconsin, Boston University, the University of North Carolina, and Princeton University. ...


Daily News (New York)
Copyright 1999 Daily News, L.P.

April 20, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: IT'S BACK TO STREET FOR PRIEST
BYLINE: By AMY FELDMAN

After less than a year of studying to become a priest and taking a vow of poverty, Jim O'Donnell, Wall Street's best-known career-switcher, is returning to the monied fray.

O'Donnell, the 37-year-old former chief executive of HSBC Securities, who left that spot last summer to study for the Catholic priesthood, said yesterday he would return to Wall Street in July as Salomon Smith Barney's London-based deputy head of equities.

"I believe that the U.S. securities firms will continue to dominate the global investment banking platform and this is where I wanted to resume my career," O'Donnell said in a statement.

He declined further comment about his decision to leave the priesthood through a spokeswoman at Salomon Smith Barney.

In his decision to study for the priesthood, O'Donnell a Long Island native who is unmarried and holds a bachelor's degree in comparative religion from Princeton Universitygave up a salary believed to be more than $ 2 million and a harried investment banker's lifestyle that included flying around the world first class. ...


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
April 20, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: SCIENTIST AT WORK: Abhay Ashtekar; Taste-Testing a Recipe for the Cosmos

BYLINE: By JAMES GLANZ
DATELINE: SANTA BARBARA, Calif.

Dr. Abhay Ashtekar, the leader of a worldwide effort to unify the two most profound, abstract and mathematically baroque theories of physics discovered in this century, is sprinkling frozen mango cubes on scoops of vanilla ice cream.

After a meal of fish and tamales during which he puttered about his kitchen in a green apron emblazoned with bright flowers and the words "golden poppies," Dr. Ashtekar serves the dessert to his wife, Christine Clarke, and two visitors while needlessly apologizing for his cooking skills....

His passion boils down to this: An attempt at creating a sort of cosmic nouvelle cuisine by merging Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity with the laws of quantum mechanics, which were first worked out in the 1920's by a number of physicists including Erwin Schrodinger, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and Einstein. No recipe exists, and only a few of the ingredients are known. ...

"We have two wildly successful theories that have defined 20th-century physics," said Dr. Gary Horowitz, a physicist at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where the workshop is being held through July. "These theories are fundamentally incomplete and inconsistent with each other, and we justcan't go on like that."

Relativity theory describes how the gravity of everything from subatomic particles to massive stars distorts and curves the four dimensions of space-time, like coconuts rolling on a rubber sheet. That changing curvature, in turn, determines exactly how the objects orbit about one another or fall together. A large enough congregation of matter can collapse to a point of infinite density, called a singularity, and shroud itself in a sphere of darkness -- a black hole, whose gravity is so powerful that nothing can escape from it, not even light.

On the other hand, standard quantum mechanics tells the tale of a "flat" space in which particles refuse to orbit smoothly; instead, they can hop suddenly from one spot to another, carrying with them only specific, sharply defined amounts of energy called quanta, like tourists holding no bills smaller than a 20. And far from respecting the crisp determinism of classical relativity, these particles sometimes exist not at definite positions but rather as fuzzy clouds of probability.

In culinary terms, these two kinds of physics have remained as distinct as a Tex-Mex barbecue and a New Age vegetarian picnic taking place in the same park. But most physicists, like Dr. Ashtekar, believe that since there is just one universe, there should be just one fundamental way of describing it. ...

That approach has led to a daring conception of space-time that shares characteristics with both the quantum world and general relativity. On incredibly tiny scales -- 10-33 centimeters, or smaller than a trillionth of a trillionth of the diameter of an atom -- space-time becomes jagged and discontinuous. At those scales, Dr. Ashtekar said, space dissolves into a sort of polymer network, "like your shirt," which looks continuous from a distance but is actually made of one-dimensional threads. ...

But because it uses relativity theory as its jumping-off point, the approach dreamed up by Dr. Ashtekar and his colleagues is "the most in the spirit of Einstein," said Dr. Thomas Thiemann, a physicist at the Albert Einstein Institute, a part of the Max Planck Society in Potsdam, Germany. ...

It was not, yet, and when infinities reared their head in supergravity, some of its ideas were salvaged and woven into string theory.

Dr. Ashtekar's approach, which drew in part on work in the 1960's by Dr. John Wheeler of Princeton University, began with Einstein's equations directly. Following his mathematical taste buds rather than accepted formalisms, Dr. Ashtekar searched for some way to transmute the theory's geometric spirit into the fuzzy quantum world.


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
April 20, 1999, Tuesday

NAME: Alan B. Krueger
HEADLINE: A Real-World Economist; Krueger And Empiricists Challenge Theorists

BYLINE: By LOUIS UCHITELLE
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.

As he pulled up the charts one after another on his office computer, Alan B. Krueger grew enthusiastic. Children do better all through their schooling, he declared, if by fourth grade they have spent just one year in a class of only 15 students. The tall green bars and rising red lines on Mr. Krueger's charts told the story in simple-to-understand detail. Poor children in particular are helped by early attention from a teacher.

"Small classes later on may have less impact," Mr. Krueger said, rehearsing the punch line of a speech he would give a few days later. "I infer that very young children become socialized in a small class. They learn how to behave in school. They are more likely to take the S.A.T. exams in high school, and to earn more later as workers."

Empirical economists talk that way, as if each finding is a nugget of fresh, significant insight. Many are. No group within the profession is challenging accepted wisdom more vigorously. But Mr. Krueger does so rather cautiously. For all his enthusiasm, he is reluctant to prescribe small classes as national policy without more research.

There is a reason for his hesitation. Empirical economists may be increasingly pressing theorists, but abstract thinkers still dominate academic economics with their explanations of how people and markets behave. Theory, for example, says that employment should fall when the minimum wage rises, but empiricists have uncovered exceptions. And for all the profession's emphasis on education as the key to higher earnings, economic theory fails to provide a blueprint for improving learning. Empiricists are trying to fill the breach with studies like Mr. Krueger's.

Many are less than a decade out of graduate school, which makes Mr. Krueger, a 38-year-old Princeton Universityprofessor and the editor of the prestigious Journal of Economic Perspectives, already an elder statesman of the growing empirical movement. It is bringing to economics what amounts to a reality check. ...

Mr. Krueger is frequently mentioned as a candidate for this year's award, to be selected this month. So is Andrei Shleifer of Harvard, a Russian-born empiricist, whose specialty is the study of financial markets operating in different legal and political settings. There are other possibilities as well for perhaps the most prestigious award in economics short of the Nobel. ...

Chart: "Alan Bennet Kruger"
BORN: Sept. 17, 1960, Newark.
HOMETOWN: Livingston, N.J.
EDUCATION: Livingston High School; B.S. Cornell University, 1983; A.M., economics, Harvard University, 1985; Ph.D, economics, Harvard University, 1987.
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS: 1987-92, assistant professor of economics and public affairs, Princeton University; 1994-95, chief economist, United States Department of Labor; 1992-present, Bendheim professor of economics and public affairs, Princeton University.
FAMILY: Married to Lisa Krueger; one son, Benjamin, 8; and one daughter, Sydney, 6.
HOBBIES: Tennis, family activities and travel.


The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC)
Copyright 1999 The News and Observer
April 20, 1999 Tuesday

DR. N.F.J. (SY) MATTHEWS RALEIGH - Dr. N.F.J. (Sy) Matthews, Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University, died after a long illness on Sunday, April 18, 1999. ...

Dr. Matthews was born on August 9, 1931, in Clinton, NC. ... He received his doctorate from Princeton Universityin 1964 and accepted appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering at North Carolina State University in that same year. ...


The San Francisco Chronicle
Copyright 1999 The Chronicle Publishing Co.
APRIL 20, 1999

OBITUARIES
HEADLINE: Malcolm Cravens

A funeral Mass will be celebrated Thursday for Malcolm Cravens, a prominent Bay Area insurance executive who died of cancer Saturday at his San Francisco home. He was 91.

Mr. Cravens was born in Houston. He was educated at the Hotchkiss School, where he was president and top scholar of his class, and at Princeton University, where he was awarded the Bullitt prize in mathematics, his major....


University Wire
Copyright 1999 Daily Princetonian
April 20, 1999

HEADLINE: Princeton U. alumnus sails to prestigious position in Navy
BYLINE: By Ivilisse V. Eguerra, Daily Princetonian
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.

Last Tuesday, Princeton UniversityDirector of Campaign Relations Kirk Unruh '70 hung up the phone after congratulating Pulitzer Prize winner Scott Berg '71, only to be on the phone again literally seconds later. This time, however, Unruh was the one receiving congratulations: He had been selected for promotion as rear admiral in the Naval Reserve.

"It was really quite a morning," Unruh said. "I had just gotten off the phone with Scott Berg, congratulating him for winning the Pulitzer Prize. I was feeling genuinely happy for his achievement when I got a call 10 seconds later from Admiral John Todushek saying I'd been selected for promotion." ...


University Wire
Copyright 1999 Daily Northwestern
April 20, 1999

HEADLINE: U.S. attitude toward Iraq is killing children
BYLINE: By Erin Fitch, Daily Northwestern
SOURCE: Northwestern U.
DATELINE: Evanston, Ill.

For more than a century, students in the United States have been vital agents of social change, with a history of working for peace and justice. In the 1960s students spurred debates in Congress about the war in Vietnam and led the protests for peace. They struggled against discrimination and racism during the Civil Rights Movement and the fight to end apartheid in South Africa.

In the 1990s there is another war we must end, another struggle for peace and justice in which we as students must make our voices heard.

For more than eight years, our government has been waging a silent war against the people of Iraq. This month, the U.S.-led sanctions will kill 4,500 children in Iraq, according to UNICEF reports. This policy will kill 250 people today, as it did yesterday, and it will tomorrow. ...

Richard Falk, professor of international law at Princeton University, argues that the sanctions constitute a crime against humanity and that U.S. officials are complicit in these crimes. ...


USA TODAY
Copyright 1999 Gannett Company, Inc.
April 20, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: Reversible contraception will fail 10% of users a year, studies find
BYLINE: Kim Painter

About one in 10 women relying on reversible contraception -- which includes all methods except sterilization -- will get pregnant within a year, say two studies updating birth-control effectiveness.

And a typical woman, using a mix of reversible methods followed eventually by sterilization of herself or her partner, can expect 1.3 unintended pregnancies over her reproductive life, says one of the studies published today in Family Planning Perspectives. ...

This continuing gap between what researchers call "perfect use" and "typical use" shows that "we still don't have an array of methods that average women find particularly easy to use," says James Trussell, a Princeton Universityresearcher. ...

Trussell's study took failure rates directly from the government survey; the second study, from researchers at the Alan Guttmacher Institute in New York, adjusted those figures for undercounted abortions that made original failure rates too low for some methods. ...


The Washington Times
Copyright 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
April 20, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: Studies of contraceptive failure rates find average 10% chance of pregnancy
BYLINE: Julia Duin; THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Women using contraceptives still have a 10 percent chance of getting pregnant, according to two new studies published by the Alan Guttmacher Institute. Young, unmarried and poor women are having the highest contraceptive failure rates, the studies conclude.

Six out of 10 pregnancies resulting from contraceptive failure end in abortion, according to AGI, the research arm of Planned Parenthood. As of 1996, the most recent year for which figures were available, Americans had 1.37 million abortions a year.

The AGI study is called "Contraceptive Failure Rates." The other study, produced by Princeton University, is called "Contraceptive Failure: Method-Related Discontinuation and Resumption of Use."

Both studies were published in the March/April issue of Family Planning Perspectives, AGI's bimonthly journal. Both were based on the 1995 National Survey of Family Growth, conducted by the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics. ...

"Natural family planning is difficult to use correctly and consistently," said James Trussel, a co-author of the Princeton report. "Those call for prolonged periods of abstinence and it is difficult for normal people to obey those rules." ...


The Boston Globe
Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company
April 19, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: Stewart W. Pach, 79;

Former president of Gillette

Stewart Warner Pach of Dover, former president of the Gillette Safety Razor Co. and American Optical Co., died of a heart attack Wednesday in the New England Baptist Hospital. He was 79.

Mr. Pach was born in Worcester, but was raised in Bronxville, N.Y. He graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover in 1938 and was captain of the swimming team. He graduated from Princeton Universityin 1942 with a degree in mechanical engineering....


Business Wire
Copyright 1999 Business Wire, Inc.
April 19, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: Universal Display Corp.Receives $ 3.7 Million From Warrant Exercises
DATELINE: BALA CYNWYD, Pa.

April 19, 1999--Universal Display Corp. (UDC), a developer of flat panel display technology, announced today that it had received approximately $ 3.7 million from the exercise of 1,067,725 warrants. The warrants, which expired on

April 12, 1999, had traded under the symbol "PANLW", and had an exercise price of $ 3.50 per share. "We are very please that more than 70% of the Warrants were exercised. This shows an extraordinary vote of confidence in the Company, said Sidney D. Rosenblatt, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of UDC. ...

UDC is part of a team including Princeton, USC and Hughes Electronics which is working under a $3 million award from the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the continued development of ultra light-weight, full-color OLED flat panel display technology. For more information, visit our web site at universaldisplay.com. ...


Copley News Service
Copyright 1999 Copley News Service
April 19, 1999, Monday

SECTION: Commentary
HEADLINE: No time for that kid stuff

A news report indicates that at some Ivy League colleges, the well-rounded high school senior is no longer the top dog on the admissions list. The colleges are looking for specialists youngsters who have developed an expertise in a particular single pursuit.

That's just great. As the situation appears in a recent Wall Street Journal article, it is another burden placed on the nation's brightest young people. If you want to get into a top school, you have to specialize. Become a top-seeded squash player. The editor of your high school yearbook. A ballerina with the local troupe. Chief medal-winner on the debating team. ...

Then that shifted slightly. The kid had to be a Renaissance child, good at everything. Good grades, a school leader, president of the drama club and first trumpet in the band. Soon, colleges added a proviso requiring that he or she be committed to the community: volunteer at the hospital, read to nursing home patients. The broader the kid's credentials, the better the chance at Princeton or Yale.

Now the bar at some elite colleges has shifted once again, this time favoring the specialist, the kid who is passionate about one thing and does it extraordinarily well. At the University of Pennsylvania, potential Olympic athletes were 50 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant. So were high school seniors who had won state or national prizes in the fine arts....


The Dallas Morning News
Copyright 1999 The Dallas Morning News

April 19, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: Scientists say blasts outshine supernovas Hypernovas may pack largest punch since big bang
SOURCE: Science Writer of The Dallas Morning News
BYLINE: Alexandra Witze

Just as the biggest parties leave behind a tremendous mess, the biggest explosions in the universe also leave piles of cosmic debris. Astronomers say they have identified the remnants of the largest explosions yet found, glowing dimly in a nearby galaxy.

Last year, scientists proposed that these explosions, called hypernovas, exist - each releasing more than 10 million billion times the energy that the sun does. Q. Daniel Wang, of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., may have the first observational evidence for hypernovas, he reported last week at an astrophysics meeting in Charleston, S.C.

Hypernovas are perhaps 100 times more powerful than an ordinary supernova, which is what happens when a massive, dying star blows up. ...

M101 is peppered with huge shells of gas and dust, like those left behind after an ordinary supernova explosion. Drs. Wang and Chu found that two of those "supernova" remnants also lay in places that spit out powerful X-rays, as measured by the ROSAT satellite. ...

"This is the best case so far for the hypernova remnants," said Bohdan Paczynski, the Princeton Universityastronomer who coined the term "hypernova."


Gannett News Service
Copyright 1999 Gannett Company, Inc.
April 19, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: Target puts the accent on style
BYLINE: NICOLE VOLTA AVERY; The Detroit News
Discount stores have arrived.

There's no shame in dropping dollars at Kmart or Wal-Mart or any other "mart." But thanks to crafty trend analysis and product partnerships with heavy-hitters such as architect Michael Graves, Target, or shall we say Tar-jay, may be positioning itself as the premier au courant discounter. ...

Despite the trendy fashion options, the kitchen and home wares aisles are where the action is. A few people glimpse the Michael Graves Collection, the much talked-about line of ultra-hip kitchen items designed by the well-known architect and Princeton Universityprofessor. The Graves line - set to expand to watches, ready-to-assemble furniture and garden supplies - rivals the much-loved Martha Stewart stuff at Kmart. ...


Health Line
Copyright 1999 The National Journal Group, Inc.
April 19, 1999

HEADLINE: PRIVATE ROOMS: HOSPITALS MAKE SWITCH TO DRAW PATIENTS

The fiercely competitive market wrought by managed care is pushing more hospitals to offer private rooms -- at costs of up to $300 a night once enjoyed by only the wealthy -- to all patients, often at no extra charge. Sunday's New York Times reported that the trend is also fueled by more sophisticated life-support technology and projected growth in intensive care, as hospitals look to more space in rooms that can be converted to intensive care units as needed. ...

But Princeton University's Uwe Reinhardt noted, "Ultimately the private rooms do drive up the cost of health care. But it is amazing how cheap the costs per square foot are compared to the costs of supplies and staff."


 Health Line
Copyright 1999 The National Journal Group, Inc.
April 19, 1999

HEADLINE: EUTHANASIA: PRINCETON PROFESSOR CREATES CONTROVERSY

"More than 100 protesters" gathered at Princeton University Saturday for a rally denouncing the appointment of controversial scholar Peter Singer to a professorship at the university's Center for Human Values. ...


The Press (Christchurch)
Copyright 1999 The Christchurch Press Company Limited
April 19, 1999

HEADLINE: DIARY
BYLINE: DUNBAR Anna

Barely sporting

THE Princeton UniversityBoard of Trustees in New Jersey has voted to ban the students' traditional "nude olympics" after this year's event turned into an alcoholic brawl. The Daily Princetonian newspaper reports the board had voted to abolish the 30-year-old annual ritual, in which students gather for a nude frolic at midnight after the year's first snowfall. After this year's event, students at the elite Ivy League school complained of being sexually groped, and more than a dozen of the 350 participants landed in hospitals with alcohol poisoning or injuries.


The Providence Journal-Bulletin
Copyright 1999 The Providence Journal Company
April 19, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: GREEN FEES IS YOUR GRASS AS GREEN AS YOUR CASH?
BYLINE: BOB WYSS; Journal Staff Writer

We may all live in the Ocean State or the Bay State but most of us are still farmers. We cultivate literally hundreds of thousands or even millions of plants each year. And it is time to begin cultivating again. We're talking about your lawn. ...

Most of us begin by showering our lawn with what we believe will be a beneficial range of fertilizers, chemicals and pesticides. In fact, we spend $30 billion a year taking care of turf grass, according to Georges Teyssot, a professor of architecture at Princeton Universitywho worked with the exhibit. ...


The Washington Times
Copyright 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
April 19, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: Death to defectives
BYLINE: Suzanne Fields; THE WASHINGTON TIMES
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.

PRINCETON, N.J. - Princeton Universityhas a problem in Human Values. It has hired Peter Singer, a professor who thinks it's OK to kill infants who are born inconveniently disabled. He is to teach in a tenured chair at Princeton's Center for Human Values.

The professor has not yet arrived, but a small but vocal grass roots effort of students and alumni are protesting his appointment. Methinks they cannot protest too much.

Mr. Singer, as the Princeton administration tells it, is an honorable man with outstanding scholarly credentials. Harold Shapiro, the president of Princeton, defends him in the name of academic freedom. Amy Gutman, former dean of faculty and head of the Center for Human Values says "there was nobody better in the world than Singer." Scholars describe him as "intellectual gold" in a front-page story in the New York Times.

Others, including scholars with similarly golden credentials, decry this academic alchemy as "base metal" ethics. Christopher Benek, a graduate student at Princeton Theological Seminary who heads the Princeton Students Against Infanticide, says Mr. Singer would empower parents to kill their disabled infants up to 28 days after birth. ...


The Boston Globe
Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company
April 19, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: Stewart W. Pach, 79;

Former president of Gillette

Stewart Warner Pach of Dover, former president of the Gillette Safety Razor Co. and American Optical Co., died of a heart attack Wednesday in the New England Baptist Hospital. He was 79.

Mr. Pach was born in Worcester, but was raised in Bronxville, N.Y. He graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover in 1938 and was captain of the swimming team. He graduated from Princeton Universityin 1942 with a degree in mechanical engineering....


Business Wire
Copyright 1999 Business Wire, Inc.
April 19, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: Universal Display Corp.Receives $ 3.7 Million From Warrant Exercises
DATELINE: BALA CYNWYD, Pa.

April 19, 1999--Universal Display Corp. (UDC), a developer of flat panel display technology, announced today that it had received approximately $ 3.7 million from the exercise of 1,067,725 warrants. The warrants, which expired on

April 12, 1999, had traded under the symbol "PANLW", and had an exercise price of $ 3.50 per share. "We are very please that more than 70% of the Warrants were exercised. This shows an extraordinary vote of confidence in the Company, said Sidney D. Rosenblatt, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of UDC. ...

UDC is part of a team including Princeton, USC and Hughes Electronics which is working under a $3 million award from the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for the continued development of ultra light-weight, full-color OLED flat panel display technology. For more information, visit our web site at universaldisplay.com. ...


Copley News Service
Copyright 1999 Copley News Service
April 19, 1999, Monday

SECTION: Commentary
HEADLINE: No time for that kid stuff

A news report indicates that at some Ivy League colleges, the well-rounded high school senior is no longer the top dog on the admissions list. The colleges are looking for specialists youngsters who have developed an expertise in a particular single pursuit.

That's just great. As the situation appears in a recent Wall Street Journal article, it is another burden placed on the nation's brightest young people. If you want to get into a top school, you have to specialize. Become a top-seeded squash player. The editor of your high school yearbook. A ballerina with the local troupe. Chief medal-winner on the debating team. ...

Then that shifted slightly. The kid had to be a Renaissance child, good at everything. Good grades, a school leader, president of the drama club and first trumpet in the band. Soon, colleges added a proviso requiring that he or she be committed to the community: volunteer at the hospital, read to nursing home patients. The broader the kid's credentials, the better the chance at Princeton or Yale.

Now the bar at some elite colleges has shifted once again, this time favoring the specialist, the kid who is passionate about one thing and does it extraordinarily well. At the University of Pennsylvania, potential Olympic athletes were 50 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant. So were high school seniors who had won state or national prizes in the fine arts....


The Dallas Morning News
Copyright 1999 The Dallas Morning News

April 19, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: Scientists say blasts outshine supernovas Hypernovas may pack largest punch since big bang
SOURCE: Science Writer of The Dallas Morning News
BYLINE: Alexandra Witze

Just as the biggest parties leave behind a tremendous mess, the biggest explosions in the universe also leave piles of cosmic debris. Astronomers say they have identified the remnants of the largest explosions yet found, glowing dimly in a nearby galaxy.

Last year, scientists proposed that these explosions, called hypernovas, exist - each releasing more than 10 million billion times the energy that the sun does. Q. Daniel Wang, of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., may have the first observational evidence for hypernovas, he reported last week at an astrophysics meeting in Charleston, S.C.

Hypernovas are perhaps 100 times more powerful than an ordinary supernova, which is what happens when a massive, dying star blows up. ...

M101 is peppered with huge shells of gas and dust, like those left behind after an ordinary supernova explosion. Drs. Wang and Chu found that two of those "supernova" remnants also lay in places that spit out powerful X-rays, as measured by the ROSAT satellite. ...

"This is the best case so far for the hypernova remnants," said Bohdan Paczynski, the Princeton Universityastronomer who coined the term "hypernova."


Gannett News Service
Copyright 1999 Gannett Company, Inc.
April 19, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: Target puts the accent on style
BYLINE: NICOLE VOLTA AVERY; The Detroit News
Discount stores have arrived.

There's no shame in dropping dollars at Kmart or Wal-Mart or any other "mart." But thanks to crafty trend analysis and product partnerships with heavy-hitters such as architect Michael Graves, Target, or shall we say Tar-jay, may be positioning itself as the premier au courant discounter. ...

Despite the trendy fashion options, the kitchen and home wares aisles are where the action is. A few people glimpse the Michael Graves Collection, the much talked-about line of ultra-hip kitchen items designed by the well-known architect and Princeton Universityprofessor. The Graves line - set to expand to watches, ready-to-assemble furniture and garden supplies - rivals the much-loved Martha Stewart stuff at Kmart. ...


Health Line
Copyright 1999 The National Journal Group, Inc.
April 19, 1999

HEADLINE: PRIVATE ROOMS: HOSPITALS MAKE SWITCH TO DRAW PATIENTS

The fiercely competitive market wrought by managed care is pushing more hospitals to offer private rooms -- at costs of up to $300 a night once enjoyed by only the wealthy -- to all patients, often at no extra charge. Sunday's New York Times reported that the trend is also fueled by more sophisticated life-support technology and projected growth in intensive care, as hospitals look to more space in rooms that can be converted to intensive care units as needed. ...

But Princeton University's Uwe Reinhardt noted, "Ultimately the private rooms do drive up the cost of health care. But it is amazing how cheap the costs per square foot are compared to the costs of supplies and staff."


 Health Line
Copyright 1999 The National Journal Group, Inc.
April 19, 1999

HEADLINE: EUTHANASIA: PRINCETON PROFESSOR CREATES CONTROVERSY

"More than 100 protesters" gathered at Princeton University Saturday for a rally denouncing the appointment of controversial scholar Peter Singer to a professorship at the university's Center for Human Values. ...


The Press (Christchurch)
Copyright 1999 The Christchurch Press Company Limited
April 19, 1999

HEADLINE: DIARY
BYLINE: DUNBAR Anna

Barely sporting

THE Princeton UniversityBoard of Trustees in New Jersey has voted to ban the students' traditional "nude olympics" after this year's event turned into an alcoholic brawl. The Daily Princetonian newspaper reports the board had voted to abolish the 30-year-old annual ritual, in which students gather for a nude frolic at midnight after the year's first snowfall. After this year's event, students at the elite Ivy League school complained of being sexually groped, and more than a dozen of the 350 participants landed in hospitals with alcohol poisoning or injuries.


The Providence Journal-Bulletin
Copyright 1999 The Providence Journal Company
April 19, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: GREEN FEES IS YOUR GRASS AS GREEN AS YOUR CASH?
BYLINE: BOB WYSS; Journal Staff Writer

We may all live in the Ocean State or the Bay State but most of us are still farmers. We cultivate literally hundreds of thousands or even millions of plants each year. And it is time to begin cultivating again. We're talking about your lawn. ...

Most of us begin by showering our lawn with what we believe will be a beneficial range of fertilizers, chemicals and pesticides. In fact, we spend $30 billion a year taking care of turf grass, according to Georges Teyssot, a professor of architecture at Princeton Universitywho worked with the exhibit. ...


The Washington Times
Copyright 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
April 19, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: Death to defectives
BYLINE: Suzanne Fields; THE WASHINGTON TIMES
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.

PRINCETON, N.J. - Princeton Universityhas a problem in Human Values. It has hired Peter Singer, a professor who thinks it's OK to kill infants who are born inconveniently disabled. He is to teach in a tenured chair at Princeton's Center for Human Values.

The professor has not yet arrived, but a small but vocal grass roots effort of students and alumni are protesting his appointment. Methinks they cannot protest too much.

Mr. Singer, as the Princeton administration tells it, is an honorable man with outstanding scholarly credentials. Harold Shapiro, the president of Princeton, defends him in the name of academic freedom. Amy Gutman, former dean of faculty and head of the Center for Human Values says "there was nobody better in the world than Singer." Scholars describe him as "intellectual gold" in a front-page story in the New York Times.

Others, including scholars with similarly golden credentials, decry this academic alchemy as "base metal" ethics. Christopher Benek, a graduate student at Princeton Theological Seminary who heads the Princeton Students Against Infanticide, says Mr. Singer would empower parents to kill their disabled infants up to 28 days after birth. ...


Austin American-Statesman
Copyright 1999 The Austin American-Statesman
April 18, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: '90s boom reaching more of America//Increases in wages help put more women, blacks, former welfare recipients on payroll
BYLINE: Peter G. Gosselin

WASHINGTON -- Lured in part by the first broad-based wage gains in two decades, nearly 12 million new workers have flooded into the nation's workplaces during the 1990s, raising the fraction of Americans at work to its highest level in history.

The influx of new workers -- notably women, immigrants, refugees from retirement and millions who had been destitute or on welfare -- is helping to extend a boom that many feared would stall for lack of enough strong backs and bright minds. Their arrival at work is demonstrating the American economy's powerful capacity for easing social problems and improving the lot of the vast majority. ...

The increases are proving particularly valuable to workers because of the virtual absence of inflation to corrode their worth. And employers are finding the raises comparatively easy to bear because of an unexpected jump in

productivity that is increasing workers' output in rough tandem with wages. The real hourly wages of the typical U.S. worker have risen 5 percent since the mid-1990s, reversing a similar-size decline during the early part of the decade, according to government statistics. ...

In Central Texas, where unemployment hasn't risen much beyond 3 percent in years, labor shortages have bedeviled employers from high-tech to construction to fast food.

Even so, "this expansion is not going to end because we run out of workers," said Alan Krueger, a Princeton Universitylabor economist.

In this regard, the 1990s are similar to other periods of U.S. history when the country has demonstrated the capacity to bulk up its work force to meet need. During World War II and again during the social changes and economic upheavals of the 1970s, for example, it drew vast numbers of women onto the job rolls. ...

NOTE: This story first appeared in the Los Angeles Times.


Daily News (New York)
Copyright 1999 Daily News, L.P.
April 18, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: SEVEN DAYS THE LAST WORD ON LAST WEEK
BYLINE: BY DAVID NOONAN

NEWS OF THE NUDE

In upstate Rochester, luxury retailer Tiffany & Co. filed a trademark infringement lawsuit in federal court against the operators of Tiffany's, a nude juice bar set to open soon. In Princeton, N.J., the Princeton UniversityBoard of Trustees voted to abolish the Nude Olympics, a booze-soaked school tradition in which naked students run around in the snow.


The Dallas Morning News
Copyright 1999 The Dallas Morning News
April 18, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: Good citizens; 4 students from Houston take top prizes in knowledge of history and news events
SOURCE: Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News
BYLINE: Sandy Louey

A little last-minute cramming didn't hurt Phillip Magness at all.

The 17-year-old senior from Houston's Klein Oak High School took the top spot Saturday at The Dallas Morning News Texas Citizen Bee.

Phillip was among the 29 students from around the state who were tested on their knowledge of history, geography, economics and current events. ...

The second-place winner, Emily Hilligoss, a senior at Stratford High School in Houston, received $ 750. Memorial High School senior Rohith Malya of Houston captured third and $ 500, while Hastings High School senior Vikram Vaz of Houston took fourth place and $ 250. Vikram said he decided to participate in the event because it tested a wide range of knowledge.

"And it offered scholarship money, which I really, really need," said the 18-year-old, who plans to attend either Harvard University or Princeton Universitythis fall. ...


The Herald-Sun (Durham, N.C.)
Copyright 1999 The Durham Herald Co.
April 18, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: Kenan digs deep to find what it means to be black

BYLINE: ALAN WOLFE

"Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the 21st Century." By Randall Kenan, Alfred A. Knopf. $ 30.

Randall Kenan, a talented young novelist and short-story writer, set off across the United States determined to discover what it means to be black. As one might expect, he found individuals whose views sound as if they were scripted by the received wisdom of racial conflict in America. ...

In the comfortable hills of Oakland, Calif., Kenan visits Frank and Dona Irvin, the parents of the Princeton Universityhistorian Nell Irvin Painter, who describe the "cultural shock" they experienced when they tried to live in Africa. ...


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
April 18, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: Competition for Patients Spurs Some Hospitals Toward Providing Only Private Rooms
BYLINE: By MILT FREUDENHEIM

Private rooms in hospitals were once only for those affluent patients willing to pay as much as $300 a day extra for some peace from the chatter, beeping machines and groans coming from the next bed. Now a growing number of hospitals are eliminating shared rooms and offering all patients -- Medicare and Medicaid, rich and indigent -- their own rooms, often at no extra charge.

The shift toward private rooms is largely a byproduct of the revolution wrought by managed care. Most hospitals are under pressure to compete for patients. Insurers used to pay hospitals based on a semiprivate room rate. Now they typically pay the same flat amount no matter what the type of room. ...

"Ultimately the private rooms do drive up the cost of health care," said Uwe E. Reinhardt, a health care economist at Princeton University. "But it is amazing how cheap the costs per square foot are compared to the costs of supplies and staff." ...


THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Copyright 1999 Orange County Register
April 18, 1999

HEADLINE: Dissenters struggle to be heard amid stampede toward Bush;
POLITICS: Some House Republicans fear the GOP is too quickly anointing Texas Gov. Bush for the 2000 nomination.

BYLINE: SUSAN FEENEY, The Dallas Morning News

DATELINE: WASHINGTON, DC

Lamar Alexander jokes that Republicans are ready to chisel George W. Bush's face on Mount Rushmore.

Gary Bauer, another GOP presidential contender, complained about the early "rush to judgment" in the 2000 race. ...

"I think I'm helping my party by urging a serious contest as opposed to anointing someone up front," (U.S. Rep. Lindsey) Graham said.

Fred Greenstein, a Princeton Universitypolitical science professor, said those concerns are valid. But he detects some sour grapes from those candidates who aren't getting much sunlight in the Texas governor's shadow.

"What do jackals do when elephants are stampeding? They yip in a high, falsetto voice and scurry around and often get squished," Greenstein said. ...


The Providence Journal-Bulletin
Copyright 1999 The Providence Journal Company
April 18, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: Journalism at its best Pulitzer Prizes celebrate spirit of a free press

BYLINE: TIM MURPHY; Assistant Managing Editor/Sunday

Several years ago, I heard a talk by the city editor of the Alabama Journal, a small paper that had a staff of seven reporters.

Like reporters on every small paper, they kept busy covering the minutiae of local news, from zoning boards to police logs. But every year, they resolved to explore one important issue in depth.

That year, the staff decided to examine why so many babies were dying in Alabama, where the infant mortality rate approached Third-World proportions.

Between school board and town council meetings, they studied records, talked to doctors and social workers and visited poor mothers in their homes. Among other things, they learned that Alabama spent more money promoting its annual blueberry festival than it did on pre-natal care.

In the end, they produced a series of stories that documented and explained a long-hidden problem and led to legislative reforms.

It won a Pulitzer Prize. ...

POETRY

Mark Strand, "Blizzard of One."

Strand, 65, is one of the country's most respected poets. He is a native of Canada and grew up in the United States and South America. He first wanted to be an artist but switched to writing in his 20s.

The former U.S. poet laureate has taught at Yale, Harvard and Princeton and is a faculty member at the University of Chicago. He has written several volumes of poems and a collection of stories and has contributed monographs on artists such as William Bailey and Edward Hopper. ...

BIOGRAPHY

A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh.

The biography of Charles Lindbergh was the third book for the Los Angeles-based Berg, a Princeton Universitygraduate who has devoted his life to writing about larger-than-life characters. Berg, 49, is also the author of Max

Perkins: Editor of Genius and Goldwyn: A Biography, about the movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn.

Just writing Lindbergh was an achievement. It took him a year to persuade the aviator's widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, to give him full access to Lindbergh's papers.

GENERAL NONFICTION

John McPhee, Annals of the Former World.

The acclaimed author spent two years on the road with geologists, studying the landscape of North America from 1978-79 for his book.

McPhee, 68, thought he could write the book all at once, but the project became too mammoth. He began writing the first of five segments in 1980 and put them together by 1998.

Friend and former student Jim Kelly, deputy managing editor of Time magazine, said McPhee "wrote about the earth though the characters who studied it. He tells the story through them."


Sunday Times (London)
Copyright 1999 Times Newspapers Limited
April 18, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: Sports story of the week

The annual Nude Olympics at Princeton University, New Jersey, has been banned after this year's event turned into an alcoholic brawl. For the past 30 years, students have marked the first snowfall of the year by a naked midnight frolic. But this year 350 people were taken to hospital with alcoholic poisoning and others complained of groping.


The Washington Post
Copyright 1999 The Washington Post
April 18, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: When Good Students Aren't Good Enough; Public Colleges Raising Standards

BYLINE: Valerie Strauss, Washington Post Staff Writer

It was one of the few things a high school senior could depend on: Maintain a B-plus average and waltz into a major public university. Not anymore. These days, even a perfect 4.0 grade-point average doesn't guarantee admission.

This just became painfully clear to hundreds of Washington area seniors with 3.5 averages or better who thought they were shoo-ins to join this fall's freshman class at the University of Maryland at College Park. Instead, they were shaken to find themselves on a waiting list -- or rejected -- because, according to university letters, "this year's applicant pool is larger and more talented than ever and we only have space to enroll one-fifth of those who apply." ...

Losing accomplished students to public schools has forced expensive private colleges to compete economically. Last year, Princeton Universitydecided to replace some loans with grants to bring costs to lower- and middle-income families "in line with -- or below -- what it costs to attend the major state universities," President Harold Shapiro said. ...


Austin American-Statesman
Copyright 1999 The Austin American-Statesman
April 18, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: '90s boom reaching more of America//Increases in wages help put more women, blacks, former welfare recipients on payroll
BYLINE: Peter G. Gosselin

WASHINGTON -- Lured in part by the first broad-based wage gains in two decades, nearly 12 million new workers have flooded into the nation's workplaces during the 1990s, raising the fraction of Americans at work to its highest level in history.

The influx of new workers -- notably women, immigrants, refugees from retirement and millions who had been destitute or on welfare -- is helping to extend a boom that many feared would stall for lack of enough strong backs and bright minds. Their arrival at work is demonstrating the American economy's powerful capacity for easing social problems and improving the lot of the vast majority. ...

The increases are proving particularly valuable to workers because of the virtual absence of inflation to corrode their worth. And employers are finding the raises comparatively easy to bear because of an unexpected jump in

productivity that is increasing workers' output in rough tandem with wages. The real hourly wages of the typical U.S. worker have risen 5 percent since the mid-1990s, reversing a similar-size decline during the early part of the decade, according to government statistics. ...

In Central Texas, where unemployment hasn't risen much beyond 3 percent in years, labor shortages have bedeviled employers from high-tech to construction to fast food.

Even so, "this expansion is not going to end because we run out of workers," said Alan Krueger, a Princeton Universitylabor economist.

In this regard, the 1990s are similar to other periods of U.S. history when the country has demonstrated the capacity to bulk up its work force to meet need. During World War II and again during the social changes and economic upheavals of the 1970s, for example, it drew vast numbers of women onto the job rolls. ...

NOTE: This story first appeared in the Los Angeles Times.


Daily News (New York)
Copyright 1999 Daily News, L.P.
April 18, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: SEVEN DAYS THE LAST WORD ON LAST WEEK
BYLINE: BY DAVID NOONAN

NEWS OF THE NUDE

In upstate Rochester, luxury retailer Tiffany & Co. filed a trademark infringement lawsuit in federal court against the operators of Tiffany's, a nude juice bar set to open soon. In Princeton, N.J., the Princeton UniversityBoard of Trustees voted to abolish the Nude Olympics, a booze-soaked school tradition in which naked students run around in the snow.


The Dallas Morning News
Copyright 1999 The Dallas Morning News
April 18, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: Good citizens; 4 students from Houston take top prizes in knowledge of history and news events
SOURCE: Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News
BYLINE: Sandy Louey

A little last-minute cramming didn't hurt Phillip Magness at all.

The 17-year-old senior from Houston's Klein Oak High School took the top spot Saturday at The Dallas Morning News Texas Citizen Bee.

Phillip was among the 29 students from around the state who were tested on their knowledge of history, geography, economics and current events. ...

The second-place winner, Emily Hilligoss, a senior at Stratford High School in Houston, received $ 750. Memorial High School senior Rohith Malya of Houston captured third and $ 500, while Hastings High School senior Vikram Vaz of Houston took fourth place and $ 250. Vikram said he decided to participate in the event because it tested a wide range of knowledge.

"And it offered scholarship money, which I really, really need," said the 18-year-old, who plans to attend either Harvard University or Princeton Universitythis fall. ...


The Herald-Sun (Durham, N.C.)
Copyright 1999 The Durham Herald Co.
April 18, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: Kenan digs deep to find what it means to be black

BYLINE: ALAN WOLFE

"Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the 21st Century." By Randall Kenan, Alfred A. Knopf. $ 30.

Randall Kenan, a talented young novelist and short-story writer, set off across the United States determined to discover what it means to be black. As one might expect, he found individuals whose views sound as if they were scripted by the received wisdom of racial conflict in America. ...

In the comfortable hills of Oakland, Calif., Kenan visits Frank and Dona Irvin, the parents of the Princeton Universityhistorian Nell Irvin Painter, who describe the "cultural shock" they experienced when they tried to live in Africa. ...


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
April 18, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: Competition for Patients Spurs Some Hospitals Toward Providing Only Private Rooms
BYLINE: By MILT FREUDENHEIM

Private rooms in hospitals were once only for those affluent patients willing to pay as much as $300 a day extra for some peace from the chatter, beeping machines and groans coming from the next bed. Now a growing number of hospitals are eliminating shared rooms and offering all patients -- Medicare and Medicaid, rich and indigent -- their own rooms, often at no extra charge.

The shift toward private rooms is largely a byproduct of the revolution wrought by managed care. Most hospitals are under pressure to compete for patients. Insurers used to pay hospitals based on a semiprivate room rate. Now they typically pay the same flat amount no matter what the type of room. ...

"Ultimately the private rooms do drive up the cost of health care," said Uwe E. Reinhardt, a health care economist at Princeton University. "But it is amazing how cheap the costs per square foot are compared to the costs of supplies and staff." ...


THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Copyright 1999 Orange County Register
April 18, 1999

HEADLINE: Dissenters struggle to be heard amid stampede toward Bush;
POLITICS: Some House Republicans fear the GOP is too quickly anointing Texas Gov. Bush for the 2000 nomination.

BYLINE: SUSAN FEENEY, The Dallas Morning News

DATELINE: WASHINGTON, DC

Lamar Alexander jokes that Republicans are ready to chisel George W. Bush's face on Mount Rushmore.

Gary Bauer, another GOP presidential contender, complained about the early "rush to judgment" in the 2000 race. ...

"I think I'm helping my party by urging a serious contest as opposed to anointing someone up front," (U.S. Rep. Lindsey) Graham said.

Fred Greenstein, a Princeton Universitypolitical science professor, said those concerns are valid. But he detects some sour grapes from those candidates who aren't getting much sunlight in the Texas governor's shadow.

"What do jackals do when elephants are stampeding? They yip in a high, falsetto voice and scurry around and often get squished," Greenstein said. ...


The Providence Journal-Bulletin
Copyright 1999 The Providence Journal Company
April 18, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: Journalism at its best Pulitzer Prizes celebrate spirit of a free press

BYLINE: TIM MURPHY; Assistant Managing Editor/Sunday

Several years ago, I heard a talk by the city editor of the Alabama Journal, a small paper that had a staff of seven reporters.

Like reporters on every small paper, they kept busy covering the minutiae of local news, from zoning boards to police logs. But every year, they resolved to explore one important issue in depth.

That year, the staff decided to examine why so many babies were dying in Alabama, where the infant mortality rate approached Third-World proportions.

Between school board and town council meetings, they studied records, talked to doctors and social workers and visited poor mothers in their homes. Among other things, they learned that Alabama spent more money promoting its annual blueberry festival than it did on pre-natal care.

In the end, they produced a series of stories that documented and explained a long-hidden problem and led to legislative reforms.

It won a Pulitzer Prize. ...

POETRY

Mark Strand, "Blizzard of One."

Strand, 65, is one of the country's most respected poets. He is a native of Canada and grew up in the United States and South America. He first wanted to be an artist but switched to writing in his 20s.

The former U.S. poet laureate has taught at Yale, Harvard and Princeton and is a faculty member at the University of Chicago. He has written several volumes of poems and a collection of stories and has contributed monographs on artists such as William Bailey and Edward Hopper. ...

BIOGRAPHY

A. Scott Berg, Lindbergh.

The biography of Charles Lindbergh was the third book for the Los Angeles-based Berg, a Princeton Universitygraduate who has devoted his life to writing about larger-than-life characters. Berg, 49, is also the author of Max

Perkins: Editor of Genius and Goldwyn: A Biography, about the movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn.

Just writing Lindbergh was an achievement. It took him a year to persuade the aviator's widow, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, to give him full access to Lindbergh's papers.

GENERAL NONFICTION

John McPhee, Annals of the Former World.

The acclaimed author spent two years on the road with geologists, studying the landscape of North America from 1978-79 for his book.

McPhee, 68, thought he could write the book all at once, but the project became too mammoth. He began writing the first of five segments in 1980 and put them together by 1998.

Friend and former student Jim Kelly, deputy managing editor of Time magazine, said McPhee "wrote about the earth though the characters who studied it. He tells the story through them."


Sunday Times (London)
Copyright 1999 Times Newspapers Limited
April 18, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: Sports story of the week

The annual Nude Olympics at Princeton University, New Jersey, has been banned after this year's event turned into an alcoholic brawl. For the past 30 years, students have marked the first snowfall of the year by a naked midnight frolic. But this year 350 people were taken to hospital with alcoholic poisoning and others complained of groping.


The Washington Post
Copyright 1999 The Washington Post
April 18, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: When Good Students Aren't Good Enough; Public Colleges Raising Standards

BYLINE: Valerie Strauss, Washington Post Staff Writer

It was one of the few things a high school senior could depend on: Maintain a B-plus average and waltz into a major public university. Not anymore. These days, even a perfect 4.0 grade-point average doesn't guarantee admission.

This just became painfully clear to hundreds of Washington area seniors with 3.5 averages or better who thought they were shoo-ins to join this fall's freshman class at the University of Maryland at College Park. Instead, they were shaken to find themselves on a waiting list -- or rejected -- because, according to university letters, "this year's applicant pool is larger and more talented than ever and we only have space to enroll one-fifth of those who apply." ...

Losing accomplished students to public schools has forced expensive private colleges to compete economically. Last year, Princeton Universitydecided to replace some loans with grants to bring costs to lower- and middle-income families "in line with -- or below -- what it costs to attend the major state universities," President Harold Shapiro said. ...


The Associated Press
April 17, 1999, Saturday

HEADLINE: Protesters denounce hiring of controversial bioethics professor
BYLINE: JOHN CURRAN, Associated Press Writer

DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.

More than 100 protesters denounced Princeton Universityon Saturday for hiring a philosopher whose controversial views include allowing parents to end the lives of their severely disabled infants.

"Nazi Germany did the same thing to the disabled, judging their lives not worth living. We object to that," said John Scaturro, 49, who protested near the Ivy League school along with his wife and young daughter.

University officials stood by the appointment of Peter Singer, a professor whose academic work they say will contribute to scholarship and ethics debates at Princeton.

Singer, a professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, was appointed last year to the Ira W. DeCamp Professorship of Bioethics at the university's Center for Human Values. He is to begin work in July.

The 52-year-old academic is widely considered the father of the international animal rights movement, and has argued parents should have the right to euthanize newborn children who have severe handicaps. ...

Princeton spokesman Justin Harmon defended Singer's hiring and suggested that some of his harshest critics have not read his books.

"According to the experts in the field, he is the one of the strongest bioethicists out there," Harmon said. "He's been hired because of the strength of his teaching and his research, not because of any particular point of view he holds for or against any issue."

NOTE: Versions of this story appeared in more than two dozen major U.S. newspapers (most appeared April 18, 1999) and were included in regional network news broadcasts.


Calgary Herald
Copyright 1999 Southam Inc.
April 17, 1999

HEADLINE: Mass extinctions linked to enormous cosmic blasts: Astronomers find traces of explosions rivalled only by Big Bang
BYLINE: Knight-Ridder Newspapers

DATELINE: CHICAGO

A team of Illinois astronomers have announced that they have found the first observational evidence for a new class of staggeringly powerful cosmic explosions -- a kind of blast so intense that similar events in our own galaxy's

past could help explain the mass extinctions that have dotted the history of life on Earth.

Some theorists also believe such explosions could be the source of intense yet mysterious blasts called gamma ray bursts, most of which occur at too great a distance from Earth to be observed in much detail.

The recent observations were made by astronomers at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois who used the Hubble Space Telescope in conjunction with other stargazing devices based in space and on land. ...

''This is very important in that it demonstrates there are explosions more powerful than ordinary supernovas,'' said Bohdan Paczynski, a professor of astrophysics at Princeton Universitywho first coined the term hypernova in 1997.

NOTE: This story also appeared in the London Free Press.


The Times Union (Albany, NY)
Copyright 1999 The Hearst Corporation
April 17, 1999, Saturday

HEADLINE: Don't corral students

BYLINE: THOMAS SOWELL

Nothing brings forth more shrill cries for more federal money than proclamations of how terrible the schools are in the ghettos. And nothing brings more yawns than examples of ghetto schools that are doing fine academic work.

If so-called educators were as serious about educating minority youngsters as they are about getting federal money, we would see a stampede toward outstanding ghetto schools, to find out how they do it. There is no such stampede. ...

It is much the same story at the college level. No one cares that the most black students who go on to become doctors come from a small black institution named Xavier University in New Orleans. Although black colleges enroll only 25 percent of all black college students, their students receive 40 percent of all science and engineering degrees received by black students. Of the 10 undergraduate institutions whose black students go on to receive the most Ph.D.s in science, six are black institutions. ...

Ironically, a recent and much ballyhooed book by two retired Ivy League university presidents claims that racial preferences at elite institutions are the key to creating a black middle class. Yet here is non-elite Xavier sending more of its graduates on to receive science degrees than does Harvard or Princeton. ...


The Associated Press
April 17, 1999, Saturday

HEADLINE: Protesters denounce hiring of controversial bioethics professor
BYLINE: JOHN CURRAN, Associated Press Writer

DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.

More than 100 protesters denounced Princeton Universityon Saturday for hiring a philosopher whose controversial views include allowing parents to end the lives of their severely disabled infants.

"Nazi Germany did the same thing to the disabled, judging their lives not worth living. We object to that," said John Scaturro, 49, who protested near the Ivy League school along with his wife and young daughter.

University officials stood by the appointment of Peter Singer, a professor whose academic work they say will contribute to scholarship and ethics debates at Princeton.

Singer, a professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, was appointed last year to the Ira W. DeCamp Professorship of Bioethics at the university's Center for Human Values. He is to begin work in July.

The 52-year-old academic is widely considered the father of the international animal rights movement, and has argued parents should have the right to euthanize newborn children who have severe handicaps. ...

Princeton spokesman Justin Harmon defended Singer's hiring and suggested that some of his harshest critics have not read his books.

"According to the experts in the field, he is the one of the strongest bioethicists out there," Harmon said. "He's been hired because of the strength of his teaching and his research, not because of any particular point of view he holds for or against any issue."

NOTE: Versions of this story appeared in more than two dozen major U.S. newspapers (most appeared April 18, 1999) and were included in regional network news broadcasts.


Calgary Herald
Copyright 1999 Southam Inc.
April 17, 1999

HEADLINE: Mass extinctions linked to enormous cosmic blasts: Astronomers find traces of explosions rivalled only by Big Bang
BYLINE: Knight-Ridder Newspapers

DATELINE: CHICAGO

A team of Illinois astronomers have announced that they have found the first observational evidence for a new class of staggeringly powerful cosmic explosions -- a kind of blast so intense that similar events in our own galaxy's

past could help explain the mass extinctions that have dotted the history of life on Earth.

Some theorists also believe such explosions could be the source of intense yet mysterious blasts called gamma ray bursts, most of which occur at too great a distance from Earth to be observed in much detail.

The recent observations were made by astronomers at Northwestern University and the University of Illinois who used the Hubble Space Telescope in conjunction with other stargazing devices based in space and on land. ...

''This is very important in that it demonstrates there are explosions more powerful than ordinary supernovas,'' said Bohdan Paczynski, a professor of astrophysics at Princeton Universitywho first coined the term hypernova in 1997.

NOTE: This story also appeared in the London Free Press.


The Times Union (Albany, NY)
Copyright 1999 The Hearst Corporation
April 17, 1999, Saturday

HEADLINE: Don't corral students

BYLINE: THOMAS SOWELL

Nothing brings forth more shrill cries for more federal money than proclamations of how terrible the schools are in the ghettos. And nothing brings more yawns than examples of ghetto schools that are doing fine academic work.

If so-called educators were as serious about educating minority youngsters as they are about getting federal money, we would see a stampede toward outstanding ghetto schools, to find out how they do it. There is no such stampede. ...

It is much the same story at the college level. No one cares that the most black students who go on to become doctors come from a small black institution named Xavier University in New Orleans. Although black colleges enroll only 25 percent of all black college students, their students receive 40 percent of all science and engineering degrees received by black students. Of the 10 undergraduate institutions whose black students go on to receive the most Ph.D.s in science, six are black institutions. ...

Ironically, a recent and much ballyhooed book by two retired Ivy League university presidents claims that racial preferences at elite institutions are the key to creating a black middle class. Yet here is non-elite Xavier sending more of its graduates on to receive science degrees than does Harvard or Princeton. ...


The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
Copyright 1999 The Atlanta Constitution
April 16, 1999, Friday

HEADLINE: Obituaries: James M. Clarke, 81, congressman from N.C.
BYLINE: Associated Press
SOURCE: Fairview, NC

Former U.S. Rep. James McClure Clarke, who served three terms in Congress in the 1980s, died at home of prostate cancer. He was 81.

A Vermont native and graduate of Princeton University, Rep. Clarke had collapsed in his home's courtyard Tuesday after working in his vegetable garden, his daughter, Annie Ager, said Wednesday.

He was elected to the state House in 1976 and the state Senate in 1980....


THE BALTIMORE SUN
Copyright 1999 The Baltimore Sun Company
April 16, 1999, Friday

HEADLINE: School condemns hate incidents; Gilman students, staff united in rejecting anti-Semitic letter
BYLINE: Kate Shatzkin

SOURCE: SUN STAFF

A Jewish teacher at one of Baltimore's most elite preparatory schools found a hate letter in his mailbox and a slur scratched on his department's door this week -- incidents to which students responded with rapid condemnation at a special assembly.

Michael R. Himelfarb, who teaches English and heads the drama department at Gilman School in Roland Park, said he is sickened by the anti-Semitic note he received Monday, but heartened by the response from students and faculty of his alma mater.

The note, Himelfarb said, told him to leave his teaching job -- one he has held for a year, since graduating from Princeton Universityin 1998. ...


The Chronicle of Higher Education
Copyright 1999 The Chronicle of Higher Education
April 16, 1999

HEADLINE: Finding New Paths for Ph.D.'s in the Humanities

BYLINE: DENISE K. MAGNER

People have talked for years about the dreary career prospects of Ph.D.'s in the humanities. Robert Weisbuch is actually doing something about it.

An English professor turned foundation leader, Mr. Weisbuch is on a mission to rescue the humanities by broadening job opportunities for Ph.D.'s both within and beyond the academy.

Since taking over as president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, in August 1997, he has moved the organization into the spotlight.

Its new grant programs to expand career options for Ph.D.'s are modest in scale -- like the foundation's $ 3.8-million endowment and $ 12-million annual operating budget. But Mr. Weisbuch hopes that the impact of the effort will far exceed the investment....

Not surprisingly, professors who have urged Ph.D.'s to look for work beyond academe's overcrowded job market are keen on the foundation's effort and on Mr. Weisbuch's leadership. "He's a shot in the arm," says Elaine C. Showalter, a professor of English at Princeton University, whose enthusiasm for non-academic hiring incited the wrath of many a graduate student during her tenure last year as president of the Modern Language Association. ...


The Chronicle of Higher Education
Copyright 1999 The Chronicle of Higher Education
April 16, 1999

HEADLINE: Hollywood in Love
BYLINE: MARTIN HARRIES

The day after the world watched Gwyneth Paltrow's tears, The New York Times reported a whole series of guesses about why Shakespeare in Love, rather than one of those big, important movies about the last just war, had won the Academy Award for best picture.

One speculation strikes me as on the right track. An unnamed executive from DreamWorks, the studio that produced Saving Private Ryan, speculated that "Shakespeare may have triumphed because the biggest block of academy voters are actors, and the film is a tribute to acting and theater." ...

Martin Harries is an assistant professor of English at Princeton University.


The Dallas Morning News
Copyright 1999 The Dallas Morning News
April 16, 1999

HEADLINE: 4 books on Plano history published

SOURCE: Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News

BYLINE: Sherry Jacobson

Did you know that the first settlers in the Plano area in 1841 were under attack by local Indian tribes for the next three years?

Did you know that children were not required to go to school in Plano until 1916, when the state legislature mandated six-month school terms for those ages 8 to 14?

Did you know it was a favorite Halloween prank in the 1920s for local boys to drop paper bags filled with flour on unsuspecting commuters on the old Interurban line?

Such historical tidbits may not be fodder for cocktail party chatter, but they are tantalizing nuggets mined from four new books published this month about Plano.

The volumes will join a growing collection of books that document Plano's history from its earliest days as a cotton-growing prairie town to its current status as a sprawling suburban city. ...

Already, there has been heavy interest in a slender book called The One Room School in Collin County, Texas by Heather M. Brown, who was an intern last summer at the Farmstead Museum. The book grew out of her assignment to research early educational efforts in the Plano area.

"It was supposed to be an academic study, but we enjoyed reading it so much that everybody wanted to make a copy," Mr. Peters recalled of the panel of local historians who reviewed the first draft. "It generated enough interest that people began suggesting we publish it."

Ms. Brown, who will graduate in June from Princeton University, spent 15 weeks on the project, but most of her time went to interviewing people who had attended one-room school houses in the Plano area...


THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Copyright 1999 Orange County Register
April 16, 1999 Friday

HEADLINE: HEALTH & SCIENCE BRIEFLY

Study: Altered drug kills resistant bacteria

Scientists said Thursday that they may have found a way to outwit drug-resistant bacteria by slightly modifying antibiotics already on the market.

They said slight changes to the structure of vancomycin, which is considered the drug of last resort against the toughest bacteria, made the drug superefficient. It killed normal bacteria even more quickly than usual and also finished off bugs that normally resist vancomycin.

Their method could offer a quick way to design antibiotics to overcome resistant bacteria, Daniel Kahne and colleagues at Princeton Universityin Princeton, New Jersey, and a team at Merck esearch Laboratories in Rahway, New Jersey, wrote in a report in the journal Science.


Sacramento Bee
Copyright 1999 McClatchy Newspapers, Inc.
April 16, 1999

HEADLINE: BUSH ATTRACTS TOP TALENT -- BUT MUST STILL PROVE HE DESERVES IT
BYLINE: Morton Kondracke

DATELINE: AUSTIN, Texas

As the attendance list at Texas Gov. George W. Bush's latest foreign policy confab attests, he has not -- as widely reported -- banned his father's former advisers from his inner circle.

To impress conservatives, Bush political aides have put it out that the foreign policy team is "Reagan, not Bush," but in fact it's both -- and some of the best of both.

Five of the eight experts who briefed the governor on Europe, the Balkans, Russia and China for three hours on Tuesday served in his father's administration. Two served only in the Reagan administration, and two were in both.

Regardless of prior service, what characterizes the group are brains, experience and a tough attitude toward foreign adversaries. And also, loyalty to Gov. Bush. Those invited to brief him are required to endorse him and not advise any other candidate. ...

Since December, when the policy briefings began, Bush has held sessions on defense, taxes, the budget, Social Security and Medicare, and fleshing out the content for his idea of "compassionate conservatism."

That session includes brainy social philosophers such as retired Professor James Wilson of UCLA and John DiIulio Jr. of Princeton University.

Subjects on the future schedule include education, the environment, weapons of mass destruction, "the new economy" and health care. ...

Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, a newspaper that reports on Capitol Hill. This opinion is distributed by the Newspaper Enterprise Association.


St. Petersburg Times
Copyright 1999 Times Publishing Company
April 16, 1999, Friday

HEADLINE: TGH president changes course
BYLINE: DAVID KARP

DATELINE: TAMPA

Hospital chief Bruce Siegel says indigent care is no longer the top item in Tampa General's mission.

When Bruce Siegel campaigned to take Tampa General Hospital private three years ago, he made the same statement so many times it could have been his mantra.

At community meetings, hospital board sessions and in interviews, Siegel promised that if the county's only public hospital went private, its commitment to the poor would remain its top priority.

But this week, when questioned under oath, Siegel said just the opposite. The president of Tampa General said that TGH's top priority is not caring for the poor.

Siegel made the statement during a deposition Tuesday to prepare for two lawsuits brought against Tampa General by the St. Petersburg Times and the Tampa Tribune. The lawsuits seek to open Tampa General's records and meetings to the public. Tampa General closed its meetings and records after a private corporation took over the public hospital in 1997. ...

Other times, Siegel, who has an undergraduate degree from Princeton Universityand a medical degree from Cornell University, could not comprehend simple words. ...


 Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)
Copyright 1999 Star Tribune
April 16, 1999, Friday

Q - Columnist George Will appears to recommend the use of military power with little hesitation. Has he served in the military? Dale McLachlan, Bloomington

A - No. The Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist is a former professor of political philosophy, according to Current Biography. The son of Frederick and Louise Will was born into an academic environment in 1941 in

Champaign, Ill. The avid baseball fan honed his knowledge of the sport as sports editor at Hartford's Trinity College, and later became that university's newspaper editor. While there he considered himself a liberal, and served as the cochairman of Trinity Students for Kennedy in 1960. But after enrolling at Oxford University in England, he moved right on the political spectrum. Reflecting on those days, he said, "I became a quite thoroughly ideological capitalist." In 1964 he earned a Ph.D. in political science at Princeton University. Will taught political science until 1970, and then worked for Sen. Gordon Allott of Colorado. A stint as an editor at the National Review led in 1973 to his current position at the Washington Post.


University Wire
|Copyright 1999 Daily Princetonian via U-Wire

April 16, 1999

HEADLINE: Gift from Princeton U. alum endows new Irish studies committee
BYLINE: By Emily Bliss, Daily Princetonian
SOURCE: Princeton U.
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.

If the ghosts of James Joyce and William Butler Yeats ever wander through Princeton University's gothic archways and turreted halls, they will finally have a home away from Ireland.

Pat Durkin '60 recently gave the University more than $ 200,000 to launch the Fund for Irish Studies -- a name particularly appropriate since the abbreviation, FIS, means "vision" in Gaelic.

Durkin, who is of Irish descent, said he had wanted to contribute to the 250th Anniversary Campaign and the Irish studies fund seemed like the most attractive option. "I match[ed] my money with my interest," he said.

According to The Committee for Irish Studies at Princeton, "The Fund for Irish Studies has the modest ambition of affording all Princeton students a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, politics and economics of Ireland." ...


The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
Copyright 1999 The Atlanta Constitution
April 16, 1999, Friday

HEADLINE: Obituaries: James M. Clarke, 81, congressman from N.C.
BYLINE: Associated Press
SOURCE: Fairview, NC

Former U.S. Rep. James McClure Clarke, who served three terms in Congress in the 1980s, died at home of prostate cancer. He was 81.

A Vermont native and graduate of Princeton University, Rep. Clarke had collapsed in his home's courtyard Tuesday after working in his vegetable garden, his daughter, Annie Ager, said Wednesday.

He was elected to the state House in 1976 and the state Senate in 1980....


THE BALTIMORE SUN
Copyright 1999 The Baltimore Sun Company
April 16, 1999,Friday

HEADLINE: School condemns hate incidents; Gilman students, staff united in rejecting anti-Semitic letter
BYLINE: Kate Shatzkin

SOURCE: SUN STAFF

A Jewish teacher at one of Baltimore's most elite preparatory schools found a hate letter in his mailbox and a slur scratched on his department's door this week -- incidents to which students responded with rapid condemnation at a special assembly.

Michael R. Himelfarb, who teaches English and heads the drama department at Gilman School in Roland Park, said he is sickened by the anti-Semitic note he received Monday, but heartened by the response from students and faculty of his alma mater.

The note, Himelfarb said, told him to leave his teaching job -- one he has held for a year, since graduating from Princeton Universityin 1998. ...


The Chronicle of Higher Education
Copyright 1999 The Chronicle of Higher Education
April 16, 1999

HEADLINE: Finding New Paths for Ph.D.'s in the Humanities

BYLINE: DENISE K. MAGNER

People have talked for years about the dreary career prospects of Ph.D.'s in the humanities. Robert Weisbuch is actually doing something about it.

An English professor turned foundation leader, Mr. Weisbuch is on a mission to rescue the humanities by broadening job opportunities for Ph.D.'s both within and beyond the academy.

Since taking over as president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, in August 1997, he has moved the organization into the spotlight.

Its new grant programs to expand career options for Ph.D.'s are modest in scale -- like the foundation's $ 3.8-million endowment and $ 12-million annual operating budget. But Mr. Weisbuch hopes that the impact of the effort will far exceed the investment....

Not surprisingly, professors who have urged Ph.D.'s to look for work beyond academe's overcrowded job market are keen on the foundation's effort and on Mr. Weisbuch's leadership. "He's a shot in the arm," says Elaine C. Showalter, a professor of English at Princeton University, whose enthusiasm for non-academic hiring incited the wrath of many a graduate student during her tenure last year as president of the Modern Language Association. ...


The Chronicle of Higher Education
Copyright 1999 The Chronicle of Higher Education
April 16, 1999

HEADLINE: Hollywood in Love
BYLINE: MARTIN HARRIES

The day after the world watched Gwyneth Paltrow's tears, The New York Times reported a whole series of guesses about why Shakespeare in Love, rather than one of those big, important movies about the last just war, had won the Academy Award for best picture.

One speculation strikes me as on the right track. An unnamed executive from DreamWorks, the studio that produced Saving Private Ryan, speculated that "Shakespeare may have triumphed because the biggest block of academy voters are actors, and the film is a tribute to acting and theater." ...

Martin Harries is an assistant professor of English at Princeton University.


The Dallas Morning News
Copyright 1999 The Dallas Morning News
April 16, 1999

HEADLINE: 4 books on Plano history published

SOURCE: Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News

BYLINE: Sherry Jacobson

Did you know that the first settlers in the Plano area in 1841 were under attack by local Indian tribes for the next three years?

Did you know that children were not required to go to school in Plano until 1916, when the state legislature mandated six-month school terms for those ages 8 to 14?

Did you know it was a favorite Halloween prank in the 1920s for local boys to drop paper bags filled with flour on unsuspecting commuters on the old Interurban line?

Such historical tidbits may not be fodder for cocktail party chatter, but they are tantalizing nuggets mined from four new books published this month about Plano.

The volumes will join a growing collection of books that document Plano's history from its earliest days as a cotton-growing prairie town to its current status as a sprawling suburban city. ...

Already, there has been heavy interest in a slender book called The One Room School in Collin County, Texas by Heather M. Brown, who was an intern last summer at the Farmstead Museum. The book grew out of her assignment to research early educational efforts in the Plano area.

"It was supposed to be an academic study, but we enjoyed reading it so much that everybody wanted to make a copy," Mr. Peters recalled of the panel of local historians who reviewed the first draft. "It generated enough interest that people began suggesting we publish it."

Ms. Brown, who will graduate in June from Princeton University, spent 15 weeks on the project, but most of her time went to interviewing people who had attended one-room school houses in the Plano area...


THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Copyright 1999 Orange County Register
April 16, 1999 Friday

HEADLINE: HEALTH & SCIENCE BRIEFLY

Study: Altered drug kills resistant bacteria

Scientists said Thursday that they may have found a way to outwit drug-resistant bacteria by slightly modifying antibiotics already on the market.

They said slight changes to the structure of vancomycin, which is considered the drug of last resort against the toughest bacteria, made the drug superefficient. It killed normal bacteria even more quickly than usual and also finished off bugs that normally resist vancomycin.

Their method could offer a quick way to design antibiotics to overcome resistant bacteria, Daniel Kahne and colleagues at Princeton Universityin Princeton, New Jersey, and a team at Merck esearch Laboratories in Rahway, New Jersey, wrote in a report in the journal Science.


Sacramento Bee
Copyright 1999 McClatchy Newspapers, Inc.
April 16, 1999

HEADLINE: BUSH ATTRACTS TOP TALENT -- BUT MUST STILL PROVE HE DESERVES IT
BYLINE: Morton Kondracke

DATELINE: AUSTIN, Texas

As the attendance list at Texas Gov. George W. Bush's latest foreign policy confab attests, he has not -- as widely reported -- banned his father's former advisers from his inner circle.

To impress conservatives, Bush political aides have put it out that the foreign policy team is "Reagan, not Bush," but in fact it's both -- and some of the best of both.

Five of the eight experts who briefed the governor on Europe, the Balkans, Russia and China for three hours on Tuesday served in his father's administration. Two served only in the Reagan administration, and two were in both.

Regardless of prior service, what characterizes the group are brains, experience and a tough attitude toward foreign adversaries. And also, loyalty to Gov. Bush. Those invited to brief him are required to endorse him and not advise any other candidate. ...

Since December, when the policy briefings began, Bush has held sessions on defense, taxes, the budget, Social Security and Medicare, and fleshing out the content for his idea of "compassionate conservatism."

That session includes brainy social philosophers such as retired Professor James Wilson of UCLA and John DiIulio Jr. of Princeton University.

Subjects on the future schedule include education, the environment, weapons of mass destruction, "the new economy" and health care. ...

Morton Kondracke is executive editor of Roll Call, a newspaper that reports on Capitol Hill. This opinion is distributed by the Newspaper Enterprise Association.


St. Petersburg Times
Copyright 1999 Times Publishing Company
April 16, 1999, Friday

HEADLINE: TGH president changes course
BYLINE: DAVID KARP

DATELINE: TAMPA

Hospital chief Bruce Siegel says indigent care is no longer the top item in Tampa General's mission.

When Bruce Siegel campaigned to take Tampa General Hospital private three years ago, he made the same statement so many times it could have been his mantra.

At community meetings, hospital board sessions and in interviews, Siegel promised that if the county's only public hospital went private, its commitment to the poor would remain its top priority.

But this week, when questioned under oath, Siegel said just the opposite. The president of Tampa General said that TGH's top priority is not caring for the poor.

Siegel made the statement during a deposition Tuesday to prepare for two lawsuits brought against Tampa General by the St. Petersburg Times and the Tampa Tribune. The lawsuits seek to open Tampa General's records and meetings to the public. Tampa General closed its meetings and records after a private corporation took over the public hospital in 1997. ...

Other times, Siegel, who has an undergraduate degree from Princeton Universityand a medical degree from Cornell University, could not comprehend simple words. ...


 Star Tribune (Minneapolis, MN)
Copyright 1999 Star Tribune
April 16, 1999, Friday

Q - Columnist George Will appears to recommend the use of military power with little hesitation. Has he served in the military? Dale McLachlan, Bloomington

A - No. The Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist is a former professor of political philosophy, according to Current Biography. The son of Frederick and Louise Will was born into an academic environment in 1941 in

Champaign, Ill. The avid baseball fan honed his knowledge of the sport as sports editor at Hartford's Trinity College, and later became that university's newspaper editor. While there he considered himself a liberal, and served as the cochairman of Trinity Students for Kennedy in 1960. But after enrolling at Oxford University in England, he moved right on the political spectrum. Reflecting on those days, he said, "I became a quite thoroughly ideological capitalist." In 1964 he earned a Ph.D. in political science at Princeton University. Will taught political science until 1970, and then worked for Sen. Gordon Allott of Colorado. A stint as an editor at the National Review led in 1973 to his current position at the Washington Post.


University Wire
|Copyright 1999 Daily Princetonian via U-Wire

April 16, 1999

HEADLINE: Gift from Princeton U. alum endows new Irish studies committee
BYLINE: By Emily Bliss, Daily Princetonian
SOURCE: Princeton U.
DATELINE: Princeton, N.J.

If the ghosts of James Joyce and William Butler Yeats ever wander through Princeton University's gothic archways and turreted halls, they will finally have a home away from Ireland.

Pat Durkin '60 recently gave the University more than $ 200,000 to launch the Fund for Irish Studies -- a name particularly appropriate since the abbreviation, FIS, means "vision" in Gaelic.

Durkin, who is of Irish descent, said he had wanted to contribute to the 250th Anniversary Campaign and the Irish studies fund seemed like the most attractive option. "I match[ed] my money with my interest," he said.

According to The Committee for Irish Studies at Princeton, "The Fund for Irish Studies has the modest ambition of affording all Princeton students a wider and deeper sense of the languages, literatures, drama, visual arts, history, politics and economics of Ireland." ...


Asheville Citizen-Times (Asheville, NC)
Copyright 1999 Multimedia Publishing of North Carolina, Inc.
April 15, 1999, Thursday

HEADLINE: JAMIE CLARKE SERVED THE MOUNTAINS WITH DIGNITY AND GRACE/ PUBLIC

DISCOURSE, CITIZENS LOSERS AT FAIRVIEW FARCE

Jamie Clarke was "to the manner born," as Shakespeare's Hamlet said of himself. Moreover, he was able to walk among kings, "nor lose the common touch," as Rudyard Kipling wrote.

Jamie Clarke died on Tuesday after a long life devoted to his family, his faith and to the people of Western North Carolina and the nation. Clarke, with his degree from Princeton University, could have succeeded in business or any

number of professions. But he chose to raise cattle and apples and, always with the help of his wife Elspeth, to devote himself to public service. ...


The Associated Press
April 15, 1999, Thursday

HEADLINE: For now, 'Sharon' galaxy the oldest, most distant object ever detected
BYLINE: JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA, AP Science Writer

It is the oldest, most distant object ever detected - a galaxy full of new stars, 13 billion light-years from Earth. Its discoverers have dubbed it "Sharon."

The galaxy found by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope lies near the edge of the universe. Its presence was detected by its faint ultraviolet light, which is invisible to conventional telescopes.

Paradoxically, the oldest known galaxy - named after the sister of one of its discoverers - appears young to us.

That's because the deeper astronomers look into space, the further back in time they are looking. It takes so long for light traveling through space to reach Earth that astronomers scanning the edges of the universe are seeing objects as they were billions of years ago. ...

In December, Princeton Universityresearchers detected the most distant quasar known. But the distance given, about 13 billion light-years away, was only a rough estimate and not as precise as the SUNY finding, which has been

accepted by other astronomers as the most distant so far. Last May, a University of Hawaii team using the Keck telescope discovered a galaxy 12.3 billion light-years away. ...


Morning Star (Wilmington, NC)
Copyright 1999 Wilmington Star-News, Inc.
April 15, 1999, Thursday

HEADLINE: STATE BRIEFS: JAMES CLARKE
Ex-congressman dies of cancer

FAIRVIEW - Former U.S. Rep. James McClure Clarke, who served three terms in Congress in the 1980s, died at home of prostate cancer. He was 81.

A Vermont native and graduate of Princeton University, Mr. Clarke had collapsed in his home's courtyard Tuesday after working in his vegetable garden, his daughter, Annie Ager, said Wednesday.

He was elected to the state House in 1976 and the state Senate in 1980.


USA TODAY
Copyright 1999 Gannett Company, Inc.
April 15, 1999, Thursday

HEADLINE: White House doesn't require an Ivy League education, but . . .
BYLINE: Michael Medved

Al Gore's fanciful recollections of a rustic boyhood, learning "to clear land with a double-bladed ax," in a recent interview with The Des Moines Register only focused fresh attention on his actual background as a lifelong preppie who attended exclusive St. Albans School for Boys in Washington, D.C., before going to Harvard University.

Gore's delusional view of himself as an agro-American may make him unique among presidential candidates, but his elite educational credentials most certainly do not. Many of the major contenders earned blue-chip diplomas from the same prestigious schools. ...

Meanwhile, both Steve Forbes and Bill Bradley are Princeton Universitymen.

In view of this concentration of candidates, one might well ask whether alumni of Yale, Harvard and Princeton dominate America's political life in much the same way they did in the early years of this Republic. The answer is a resounding no: These three schools are actually far more dominant today.

Among our first 18 presidents, only John Adams and John Quincy Adams went to Harvard, and James Madison attended Princeton. The others had no connection with the eight Ivy League schools, and seven never attended college at all. Today, on the other hand, three of our past five presidents (Gerald Ford, George Bush and Bill Clinton) earned degrees from Yale. ...


The Washington Times
Copyright 1999 News World Communications, Inc.

April 15, 1999, Thursday

HEADLINE: EC nominee looks to enact changes; Hopes rise he can steady the helm
BYLINE: Nicholas Kralev; SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
DATELINE: NEW YORK

NEW YORK - While European leaders ponder the continent's worst humanitarian crisis since World War II, the nominee for European Commission president has concerns other than the Kosovo disaster.

Since leaders of the European Union designated Italy's Romano Prodi to succeed Jacques Santer as president of the scandal-torn executive body March 24, Mr. Prodi has been trying to identify the problems of the European institutions and to outline the necessary reforms.

Out of the spotlight, with all eyes on Kosovo, where the NATO air strikes started the day he was nominated, Mr. Prodi has been working quietly to build his political credibility outside his country. He announced he will run for the

European Parliament in the June elections and give up his seat when the Parliament elects him EC president. ...

After the newly established European Central Bank, in a bid to stimulate economic growth, slashed interest rates by half of a percentage point last week, analysts were optimistic about the future of the European economies.

They even say that there shouldn't be worries over the euro's weak performance since its birth in January.

"A weak euro is good for Europe in a sense that it helps their exports," said Kathleen McNamara, professor of international affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. "I worry less about interest rates and inflation and more about unemployment and growth." ...


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