Princeton in the News

May 27 to June 2, 1999

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ABC NEWS
SHOW: ABC WORLD NEWS THIS MORNING (6:30 am ET)
JUNE 2, 1999

HEADLINE: MORNING BUSINESS REPORT
BYLINE: ANDERSON COOPER, BERTHA COOMBS

Things at Princeton University's graduation were definitely not normal yesterday. First Thomas Schmidt gave the salutatory speech, but all in Latin except the very last sentence. In English he said, "Will you marry me, Anastacia Rohrman?" The answer -- yes.


Agence France Presse
Copyright 1999 Agence France Presse
June 02, 1999

HEADLINE: The key players of Tiananmen, ten years on
DATELINE: BEIJING, June 2

China called in the army to crush six weeks of pro-democracy demonstrations on June 4, 1989, sending many protest leaders fleeing from the country and jailing others, while the top state leadership remained largely unchanged.

Here is an update on where some of the key players are today:

STUDENTS …

CHAI LING: 'Commander in Chief' of the hunger strikers on the square, Chai fled to the US where she studied at Princeton University. She now runs a private business consultancy in the Boston area.


Asbury Park Press (Neptune, NJ.)
Copyright 1999 Asbury Park Press, Inc.
June 2, 1999, Wednesday

HEADLINE: KUDOS

Fighting the good fight Father of girl who beat the disease earns American Cancer Society national award
BY: ELLIOTT DENMAN/STAFF WRITER

EIGHTEEN years ago, 6-year-old Julie Spero of Rumson fought a successful battle against cancer.

Thanks to surgery and chemotherapy, a rare nerve tumor was beaten back and the youngster was able to get on with her life.

At the battle's end, the Spero family did a lot more than count its collective blessings.

They poured new energy into the ongoing war against the disease and have served as dedicated volunteers for the American Cancer Society.

Stephen Spero, Julie's dad, was recently presented the St. George National Award by the American Cancer Society, the society's highest honor available to a volunteer on the state level. …

"Forty percent of all funds raised go to cancer research," he said.

"They're sent out from the national office in Atlanta," he said. "Sixteen Nobel laureates around the U.S. have worked on sponsored research projects.

"And a lot of the grants go to New Jersey. Princeton University, Rutgers University and the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry all are involved. …


The Associated Press
June 2, 1999, Wednesday

DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.

A lovesick Princeton University student slipped a very personal message into the end of his commencement address delivered in Latin.

The words, "Will you marry me, Anastacia Rohrman?" were the only ones spoken in English during Thomas Wickham Schmidt's salutatory speech Tuesday. The rest was in Latin.

Ms. Rohrman said yes. Or, more accurately, she held up a sign that a friend of Schmidt's had slipped her with the word "YES!" written on it.

"When he proposed, the friend slipped the sign out and handed it to her. She was completely overcome and held up the sign," university spokeswoman Mary Caffrey said.

There was apparently no sign saying "NO!"

There was no immediate word on a wedding date for the two 22-year-olds.

NOTE: This news item appeared in newspapers throughout the United States.


The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
June 2, 1999, Wednesday

HEADLINE: Astronomers discover planetlike objects adrift in space
BYLINE: By The Associated Press

Astronomers using a New Mexico telescope have discovered two orbs adrift in space, each too small to burn like a star and probably too large to be called a planet.

The so-called methane brown dwarfs - more massive than Jupiter - might be as common as the stars within 30 light years of Earth, the scientists said. Light travels about 6 trillion miles a year in space.

Astronomers David Golimowski of Johns Hopkins University and Xiaohui Fan of Princeton University announced their discoveries during this week's meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Chicago.

The discoveries this spring demonstrate the power of the New Mexico-based Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Golimowski said.

The Sloan, at Apache Point Observatory in the mountains overlooking Alamogordo, is in the first year of a five-year project to map the sky above the northern hemisphere in unprecedented detail. …

Fan discovered the first of the methane dwarfs by accident while looking for the telltale signs of quasars -- luminous, starlike objects emitting superbright light at the edge of the known universe.

The faint red light from the methane dwarfs drew his attention because it looked similar to the light expected from a quasar.

But when he began looking closely at the data, he realized the object had important differences that meant it must be a nearby object, tiny and faint.

Scientists had expected objects like methane dwarfs might exist in space. …


National Post
(formerly The Financial Post)
Copyright 1999 Financial Post from National Post
June 2, 1999 Wednesday

HEADLINE: Microsoft technology head to take leave of absence
DATELINE: REDMOND, Wash.

REDMOND, Wash. - Microsoft Corp. said Nathan Myhrvold, its chief technology officer, will take a leave starting July 1 to pursue endeavors including a search for dinosaur remains. Mr. Myhrvold, 39, will continue to consult with Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman, on strategy. Rick Rashid, vice president of research, will be in charge of all basic research, the company said. Mr. Myhrvold, who studied quantum physics with Stephen Hawking and holds a doctorate from Princeton University, joined Microsoft in 1986 when it acquired a company he founded. Mr. Myhrvold's interests range from theoretical physics to French cooking to auto racing.


NBC News Transcripts
Copyright 1999 National Broadcasting Co. Inc.
SHOW: TODAY (7:00 AM ET)
June 2, 1999, Wednesday

HEADLINE: THOMAS WICKHAM SCHMIDT AND ANASTACIA ROHRMAN TALK ABOUT UNIQUE MARRIAGE PROPOSAL SCHMIDT MADE WHILE GIVING HIS SALUTATORY ADDRESS AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

ANCHORS: MATT LAUER; KATIE COURIC
MATT LAUER, co-host:

Thinking of creative ways to make a marriage proposal is something that's always in style. Thomas Wickham Schmidt, this year, salutatorian at Princeton University came up with a proposal during his commencement address Tuesday that was truly classic.

Mr. THOMAS WICKHAM SCHMIDT: (Latin spoken) Anastacia Rohrman, I'd like to ask you to marry me.

(Latin spoken)

LAUER: Thomas Wickham Schmidt, good morning and welcome to you and your new fiancee, Anastacia Rohrman. Welcome to the both of you.

Mr. SCHMIDT: Good morning.

LAUER: Where did you come up with the idea to do this?

Mr. SCHMIDT: Well, I had always been trying to think of a creative way to propose. And when I heard I was Latin salutatorian, I thought, 'This is it, this is it. This is my one chance in my life to do something that's really, really neat, real unique.' …

LAUER: When do you--when do you plan on getting married?

Ms. ROHRMAN: We haven't set a date yet.

Mr. SCHMIDT: We haven't set a date yet.

LAUER: And do you know where?

Mr. SCHMIDT: Maybe the chapel.

Ms. ROHRMAN: Maybe. We haven't...

LAUER: At Princeton University?

Ms. ROHRMAN: We haven't really talked about it. …


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
June 2, 1999, Wednesday

HEADLINE: Princeton Puzzle: Where Have Jewish Students Gone?
BYLINE: By KAREN W. ARENSON
DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.

As a high school student 50 years ago, Stanley Katz thought Princeton University was paradise, a place inhabited by pipe-smoking scholars with patches on their elbows and mustaches. "I said, 'Katz, that's you.' "

But as he learned more about Princeton, it dawned on him "that this was the last place in the Ivy League -- except maybe Dartmouth -- that was for me," he said. "It became clear to me that if not anti-Semitic, it wasn't congenial tto Jews." He went to Harvard.

Today Mr. Katz is a Princeton professor and president-elect of its Center for Jewish Life, and the university is a far more welcoming place. The president, the provost and the dean of the college are Jewish. So are many of the faculty members. Professor Katz's center is a lively place, with a large kosher kitchen and a stream of events, from casino nights and swing dances to Talmud classes and Friday night services.

So how can it be, Mr. Katz and other Jews on campus are asking, that Princeton's Jewish enrollment has fallen by nearly half since the early 1980's -- to about 10 percent, or about 450 undergraduates, from a high of 18 percent? Why do other Ivy League campuses -- Harvard, YYale, Columbia, Penn -- manage to keep Jewish populations of at least a quarter and in some cases more than a third? (The figures, drawn from surveys by the University of California at Los Angeles that ask first-year college students their religious preferences, are considered rough estimates.)

The decline in Jewish enrollment at Princeton is not new: the surveys suggest that it reached the present level in the early 90's. And the figures closely track a nationwide pattern; the percentage of college students who identify themselves as Jews has declined steadily over the last two decades.

But in April, a series of front-page articles in The Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper, called attention to the decline and touched off a campuswide debate. …

"Maybe Princeton is labeled as a school Jews don't go to, but that's not true," said Todd S. Rich, a junior economics major from East Brunswick who is president of the Center for Jewish Life. "We're thriving."

The center has even set up a task force to consider what it might do "to counter this negative image," said Princeton's rabbi, James S. Diamond. "The reality is that the quality of Jewish life here is probably as good as anywhere in the country," he said. …


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
June 2, 1999, Wednesday

HEADLINE: Commencements; Princeton University

PRINCETON, N.J., June 1 -- The adage that commencement marks both a beginning and an end rings as true as wedding bells for Thomas W. Schmidt and Anasstacia M. Rohrman.

Mr. Schmidt, Princeton's class of '99 salutatorian (that's runner-up to valedictorian), proposed marriage during his speech today at the university's 252d commencement ceremonies. Ms. Rohrman accepted.

"I was trying to think of something creative to do," said Mr. Schmidt, 22, of Alexandria, Va., a classics major. "Originally, my plan was to propose in Latin, but my friend said I better do it in English, because she wouldn't understand."

A friend of Mr. Schmidt's in the audience handed Ms. Rohrman a cardboard sign that would signal her reply. But like any good lawyer, Mr. Schmidt had left nothing to chance. "Both sides of the sign said yes," he said later. Ms. Rohrman said she was "pleasantly surprised" by the public proposal. …

At the ceremony, which was held on the lawn outside Nassau Hall, 1,172 students received bachelor's degrees and 634 received master's degrees or doctorates. Following tradition, the main speaker was Princeton's president, Harold T. Shapiro, who told the new graduates that there was "no substitute for thoughtful judgments," even when life's pace is increasingly accelerated by technology.

Among the recipients of honorary degrees were Kofi Annan, the Secretary General of the United Nations; Oscar Arias Sanchez, the former president of Costa Rica and a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and Gordon Parks, the photographer and film director.


PR Newswire
Copyright 1999 PR Newswire Association, Inc.
June 2, 1999, Wednesday

DISTRIBUTION: TO BUSINESS, ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL EDITORS

HEADLINE: Research Funding Request is Approved for Pure Energy's New 'Alternative Fuel' P-Series Says L. L. Knickerbocker; University of Louisville to Receive $500,000 to Conduct Production Research

DATELINE: LAKE FOREST, Calif., June 2

The L. L. Knickerbocker Co., Inc. (Nasdaq: KNIC) today announced that Pure Energy Corporation (PEC), a bio-based alternative fuel company in which it holds a substantial equity interest, announced that the Senate Appropriations Committee approved a $500,000 request for the University of Louisville to conduct research on production systems for its alternative fuel known as "P-Series."

P-Series motor fuel, which is made largely from renewable resources and is essentially sulfur-free, was approved last month as an "Alternative Fuel" by the Department of Energy under regulatory authority of the Energy Policy Act of 1992 (EPACT). Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) submitted the request as part of the Energy and Water Appropriations bill, which must still be approved by the full senate. …

P-Series is the first competitive, environmentally responsible fuel made from domestic materials that is practical, high performance choice for today's vehicles. The high-octane, substantially non-petroleum fuel is designed to operate in flexible fuel vehicles that are on the roads today, and of which hundreds of thousands are being produced each year by auto makers. …

Pure energy holds the exclusive worldwide license to manufacture and distribute P-Series. In May of 1999, the Department of Energy approved P-Series as an "Alternative Fuel" under the Energy Policy Act of 1992, clearing the way for the new fuel to become an attractive and widely available alternative fuel. P-Series was patented by Princeton University (U.S. Patent No. 5697987) in December 1997.


The Record (Bergen County, NJ)
Copyright 1999 Bergen Record Corp.
June 2, 1999; WEDNESDAY

HEADLINE: WILL YOU MARRY ME?
SOURCE: Wire services

Princeton University graduate Anastacia Rohrman of St. Paul, Minn., holding up a sign accepting a marriage proposal during Tuesday's commencement. Thomas Schmidt of Alexandria, Va., proposed in English during his salutatory speech, which is traditionally given all in Latin.

GRAPHIC: ASSOCIATED PRESS PHOTO - Princeton University graduate Anastacia Rohrman of St. Paul, Minn., holding up a sign accepting a marriage proposal during Tuesday's commencement. Thomas Schmidt of Alexandria, Va., proposed in English during his salutatory speech, which is traditionally given all in Latin.


The Richmond Times Dispatch
Copyright 1999 The Richmond Times Dispatch
June 2, 1999, Wednesday

HEADLINE: .. . AND THE GOVERNMENT TRACKS OUR "DEFECTS" IN ITS DATABASE

BYLINE: Robert Holland

National databases to track the rearing and education of American children are becoming common. But that does not mean they should be accepted uncritically.

Amazingly, with practically no dissent, Congress enacted a law last year that dangles $70 million in front of states to get their cooperation in setting up a registry of infants with birth defects.

The states are supposed to identity through birth certificates, hospital records - and "such other sources" as the Secretary of Health and Human Services deems necessary - all children born with defects, then designate them by race and gender, and finally enter them in a government database through which they may be tracked at least the first five years of their lives.

All that raises the spectre of eventual government research-driven efforts to intervene with genetic testing, and to implement mandatory abortions, and possibly even infanticide to produce a more perfect human species. …

And are we that many steps from the abyss? Consider Princeton University's recent hiring of Professor Peter Singer to teach in a tenured chair in its Center for Human Values. In his book, Practical Ethics, Singer wrote that "killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all." Specifically writing about hemophiliac infants, Singer opined that "when the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of a happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second." …


The Seattle Times
Copyright 1999 The Seattle Times Company
June 02, 1999, Wednesday

HEADLINE: DAILY BRIEFING

Upbeat

A Princeton University student slipped a personal message into his commencement address delivered in Latin. "Will you marry me, Anastacia Rohrman?" were the only words spoken in English during Thomas Wickham Schmidt's speech yesterday. Rohrman said yes.


The Washington Times
Copyright 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
June 2, 1999, Wednesday, Final Edition

HEADLINE: Debate and prove pro-infanticide professor wrong, but don't silence him

Steve Forbes is right in his vehement criticism of Professor Peter Singer's utilitarian advocacy of infanticide as a means of achieving greater happiness for society.

It would be a mistake, however, for Mr. Forbes to withdraw financial support from Princeton University in an effort to force the rescindment of Mr. Singer's appointment ("Stop sending cash and Princeton will listen," Letters, May 24).

Such an effort would represent a silencing of opinions that would be detrimental to both students and Mr. Forbes' cause.

In his book "On Liberty," John Stuart Mill offers a defense of the free expression of opinions that Mr. Forbes should keep in mind.

Mill writes that suppression even of "wrong" opinions "robs the human race," for "they lose the clearer perception and livelier impression of the truth, produced by its collision with error."

We must realize that current issues such as abortion and euthanasia are political manifestations of a utilitarian trend that has emerged and that threatens the founding principles of our country.

As Princeton students inevitably debate and challenge Mr. Singer's utilitarianism, their appreciation for traditional standards of morality will only be strengthened, and they will become better future opponents of such policies.

PAUL QUINLAN, Tampa, Fla.


The Washington Post
Copyright 1999 The Washington Post
June 2, 1999, Wednesday

Alexandrian Proposes During Graduation

Tired of the status quo and not at all fearful of becoming persona non grata, a Princeton University student from Virginia slipped a marriage proposal into the end of a commencement address delivered in Latin yesterday.

"Will you marry me, Anastacia Rohrman?" were the only words spoken in English during Thomas Wickham Schmidt's salutatory speech.

She said yes. Or, more accurately, held up a sign that a friend of Schmidt's slipped her with the word "YES!" written on it.

And there was no caveat emptor. Rohrman eagerly waved the sign, university spokeswoman Mary Caffrey said.

Schmidt, 22, of Alexandria, received a bachelor of arts degree in classics. Rohrman, also 22, of St. Paul, Minn., received a bachelor of science degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering.


The Toronto Star
Copyright 1999 Toronto Star Newspapers, Ltd.
June 2, 1999, Wednesday

HEADLINE: WHITBY-AJAX REVEALS PROVINCIAL TRENDS

BYLINE: Joel Baglole

NDP candidate says her goal is to remove Tory Jim Flaherty from his seat.

In March, Betty Ann Craig sought the NDP nomination in the restructured riding of Oshawa, where she has lived for the past 20 years. She lost the nomination to labour workhorse Colleen Twomey.

However, John Redko and Gerry Topham of the New Democratic Party's Whitby-Ajax riding association were so impressed with the way Craig conducted herself that wintry night, they recruited her to seek the NDP nod in their riding, which borders Oshawa.

A month later, Craig was acclaimed the party's candidate in Whitby-Ajax.

''Not living in the riding of Whitby-Ajax is no handicap for me,'' said Craig, who lives and works in Oshawa. …

Tory Labour Minister Jim Flaherty is both popular and well known in the new riding of Whitby-Ajax.

Sixty-five per cent of Whitby-Ajax comprises Flaherty's old riding of Durham Centre. Another 30 per cent is made up of the old riding of Durham West and 5 per cent comes from the old Durham East. …

''But believe me, removing Jim Flaherty from his seat is the greatest service I can pay to the people of Whitby-Ajax, and the workers in this riding.'' …

Flaherty says the Conservative government has spent the past four years listening to everyone in Ontario.

''We're the only party that speaks for everyone,'' said Flaherty, who admits he has run into a lot of protesters on the campaign trail. ''But I mean everyone, not just special interest groups.''

Born and raised in Lachine, Que., Flaherty, 49, earned a bachelor of arts in sociology at Princeton University in New Jersey before moving to Toronto in 1970 and attending Osgoode law school. …


The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
June 1, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: Princeton grad proposes to St. Paul woman in salutatory speech

DATELINE: PRINCETON, N.J.

Tired of the status quo and not at all fearful of becoming persona non grata, a Princeton University student slipped a marriage proposal into the end of a commencement address delivered in Latin on Tuesday.

The words, "Will you marry me, Anastacia Rohrman?" were the only ones spoken in English during Thomas Wickham Schmidt's salutatory speech.

Rohrman of St. Paul, Minn., said yes. Or, more accurately, held up a sign that a friend of Schmidt's slipped her with the word "YES!" written on it.

And there was no caveat emptor here. Rohrman eagerly waved the sign, university spokeswoman Mary Caffrey said.

"He previously arranged with a friend who was sitting next to her in the audience to have him hide the sign under his gown," Caffrey said. "When he proposed, the friend slipped the sign out and handed it to her. She was completely overcome and held up the sign."

Schmidt, 22, of Alexandria, Va., received a bachelor of arts degree in classics. Rohrman, also 22, received a bachelor of science degree in mechanical and aerospace engineering.


The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
June 1, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: Astronomers discover planetlike objects adrift in space

BYLINE: By The Associated Press

Astronomers using a New Mexico telescope have discovered two orbs adrift in space, each too small to burn like a star and probably too large to be called a planet.

The so-called methane brown dwarfs - more massive than Jupiter - might be as common as the stars within 30 light years of Earth, the scientists said. Light travels about 6 trillion miles a year in space.

Astronomers David Golimowski of Johns Hopkins University and Xiaohui Fan of Princeton University announced their discoveries during this week's meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Chicago.

The discoveries this spring demonstrate the power of the New Mexico-based Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Golimowski said. …

The planetlike objects have methane in their atmospheres. Scientists estimate the objects are 10 to 70 times the mass of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system.

Fan discovered the first of the methane dwarfs by accident while looking for the telltale signs of quasars -- luminous, starlike objects emitting superbright light at the edge of the known universe.

The faint red light from the methane dwarfs drew his attention because it looked similar to the light expected from a quasar.

But when he began looking closely at the data, he realized the object had important differences that meant it must be a nearby object, tiny and faint. …


The Associated Press
State & Local Wire
June 1, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: Crombie Taylor, architect and design educator in Chicago and Los Angeles

DATELINE: LOS ANGELES

Crombie Taylor, an architect and preservationist who taught design at the University of Southern California for 23 years, has died at the age of 85.

Taylor died May 24 at his Santa Barbara home of congestive heart failure, USC reported. …

Born in Oakmont, Pa., Taylor earned architectural degrees at Penn State and Princeton University and then taught at Georgia Tech. In 1944, he began a decade of teaching and working with the Institute of Design in Chicago. He was acting director of the institute from 1951 to 1954, when he left to practice architecture.


Astronomy
Copyright 1999 Kalmbach Publishing Company
June 1, 1999

HEADLINE: COSMIC FLOOD; astronomers are collecting too much data to process
BYLINE: Begley, Sharon

Photons that arrive night after night as relentlessly as a swollen Mississippi are overwhelming astronomers with a deluge of data.

It's not that Susan McMahon wishes bad luck on any of her colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Nor is it that McMahon, manager of the planetary-data service at JPL, wasn't as eager as everyone else for the Galileo probe and orbiter to uncover Jupiter's secrets. But when a slew of radio commands failed to deploy Galileo's high-gain antenna in April 1991, McMahon couldn't stifle a little "Thank God!"

With data now arriving only via the low-gain antenna - at a significantly lower rate than it would have over the high-gain - McMahon's Planetary Data System can just about keep up with the incoming bytes. ...

She'd better think about it anyway. Astronomers are being buried in a deluge of data, a flood of photons that arrives night after night as relentlessly as the Mississippi overflowing its banks. Researchers are almost (or already, depending whom you ask) overwhelmed by it, missing nuggets of gold that wash past in a sea of junk or get buried forever in the muck. ...

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, for instance, which is using a new telescope at Apache Point, New Mexico, to map half the northern sky in five wavelengths from UV to the near infrared, will detect more than 200 million objects. It will create an archive of 40 terabytes, says astrophysicist and SDSS investigator Alexander Szalay of Johns Hopkins University. "Even before these big surveys, we have been just barely keeping our heads above water," says astrophysicist Robert Nichol of Carnegie Mellon University. "With the Sloan survey, the faucet is being opened and the deluge is starting." ...

How much are we talking about? Take OGLE, the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment. Begun in 1992 at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, and since 1996 using the dedicated Warsaw Telescope there, OGLE searches for the galaxy's dark matter by looking for microlensing events. ...

Taking data every night, says Bohdan Paczynski, the Princeton University astronomer who first proposed using lensing to spot dark matter, OGLE is collecting some 300 gigabytes per year. With a new detector coming on line late this year or early 2000, the rate will increase 16-fold, and OGLE will be swamped by 4 to 5 terabytes per year.

OGLE's collaborators aren't worried about storage - they've gone to digital linear tape, which stores 20 gigabytes per cartridge. The problem is access. "We try to put our data - processed and with the errors cleaned out - in the public domain almost immediately," says Paczynski. "In the best case, that's about a year after we take it." The only practical way to share the data is over the Internet, but remember Szalay's calculation: 500 gigabytes would take a year to stream over a standard connection. ...

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey will contain at least 10 times more data, by the end of its planned five-year run, than any other sky catalog: 40 trillion bytes, enough to fill 20 million floppy disks. ....


Astronomy
Copyright 1999 Kalmbach Publishing Company
June 1, 1999

HEADLINE: COSMIC FLOOD; astronomers are collecting too much data to process

BYLINE: Begley, Sharon

Photons that arrive night after night as relentlessly as a swollen Mississippi are overwhelming astronomers with a deluge of data.

It's not that Susan McMahon wishes bad luck on any of her colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Nor is it that McMahon, manager of the planetary-data service at JPL, wasn't as eager as everyone else for the Galileo probe and orbiter to uncover Jupiter's secrets. But when a slew of radio commands failed to deploy Galileo's high-gain antenna in April 1991, McMahon couldn't stifle a little "Thank God!"

With data now arriving only via the low-gain antenna - at a significantly lower rate than it would have over the high-gain - McMahon's Planetary Data System can just about keep up with the incoming bytes. "If we'd had to deal with the data return from the high-gain antenna," says McMahon, "we couldn't have. As it is, we're hanging on by our fingernails. Once Cassini (the mission to Saturn) and Mars Global Surveyor start returning data, I don't even want to think about what's going to happen." …

To wrestle the data from the new sky surveys into submission, therefore, will take nothing less than "a paradigm shift," says Szalay. "We need new tools to properly digest, warehouse, query, and analyze our data. The key to the scientific enterprise of the future will be the ability to manage, index, access, interpret, and analyze these enormous data sets."

How much are we talking about? Take OGLE, the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment. Begun in 1992 at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, and since 1996 using the dedicated Warsaw Telescope there, OGLE searches for the galaxy's dark matter by looking for microlensing events. Gravitational lensing results from the ability of massive objects to bend light, kind of like a bowling ball positioned in the center of a trampoline deflects - downward - the path of a line of ants marching from one side to the other. Gravitational lensing bends light from a background galaxy into multiple paths, so the light reaching us is 10 or 100 times brighter. OGLE looks for such signatures. Taking data every night, says Bohdan Paczynski, the Princeton University astronomer who first proposed using lensing to spot dark matter, OGLE is collecting some 300 gigabytes per year. With a new detector coming on line late this year or early 2000, the rate will increase 16-fold, and OGLE will be swamped by 4 to 5 terabytes per year.

OGLE's collaborators aren't worried about storage - they've gone to digital linear tape, which stores 20 gigabytes per cartridge. The problem is access. "We try to put our data - processed and with the errors cleaned out - in the public domain almost immediately," says Paczynski. "In the best case, that's about a year after we take it." The only practical way to share the data is over the Internet, but remember Szalay's calculation: 500 gigabytes would take a year to stream over a standard connection. …


The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)
Copyright 1999 The Commercial Appeal
June 1, 1999, TUESDAY

HEADLINE: SKY HUNTS FIND NEW METHANE BROWN DWARFS

BYLINE: The New York Times News Service

DATELINE: CHICAGO

Ambitious new surveys of the sky have been surprising astronomers with mystifying discoveries, including a new category of numerous dim, reddish objects that scientists are calling methane brown dwarfs.

In some of the first observations by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Princeton University astronomers detected dots of light from two unusual objects.

Each was smaller than a star and larger than a planet. Their atmospheres were rich in methane. And they were on their own, far from any neighboring star.

The two objects were not like any previously observed brown dwarfs, the so-called failed stars that had long been theorized but were not observed until 1995. Brown dwarfs have too little mass to generate the nuclear fusion to shine like other stars and yet are too massive and hot to be planets. …


The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY.)
Copyright 1999 The Courier-Journal
June 1, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: Kentucky's big new employer; Amazon.com has made waves 1 but not profits

Online retailer sees bright future as it branches out

BYLINE: JOSEPH GERTH

Just four years after it began in a Seattle garage, Amazon.com has become a behemoth.

Huge sales. Huge growth. Huge losses.

It's the world's largest online purveyor of books, music and videos and is quickly branching out into other areas - toys, pharmaceuticals, gifts, pet supplies, groceries and, most recently, auctions.

And despite never having earned a dime, it has become a star on Wall Street.

Now, it's coming to Kentucky, where it's offering jobs and a future to people in two cities: Lexington, where jobs are plentiful, and Campbellsville, where they are not. …

Jeff Bezos, the company's founder and CEO, is a 1986 Princeton University honors graduate in electrical engineering and computer science. A financial magazine recently put his worth at more than $12 billion. …


International Herald Tribune
(Neuilly-sur-Seine, France)
Copyright 1999 International Herald Tribune
June 1, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: PEOPLE

BYLINE: International Herald Tribune

Queen Noor of Jordan said Sunday that her late husband, King Hussein, was a ''compassionate'' man who led by moral example and not by using his political powers.

''Yes, he was a king,'' she said of her husband, who died of cancer in February. ''But history is littered with ineffectual kings.'' The American- born queen spoke at graduation ceremonies at Brown University. The queen said that when the Middle East was divided by war, it was Hussein who opened the door to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace. The queen, a graduate of Princeton University, was to receive an honorary degree from Brown on Monday


THE KANSAS CITY STAR
Copyright 1999 The Kansas City Star Co.
June 1, 1999 Tuesday

HEADLINE: Early in game, Bradley plays well/ Democratic race narrows quickly

BYLINE: STEVE KRASKE, The Kansas City Star

MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa - The man with the perfect resume has himself in the perfect position.

Bill Bradley - Princeton graduate, Rhodes scholar, basketball star, author and three-term U.S. senator - is the insurgent candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. But now Bradley finds himself with only one person to beat - Vice President Al Gore.

"I think people will be surprised by how well he does in Iowa," said Jim Beres, a Gore backer who listened to Bradley speak for an hour Monday in a park shelter here in Marshalltown. "It's sort of a stealth candidacy." …

Bradley insists that he is the outsider candidate of "big ideas. " His outsider status, however, has been questioned because his 18-year Senate career ended only in 1997. And Bradley has been maddeningly vague about how he would take his "big ideas," such as improving race relations and reforming health care, and transform them into public policy.

"This isn't about intellectual abstractions. This isn't a senior thesis at Princeton," said Chicago-based Democratic consultant David Axelrod, who backs Gore. "This is about real life." …


Los Angeles Times
Copyright 1999 Times Mirror Company
June 1, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: OBITUARIES; CROMBIE TAYLOR; PRESERVATIONIST, USC DESIGN EDUCATOR

BYLINE: MYRNA OLIVER, TIMES STAFF WRITER

Crombie Taylor, innovative architect, design educator and preservationist who championed the historic work of late 19th century designer Louis H. Sullivan, has died. He was 85.

Taylor, who taught design at USC for 23 years, died May 24 at his Santa Barbara home of congestive heart failure, USC officials announced.

As an architect, Taylor designed several award-winning buildings in Chicago, including the Hull House Uptown Center. He was known as the first modern architect to value and use Tiffany glass and Oriental carpets in spare, open, unadorned interiors. He also used 18th century and early 19th century furniture in those sleek interiors, a technique that became widely imitated. …

Born in Oakmont, Pa., Taylor earned architectural degrees at Penn State and Princeton University and began his career teaching at Georgia Tech. In 1944, he began a decade of teaching and working with the fabled Institute of Design in Chicago, furthering the European Bauhaus school of modern architecture and design. …


National Post
Copyright 1999 Financial Post from National Post
June 1, 1999 Tuesday

HEADLINE: Dissident now Internet entrepreneur

BYLINE: Leslie Gevirtz

DATELINE: CAMBRIDGE, Mass.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - It's a long journey from Tiananmen Square to Harvard Square and along the way, one of the pro-democracy protest's leaders has emerged as a U.S.-based Internet entrepreneur.

Chai Ling's slight figure, in shorts and tee-shirt, was seen in the last days of the 'Beijing spring', encouraging demonstrators through a megaphone just a few days before the army crackdown around Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989.

Today, her slim frame is dressed in a black designer suit.

Just as she was at the leading edge of the student movement, she is now at the cutting edge of technology working with 18 employees from an office near Harvard Square.

Ms. Ling heads her own Internet firm, Janzabar. It is, she explains, a transliteration of the Chinese for the phrase best and brightest. …

The idea for Janzabar came partly from her experiences in Beijing, Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School and Harvard Business School.

'Beijing was beautiful. The whole campus is very romantic,' she said. Princeton 'is a wonderful college for undergraduates, but it's a bit lonely for graduate students. It was isolating.' …


NBC News Transcripts
Copyright 1999 National Broadcasting Co. Inc.

SHOWS: SUNRISE and TODAY
June 1, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: NATIONAL ARCHIVES RELEASES DOCUMENTS TODAY WHICH REVEAL JFK'S CASKET WHICH WAS USED TO BRING PRESIDENT'S BODY TO WASHINGTON WAS DROPPED INTO ATLANTIC OCEAN

PETE WILLIAMS reporting:

When the body of President Kennedy was brought back to Washington in 1963 after the assassination in Dallas, it was transported in a bronze casket. But when the president was buried at Arlington National Cemetery, the body was in a different casket of hand-polished mahogany. So what happened to the other coffin? Documents to be released today by the National Archives in Washington provide some answers. Long-lost records reveal that the bronze casket was loaded onto a military cargo plane, flown out over the Atlantic Ocean and dropped into the water. Officials say it was disposed of because, on the flight from Dallas, it had been damaged. A handle was knocked off. And the Kennedy family chose the mahogany casket as more suitable for burial. Nonetheless, some experts on the assassination say it was deplorable to drop the bronze casket into the sea.

Mr. DAVID LIFTON (Assassination Historian): I think it should not have been disposed of at all. And the way it was disposed of is only going to create additional confusion and mystery in this case because that casket was evidence.

WILLIAMS: But many who served on the board that reviewed assassination records say the casket itself was an insignificant piece of the puzzle. Even so, one board member says dumping it into the ocean gives a minor piece of evidence an air of mystery.

Mr. WILLIAM JOYCE (Princeton University): It will give aid and comfort to those who see conspiracies surrounding the assassination. And it's probably an unnecessary consequence. …


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
June 1, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: For Good Health, It Helps To Be Rich and Important

BYLINE: By ERICA GOODE

Doctors usually evaluate patients' vulnerability to serious disease by inquiring about risk factors like cigarette smoking, obesity, hypertension and high cholesterol.

But they might be better off asking how much money those patients make, how many years they spent in school and where they stand relative to others in their offices and communities.

Scientists have known for decades that poverty translates into higher rates of illness and mortality. But an explosion of research is demonstrating that social class -- as measured not just by income but also by education and other markers of relative status -- is one of the most powerful predictors of health, more powerful than genetics, exposure to carcinogens, even smoking. …

But race and to some extent sex still have an impact on health that is independent of social class. The gap in infant mortality rates between blacks and whites, for example, actually increases with higher social status. And being black or female discounts some of the advantages afforded by education: white men accrue health advantages with every additional year of schooling they receive. But black men and women, though they also show gains, show them only through high school, according to an analysis of Federal data by Dr. Adler and Dr. Burton Singer of Princeton University's Office of Population Research. White women, the researchers found, continue to gain in health status through college, but unlike white men, do not receive the gains in health bestowed by post-graduate education. …


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
June 1, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: Astronomers Detect New Category of Elusive 'Brown Dwarfs'

BYLINE: By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

DATELINE: CHICAGO, May 31

Ambitious new surveys of the sky are surprising astronomers with mystifying discoveries in recent weeks, including an entirely new cosmic category of dim, reddish objects that scientists are calling "methane brown dwarfs."

The discoveries, announced here today at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, were described as strong evidence that the faint brown dwarfs, though elusive, may represent a significant population of the universe. Astronomers speculated that these objects may well be as numerous as the stars.

In some of the first observations by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, a project to map a broad swath of the heavens, astronomers detected dots of light from two unusual objects. Each was smaller than a star and larger than a planet. Their atmospheres were rich in methane. And they were on their own, far from any neighboring star.

The two objects were unlike any previously observed brown dwarfs, the so-called failed stars that had long been theorized but had not been observed until 1995. Brown dwarfs have too little mass to generate the nuclear fusion to shine like other stars and yet are too massive and hot to be a planets. The only other such object with traces of methane, known as Gliese 229B, was detected orbiting a normal star. …

The first observations of the new methane brown dwarfs were made this spring by astronomers at Princeton University, using the Sloan Survey's new telescope at Apache Point, N. M. Dr. Michael Strauss and a graduate student, Xiaohui Fan, were searching for objects of unusual color.

"The object we observed was the reddest object we have found thus far in 400 square degrees of observing," Dr. Strauss said. …


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
June 1, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: Paid Notice: Deaths JAMES K. WATKINS JR.

WATKINS-James K. Jr. Of Darien, CT on May 24, 1999. Husband of the late Irene Taylor. Father of James K. III and J. Randolph Watkins. Brother of George H., John B. & Margaret B. Watkins. Memorial Service will be held at St. Luke's Episcopal Church, Darien, CT on Wednesday, June 2, 1999 at 11:00 AM. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to: Princeton University, P.O. Box 46, Princeton, NJ 08540 or St. Luke's Episcopal Church, Book of Remembrance, Box 3128, Darien, CT. 06820.


Newsday (New York, NY)
Copyright 1999 Newsday, Inc.
June 1, 1999, Tuesday

HEADLINE: LETTERS / THE END DOES NOT JUSTIFY THESE MEANS

BYLINE: Msgr. Daniel Hamilton, Donald V. Paone

The National Bioethics Advisory Commission will recommend that our government begin to fund research on human embryos, saying that the moral evil in destroying human embryos is outweighed by the social good expected from this research "Embryo Study Gets a Boost," May 25 .

A key principle for all moral behavior is that one may never do evil that good may come of it. The end does not justify the means. It is a fact that the human embryo is a unique member of the human species, containing everything necessary for development through all stages of human life.

If it is morally acceptable to destroy the human being in the first stage of his or her existence, then why not, also, as bioethicist Peter Singer of Princeton University holds, the infant? The difference, after all, is not in kind, but only in degree of development.

Perhaps it's just a matter of our getting used to this idea of destroying inchoate human beings for the good of the society as a whole. Maybe we just need to get used to applying the principle: the end justifies the means.

Msgr. Daniel Hamilton Lindenhurst

The National Bioethics Advisory Commission is about to recommend that Congress reverse itself and not prohibit research on human embryos. This despite strong sentiment in Congress and the nation that the human embryo possesses a special moral status.

The justification, according to Harold T. Shapiro, chairman of the commission, is that the obligation to provide for the future health of the people outweighs the "symbolic moral obligation we have to the embryo." It is generally accepted in the scientific community that research on embryonic stem cells or on the embryo itself could lead to possible cures of a number of diseases.

However, there is other research just as promising not involving the embryo. …

Donald V. Paone Malverne


The Record (Bergen County, NJ)
Copyright 1999 Bergen Record Corp.
June 1, 1999; TUESDAY

HEADLINE: TEACHER HONORED FOR GIVING LIFE LESSONS

BYLINE: DON STANCAVISH, Staff Writer

DATELINE: TEANECK

As a middle school science teacher, Theodora Lacey, has the not-so-easy job of getting teenagers interested in the rudiments of biology, chemistry, and physics.

"My personal elation,"she says,"comes from looking beneath the sour face, the dreamy eyes, the squirming bodies, the beauty queens, the know-it-alls, the loners, and the ideal students, wondering what was behind all of these expressions, perhaps a second Einstein, Benjamin Banneker, Bill Gates, Martin Luther King." That gift of finding the potential in all her students has earned Lacey the honor of being chosen by Princeton University as a 1999 Distinguished Secondary School Teacher. She is one of four in New Jersey to receive the award.

A teacher in Teaneck since 1969, Lacey will participate in Princeton's commencement today when she accepts the award, which Princeton has given annually since 1959. Lacey will receive $5,000. An additional $2,500 will go to her school. …


TechWeb News
Copyright 1999 CMP Media, Inc.
June 1, 1999

HEADLINE: Microsoft CTO: I Was Not Pushed

BYLINE: Stuart Glascock , Computer Reseller News

Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold confirms that he is taking some time away from the software giant, but he denies a report that he is being forced out by president Steve Ballmer.

In a telephone interview Tuesday with Computer Reseller News, Myhrvold said he fully expects to return toMicrosoft after his leave, and he called a Time magazine article dated June 7 "patently false."

"It's garbage," Myhrvold said of the weekly's assertion that he was being forced out. "There isn't a factual thing in it." …

Myhrvold had other ideas for announcing his plans before Time magazine's report triggered a quick response. Officials at Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft rushed a press release on Tuesday, saying that Myhrvold would be taking some time to pursue scientific interests, including joining an expedition this summer to hunt for dinosaur remains in eastern Montana. …

Observers credit Myhrvold, who holds a Ph.D. in theoretical mathematical physics from Princeton University, with recruiting top researchers from academia to a corporate setting.

"He was really instrumental in convincing a lot of the people who now work at Microsoft to consider it," Davis said. "He painted a very compelling picture for people who met with him and found that Microsoft was populated by a lot of very smart people, not just in research, but in development groups." …


TEXAS MONTHLY
Copyright 1999 TEXAS MONTHLY, INC.
June, 1999

HEADLINE: Go East, Young Man

BYLINE: by Helen Thorpe

HIGHLIGHT: Child of privilege? Sure, but he left Andover and Yale as a regular guy.

WHEN TENTH GRADER GEORGE W. BUSH arrived at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in the fall of 1961, he discovered that winter was cold, the trees looked funny, the days were short, and there were no girls at all. There were, however, top students from all over the country. "We were in way over our heads in a foreign land," recalls Clay Johnson, a friend from Fort Worth who is now the governor's appointments secretary. "We found we had to struggle just to catch up with everybody else." …

In the fall of his senior year Bush had his second brush with the authorities. He traveled to Princeton University for the latest installment in the schools' football rivalry. Yale had not won a game against Princeton for many years, but that day, the Bulldogs managed to trounce the Tigers on their home turf. "I was leaving the field, and when I looked back, George was standing in the middle of the crossbars, helping to bring down the goalposts," says classmate H. Rey Stroube III. The Princeton campus police quizzed the Yalies involved but brought no charges. "I was escorted to the campus police place, and the guy said, 'Leave town,'" the governor said. "So I was once in Princeton, New Jersey, and haven't been back since." …


Business Week
Copyright 1999 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
May 31, 1999

HEADLINE: CAN YOU REALLY BEAT THE MARKET?

BYLINE: By Peter Coy in New York

HIGHLIGHT: A new book reopens the debate over whether it's possible to predict the movement of stock prices

Andrew W. Lo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology remembers the excitement of reading A Random Walk Down Wall Street when he was in high school in the 1970s. In it, Princeton University economist Burton G. Malkiel made the case that stock prices are unpredictable -- as random as the lurching of a drunk. Says Lo: ''That was one of the first books that got me interested in economics. It was an eye-opener.''

An eye-opener, maybe, but hardly a guiding light. Today, as a finance professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, Lo is working to prove that Malkiel and his fellow random-walkers are wrong -- that shrewd investors can beat the market after all. He and collaborator A. Craig MacKinlay of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School have even written a book called A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street. It was published in March -- two months before Malkiel came out with a thoroughly revised seventh edition of his own book, which has sold more than 500,000 copies. …


Business Week
Copyright 1999 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
May 31, 1999

HEADLINE: Q&A: MEG WHITMAN: eBay

HIGHLIGHT: She says the online auction site takes Amazon seriously, but so far she hasn't felt threatened

Margaret C. Whitman, CEO of eBay Inc., is Silicon Valley's newest star and one of the only women to head a leading E-commerce site. After tenures at Hasbro and Disney, Whitman presides over an upstart that has seen its cult-like following explode and its market value surpass even that of Amazon.com. Recently, she spoke with BUSINESS WEEK's Silicon Valley Bureau Chief Linda Himelstein.

What is eBay's strategy and will it change going forward?

We started with commerce, and what grew out of that was community. So we think of ourselves as sort of a community-commerce model. And what we've basically done is put in place a venue where people can be successful dealing and communicating with one another. But we also want to expand the kinds of merchandise sold on eBay. The Butterfield & Butterfield [Auctioneers Corp.] acquisition helps us accelerate our entry into the premium segment. And then we also want to get into the kind of merchandise that is not necessarily shippable because it's not economic to ship or you want to see it before you buy it. So cars, boats, RVs, things like that. We're also looking at the kind of merchants who sell on eBay. In the beginning, this was strictly about individuals doing business with one another. What happened is that some of those individuals actually became small dealers. They quit their day jobs to sell full time on eBay. Now, we have a lot of merchants who keep their storefronts but in fact their most profitable distribution channel is eBay. …

Resume: MARGARET C. WHITMAN

BORN August 4, 1956.

EDUCATION B.A., economics, Princeton University. MBA, Harvard University.


Business Week
Copyright 1999 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
May 31, 1999

HEADLINE: Q&A: JEFF BEZOS: amazon.com

HIGHLIGHT: The pioneer of online selling says that eBay doesn't have to lose for Amazon to win

Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeffrey P. Bezos is the poster executive for consumer E-commerce. In a recent interview with BUSINESS WEEK Senior Correspondent Robert D. Hof, Bezos declined to take on auction rival eBay directly. But he talked about why he thinks Amazon's mix of retail, auctions, and referrals to other merchants will provide the greatest appeal -- and ultimately the most profits.

How is Amazon.com's business model evolving as you've added auctions and referrals to other merchants?

Our vision is that we want to be the world's most customer-centric company. In many ways, we're a one-trick pony. It's just a good trick. And that is we focus incessantly on trying to get the customer experience right.

Within that, we want to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online. You realize very quickly that you can't sell everything people might want directly. So instead you need to do that in partnership with thousands and indeed millions of third-party sellers in different ways. To try to do that alone, in strictly a traditional retailing model, isn't practical. …

Resume: JEFFREY P. BEZOS
BORN January 12, 1964, Albuquerque, N.M.

FORMATIVE CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCE Summers on the family's Texas cattle ranch, developing a love of science from his grandfather, a retired manager for the Atomic Energy Commission.

EDUCATION B.S., electrical engineering and computer science, Princeton University. Valedictorian and president, Miami's Palmetto High School.


The Des Moines Register
Copyright 1999 The Des Moines Register, Inc.
May 31, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: Dateline Iowa

New Miss Iowa receives crown

The Register's Iowa News Service

Davenport, Ia. -Jennifer Caudle, 21, was crowned Miss Iowa 1999 Saturday at the Adler Theater in Davenport.

Caudle, the daughter of Davenport educators, recently graduated from Princeton University in New Jersey. After competing in the Miss America competition and serving as Miss Iowa, she plans to attend medical school. …


The Houston Chronicle
Copyright 1999 The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company
May 31, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: JFK's first casket dumped at sea, records show

SOURCE: Houston Chronicle News Services

DATELINE: WASHINGTON

WASHINGTON - A bronze casket used to transport President Kennedy's body from Dallas to Washington was dropped from a military plane into the ocean two years after he was killed, according to assassination documents.

The National Archives will release 43 pages of papers dealing with the casket this week. They will be part of the latest cache of documents relating to the assassination of President Kennedy that the government is releasing.

The release will include 50,000 pages of CIA documents relating to Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, as well as intelligence files on Cuba and other matters.

"Apparently, the casket is in 9,000 feet of water in the Atlantic Ocean," said Kermit L. Hall, a member of the now-defunct Assassination Records Review Board. …

Lifton said one of the last times the casket may have been seen was when author William Manchester had it uncrated in a government warehouse as part of research on the assassination and noticed that it had been damaged.

But William L. Joyce, associate university librarian for rare books and special collections at Princeton University, said new information about the casket's disposal is no big deal.

Joyce, who also was a member of the assassination review board, acknowledged that the disposal story presented another "untidy" detail surrounding the assassination.

"Whether that confers additional meaning on the event is, in my view, very doubtful," he said. "I can almost hear the conspiracy buffs. I just don't think we can get all knotted up over this."


The Houston Chronicle
Copyright 1999 The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company
May 31, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: A royal address PHOTO CAPTION

Queen Noor, wife of the late King Hussein of Jordan, talks with Brown University President E. Gordon Gee before addressing graduating students at the university in Providence, R.I., Sunday. Noor, who is an advocate for the banning of land mines, told the crowd that disarmament is a top priority for peace. A graduate of Princeton University in 1974, the queen will receive an honorary degree from Brown.


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
May 31, 1999, Monday

NAME: Standish F. Medina Jr.

HEADLINE: Standish F. Medina Jr., 58, Lawyer Who Often Avoided Trial

BYLINE: By ANTHONY RAMIREZ

Standish Forde Medina Jr., a leading trial lawyer who made a name for himself by resolving disputes so that clients could avoid trial, died on Saturday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering hospital in Manhattan. Mr. Medina, who had residences in Manhattan, Westhampton, N.Y., and Washington, Conn., was 58.

The cause was leukemia, according to his widow, Kathryn Bach Medina, division vice president and executive editor at Random House. …

Among colleagues, Mr. Medina was known for bringing order to a years-long complex of insurance company cases in which policyholders accused New York Life, Phoenix, Transamerica and Hancock of unfair sales practices. Mr. Medina, representing the insurance companies, helped design a process that brought automatic relief for some policyholders and accelerated arbitration for others, thus avoiding lengthy litigation for all parties.

The law ran in the family. Mr. Medina was the grandson of Harold R. Medina, a Federal judge for more than three decades, who was best known for his handling of the trial of 11 Communist leaders in the 1940's. Like his grandfather; uncle, Harold Jr., and father, Standish, Mr. Medina graduated from Princeton University and Columbia Law School. … 


The Richmond Times Dispatch
Copyright 1999 The Richmond Times Dispatch
May 31, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: CELEBRATE HALF A SQUID IN THE DUPLEX!

BYLINE: Ray McAllister

There's a dynamite little celebration coming up for the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown, the quadricentennial. It's not till 2007, but we should definitely make plans to be there.

You know they'll party like it's 1999.

Jamestown's quadricentennial. Has a nice ring, doesn't it? Dignified and important.

The Latin does it, I think. You could talk about warts in Latin, and it would sound dignified. …

Sure enough. Reading used "Bicenquinquagenary Celebration" for its 250th anniversary last year.

So did Virginia's own Washington and Lee University. And Princeton University had used it in 1996.

So, "Bicenquinquagenary Celebration" or "Sesquiduplecentennial"? …


U.S. News & World Report
Copyright 1999 U.S. News & World Report
May 31, 1999

HEADLINE: John Demjanjuk; Charlie Trie; Shirley Egan and Georgette Smith; David E. Kelley

Talk about unblocked. David E. Kelley, already a television-writing phenomenon with three series airing during the current season, will add a fourth show to his personal prime-time lineup for the fall. Snoops, an hourlong drama about detectives in Los Angeles, will join his Ally McBeal, The Practice, and Chicago Hope. Kelley, 42, who has his name on more shows than any other Hollywood writer, has been known to pen a season's worth of at least 13 episodes himself--almost unheard of in a business where teams write most shows. The Maine native and former practicing lawyer is an avid hockey player; he was captain of Princeton University's team. In addition to his prodigious television output, Kelley has two movies coming out this year. And he still manages to make it home most nights to join his wife, actress Michelle Pfeiffer, and their two children for dinner.


U.S. News & World Report
Copyright 1999 U.S. News & World Report
May 31, 1999

HEADLINE: The promise and peril of stem cell research

SERIES: Ethics

BYLINE: By Jennifer Couzin

HIGHLIGHT: Scientists confront thorny ethical issues;

In a cramped laboratory at Boston Children's Hospital, Evan Snyder toils over petri dishes packed with cells that the pediatric neurologist hopes will one day help youngsters with brain disorders. The cells, harvested from the brain of an aborted fetus, are neural stem cells, the building blocks of the human brain. The potential of such cells to battle diseases like diabetes and generate new organs is nothing short of wondrous.

But for all their promise, stem cells present researchers like Snyder with a complex moral dilemma. Because these cells are most abundant in the earliest stages of development--namely in embryos and fetuses--questions over their use have abounded since the first human embryonic stem cells were isolated last year. While a presidentially appointed panel investigates the ethics of stem cell research, the National Institutes of Health is drafting its own guidelines. Harold Shapiro, chair of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission and president of Princeton University, points to the key question: "When does biological material achieve the moral status of a person?" …


The Washington Times
Copyright 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
May 31, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: Questioning federally funded human embryo research

The National Bioethics Advisory Commission has recommended that Congress rescind bans on federally funded research conducted on human embryos ("Clinton's advisers propose limited embryo research," May 24). It is notable that the chairman of this committee is Harold T. Shapiro, president of Princeton University. Your readers may recall that Princeton lately has been at the center of another controversy, having to do with the appointment of Peter Singer, a proponent of abortion, infanticide and euthanasia (among other unsavory activities) to the Ira W. DeCamp Professorship of Bioethics at the university's ironically named Center for Human Values.

Mr. Shapiro has been a staunch defender of this hire. Not surprisingly, he resorted to the same utilitarian casuistry employed by Mr. Singer to explain his committee's proposal: "These are very difficult judgments to make, but it's a balancing act. We have moral obligations to the future health and welfare of people, and we need to balance these with, at the very least, the symbolic moral obligation we have to the embryo." Compare his language to that of Mr. Singer in his 1993 book "Practical Ethics," in which he claims that ethical thinking consists of weighing "the interests of all those affected by my decision" and adopting "the course of action which has the best consequences, on balance, for all affected" (Page 12).

The fact that the same principles being employed by presidential appointees to recommend legislation permitting taxpayer-subsidized laboratory experiments with human embryos are being used by sophists in our universities who would warrant the killing of unwanted newborns should give one pause.

Let those who are inclined to believe the advice of Mr. Shapiro and his colleagues to be harmless and even beneficial beware of all the evil their counsel ultimately entails: To accept this panel's proposal is to commit to an ethical "philosophy" the perniciousness of which the likes of Mr. Singer ably illustrate.

RONNY L. FRITZ

Silver Spring


The Washington Times
Copyright 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
May 31, 1999, Monday

HEADLINE: Christ Church preacher eyes local growth

BYLINE: THE WASHINGTON TIMES

When the Holy Spirit movement began growing in early 20th century America, the effect was felt not only on Azusa Street in Los Angeles but at one Washington home meeting in 1907.

Thus began Christ Church of Washington, organized in 1922.

It met for its first five years on Pennsylvania Avenue above a tire store. As an early congregation with the Assemblies of God, Christ Church in time erected its own sanctuary - designed by its architect-pastor in 1965 - on Massachusetts Avenue NW.

The church, which founded WCTN radio, a Gospel station, is now an independent charismatic church. It drew huge crowds in the 1970s when it hosted Tuesday night T.A.G. (Take and Give) meetings, which brought thousands of baby boomers into the charismatic renewal. This year, the 110-member congregation named the Rev. Jesse Owens as its new senior pastor.

A Zion Bible College graduate, Mr. Owens has helped develop charismatic congregations. He applies a model that had worked at a vacant Gothic church across from Princeton University, where in 1978 he built a vibrant congregation of 500 members.

Mr. Owens' wife, Kay, has been his co-minister and, after 41 years of marriage, they have four children and 11 grandchildren.


The Associated Press
State & Local Wire

May 30, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: Queen Noor of Jordan praises her late husband

DATELINE: PROVIDENCE, R.I.

Queen Noor of Jordan said on Sunday her late husband King Hussein was a "compassionate" man who led by moral example and not by using his political powers.

"Yes, he was a king," she said of her husband, who died of cancer in February.

"But history is littered with ineffectual kings."

The American-born Queen Noor made the comments while giving an address on the campus green of Brown University, one of many weekend graduation events at the Ivy League school. …

Queen Noor, a Princeton graduate, will be receiving an honorary degree from Brown on Monday.


The Dallas Morning News
Copyright 1999 The Dallas Morning News
May 30, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: Grad trying to find niche; Colleyville teen already tackled several careers

SOURCE: Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News

BYLINE: Kelly Ryan

DATELINE: COLLEYVILLE

COLLEYVILLE - At the age of 18, John Jannarone already has pursued careers in acting, medicine, environmental science and investment banking.

For the moment, investment banking is on the mind of Colleyville Heritage High's salutatorian. But his career goals could change, he warned, after a few semesters at Princeton University, where he will be this fall.

The one-time volunteer at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., said he now enjoys spending much of his time reading philosophy - namely, Nietzsche and Ayn Rand.

"I read philosophy on my own right now," he said, sitting in his family's Colleyville living room. "I've changed my direction, and I'm glad I did." …

Accolades came in many forms for John, especially this year. Recently, he was named to the Texas All-State Academic Team, which recognizes the top 20 seniors in the state. He's also a National Merit Commended Scholar, was enrolled this year in eight advanced-placement courses and received a $12,000 scholarship from Lockheed Martin.

John said for now, he enjoys living in the present instead of constantly looking to the future. He is excited, however, about the prospect of attending Princeton, meeting a roommate and taking classes in which students sit around with professors and discuss the meaning of life. …

Life right now is slowing down a bit after a long stint of DNA research John conducted on American Indians. When he was 15 and living in Rockville, Md., he called the National Institutes of Health to see if he could work there. Although skeptical at first, the researchers agreed to let John start out doing clerical work in the office, although he was the youngest person to work for the institutes.

John said that work later allowed him to look over the shoulders of scientists, and later, to perform some of the research himself. …


The Jerusalem Post
Copyright 1999 The Jerusalem Post
May 30, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: The point where benign becomes malignant

BYLINE: Judy Siegel-Itzkovich

Judy Siegel-Itzkovich spoke to Prof. Arnold Levine, president of Manhattan's Rockefeller University, when he was here earlier this month to receive a prize for his groundbreaking work on the seminal p53 protein, which inhibits tumor development

Some of the most influential medical breakthroughs, such as penicillin, have come about by chance. There's no shame in this, as a researcher requires not only the intelligence to realize he has accidentally stumbled upon something big, but the persistence to prove its importance.

Prof. Arnold Levine, president of Manhattan's prestigious Rockefeller University, is an example of such a scientist.

Twenty years ago, he led a team that discovered the p53 protein, a molecule that inhibits tumor development, and whose disruption is associated with an estimated 55% of human cancers. Subsequently, the Brooklyn-born molecular biologist and his colleagues succeeded in isolating, cloning and characterizing the biological properties of the p53 tumor suppressor gene.

P53, which Levine named for the protein's molecular weight of 53,000 measurement units, is the subject of extensive research around the world, including groups here at the Lautenberg Center and the Weizmann Institute. In fact, an Israeli student of Levine's, Moshe Oren, cloned the p53 gene during the last week of his three-year stay in Levine's lab. Today, Oren is a Weizmann Institute professor and continues to work on the gene. …

Levine, who is on Weizmann's board and visits Israel annually, was here on a special trip earlier this month to receive the Rabbi Shai Shacknai Memorial Prize in Immunology and Cancer Research from the Lautenberg Center at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School. The prize was established by Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, the state where Levine - due to celebrate his 60th birthday in July - previously lived as head of the molecular biology department at Princeton University from 1984 to 1996. …


The Morning Call (Allentown)
Copyright 1999 The Morning Call, Inc.
May 30, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: APPEL CASE JUDGE LAUDED FOR INTEGRITY;

* WILLIAM YOHN JR.'S DECISION MAY MEAN NEW TRIAL FOR CONFESSED KILLER.

BYLINE: ELLIOT GROSSMAN; The Morning Call; Morning Call librarians Patrice Swartz and Dianne Knauss helped with research; for this story.

Angered that he might be forced to retry a triple murderer, Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli last week called a ruling by U.S. District Judge William Yohn Jr. an "outrage" and a "travesty of justice."

But among lawyers and judges, the man who made the decision in the Martin Appel case enjoys a reputation for fairness, honesty and thoroughness. And he is considered a judge who does not let his own political feelings influence his decisions.

"He has a lot of integrity. In my mind, it's unquestioned," said Colin Hannings, former chief public defender in Montgomery County, where Yohn served as a county judge. …

In a May 21 decision, Yohn vacated the conviction and sentence for Appel, who was facing the death penalty. In 1986, Appel pleaded guilty to the killings of three bank employees during a robbery at an East Allen Township bank branch. Accomplice Stanley Hertzog is serving a life sentence. …

****

Yohn, born New Year's Day 1935, distinguished himself at an early age. In 1953, he was class president and valedictorian at Pottstown High School.

He graduated from Yale Law School after earning Phi Betta Kappa distinction at Princeton University. …


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
May 30, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: ON THE MAP;

Same House, Different Lot: Princeton's Scrambled Buildings

BYLINE: By KAREN DeMASTERS

A photograph of Princeton from 100 years ago or more might at first glance resemble the town of today with its concentration of 18th- and 19th-century houses. But look closer, and it may seem that the buildings have been scrambled. That's because they have been: over the past 130 years, nearly 200 buildings there have been moved from one place to another, some more than once.

The Historical Society of Princeton last week opened an exhibition of more than 180 photographs, drawings, maps and newspaper cartoons showing the many moves. The exhibition, on view through next March at the Historical Society museum, Nassau Street and Vandeventer Avenue, is open free of charge from noon to 4 P.M. every day except Monday.

Susanne C. Hand, curator of the exhibition, talked about the borough's moving buildings.

Q. Why have so many buildings in Princeton been moved rather than torn down and replaced?

A. It is a combination of factors. Princeton University and the Princeton Theological Seminary are in the heart of the borough and are always expanding. Princeton University encouraged moving buildings by giving houses to people with the condition that they move them. At the same time, land along Nassau Street became more valuable as it was developed commercially or people wanted to make way for more stylish houses. …


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
May 30, 1999

HEADLINE: PRIVATE SECTOR;

From Brazil to Wall St. and Back

BYLINE: By SIMON ROMERO

DATELINE: RIO DE JANEIRO

THE United States has had only two central bank chiefs in the last two decades, but boom-and-bust Brazil has had 20, an average of one a year.

Now, three months into the term of the newest head of Brazil's central bank, Arminio Fraga Neto, a soft-spoken former hedge fund manager for the billionaire investor George Soros, Brazilians hope that the roller-coaster ride is smoothing out. They also hope that Mr. Fraga, like the United States' departing Treasury Secretary, Robert E. Rubin, can use his experience in the high echelons of finance to advance his government's goals.

"The market was in need of a respected trader, and Fraga filled this gap," said Fernao Bracher, a former president of the central bank who is now the head of Banco BBA Creditanstalt, an investment bank here.

But Mr. Fraga, who is 41, brings more than trading experience to his new post. While overseeing emerging-markets investments for Mr. Soros, he also taught part-time at Columbia University. Now, back in Brazil, he has been credited as the driving force in restoring Brazil's credibility with foreign investors in the wake of a currency crisis earlier this year. …

In fact, Mr. Fraga has kept a foot in both camps since receiving a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 1985. Before working for Mr. Soros, he was at Salomon Brothers and Banco Garantia, a leading Brazilian investment bank now owned by Credit Suisse First Boston. In 1984, he worked for the Federal Reserve's research division in Washington. …


Newsday (New York, NY)
Copyright 1999 Newsday, Inc.
May 30, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: SCHOOLS / CLOSE UP / GIFTED LONG BEACH STUDENTS GET THEIR WRITING ON COURSE

BYLINE: BY BETTY OMMERMAN. STAFF WRITER

A PUBLISHED writer teaching, nurturing and critiquing fledgling writers. Fledgling writers critiquing each other. That's the inspiration for 26 dedicated students who won a spot in Long Beach High School's "Talented Writers Program." The daily class is taught by Ellen Pickus, an English teacher whose poetry has appeared in various publications, including the "Long Island Quarterly." Students are selected in the eighth grade. "I go to the junior high and speak to students individually," Pickus said. "They submit samples and their English teacher inputs opinions about their work." The students creativity and dedication have resulted in publication of their work, as well as awards. …

Other award-winning students include seniors Aaron Gillego, whose article was published in "Writers of Passage," a teenagers literary journal; Amy Chihanek, who won a silver medal for non-fiction from the Empire State Scholastic Press Association and Christine Hoyt, who received the association's honorable mention for poetry. Jeffrey Wright, a senior, and Vanessa Riza, a junior, won honorable mentions in the annual writing contest sponsored by Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J. Jeffrey also won honorable mentions in this year's poetry contest of the Rockville Centre Guild for the Arts and last year's poetry contest sponsored by Princeton University. …


The Ottawa Citizen
Copyright 1999 Southam Inc.
May 30, 1999

HEADLINE: When Canada felt its literary Oates ...

BYLINE: Douglas Fetherling

It's insulting to anyone but a genre writer -- someone who cranks out romances or westerns, for instance -- to be called prolific. Serious writers are interested in craft, not athleticism, and each moves to the rhythms of his or her own metabolism. So let us just say that, considered as an author, Joyce Carol Oates has the metabolism of a hummingbird. In the next few weeks, when her novel Broke Heart Blues appears, Ms. Oates will have had three new books out in almost as many months. The other two are The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque, recently reviewed in the Citizen, and Starr Bright Will Be with You Shortly, by ''Joyce Carol Oates writing as Rosamond Smith,'' a device she uses for separating out her less-serious works of fiction. All of these Oateses are published by Penguin Books Canada.

Amid such productivity, then, it's easy to miss the paperback reissue of Greg Johnson's Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates (Penguin Books Canada; $22.99). This thoroughly workmanlike study, whose bibliography lists 136 books by Ms. Oates, has several strong attributes. Among them is a heavy reliance on the subject's diaries and letters. This technique gives us the immediacy of her voice. But Invisible Writer is hardly a lively study. I was especially disappointed in the way Mr. Johnson missed a great opportunity for passion and insight in dealing with the years Ms. Oates lived in Canada during the late '60s and early '70s. …


Scotland on Sunday
Copyright 1999 The Scotsman Publications Ltd.
May 30, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: TOMORROW'S GREEN FUEL WILL POWER TODAY'S CARS

BYLINE: By Peter Warren

THE US government has given its backing to the development of a cleaner vehicle fuel made from agricultural and paper waste as it races to improve its dismal pollution record.

And according to experts from Friends of the Earth, the P-Series fuel could be effectively produced in Scotland, which as well as its large oil reserves has ample forestry and agricultural waste from suitable crops such as oil seed rape. …

Produced to a formula devised by Dr Stephen Paul, an academic from Princeton University who chairs the US Alternative Fuels subcommittee, the P-Series fuel is likely to be one of the first alternatives to petrol able to take advantage of tough new US regulations. These require the car fleets of both state and federal government in the US to replace existing vehicles with ones capable of burning a range of alternative fuels. …


The Sunday Herald
Copyright 1999 Scottish Media Newspapers Limited
May 30, 1999

HEADLINE: Monumental

BYLINE: Words: David Stenhouse

He's the 68th most powerful person in Scotland and he wants to create a Scottish Mount Rushmore. What is it that drives Sandy Stoddart to value big classical public art over the idiosyncratic work of modern sculptors?

JOHNNIE Walker's head seems to have come off. He's leaning jauntily on a classical bust, its hair snaking out from under his arm, but his face, sans trademark top hat, is a few feet away, looking over the whole scene from a top shelf. His disembodied skull is jammed right next to a bust of James IV, a row of Ossianic warriors all fused together like a row of little girls and a tiny scarecrow of wire quickly twisted together out of a wardrobe of coat hangers. On the floor there's a large, clear square, like the space left when a painting comes down off the wallpaper. It's slightly fresher than the rest of the room, which is covered by a fine layer of monumental dust. A few days before it held an enormous statue of John Milton destined for the headquarters of Boots in Nottingham. The great English poet sat snugly next to an early prototype of John Witherspoon, the founder of Princeton University and the only Scottish signatory of the American Constitution. Witherspoon looks quietly pleased at the company he's keeping.

This crammed space looks like a graveyard for old statues. In fact, it's where they are born. Except for the telephone, perched in the far corner on top of a pile of yellowing newspapers, this could be mistaken for a sculptor's studio from the 1800s. And that confusion would please the artist who works here no end. …


Sunday Times (London)
Copyright 1999 Times Newspapers Limited
May 30, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: Eureka!

After eight years of painstaking calculation, astronomers have decided that the universe is a billion years younger than previously thought.

A more accurate calculation of its age - now thought to be about 12 billion years - is possible because of an increased understanding of a mathematical yardstick called the Hubble constant, which is used to assess the speed at which galaxies are moving away from each other, and so the speed at which the universe is expanding.

In separate research, scientists at Princeton University announced that galaxies are - as predicted - flying away from each other at an increasing rate. "This suggests the universe will keep expanding for ever, faster and faster," said Neta Bahcall, a cosmologist.


The Washington Times
Copyright 1999 News World Communications, Inc.
May 30, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: Pro-lifers gear up to guard ban on stem-cell research

BYLINE: Joyce Howard Price; THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The Senate Majority Leader's office says the chances are "nil" that a ban on federal funding of human embryo research will be lifted during this session, despite recommendations of a presidential panel.

"That's not going to happen," said John Czwartacki, spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Mississippi Republican.

But pro-lifers in the House are gearing up for what they believe could be a tough fight in that chamber to keep the 3-year-old funding ban in place.

It's a fight that will pit them against prestigious medical groups such as the American Cancer Society, the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation and the American Parkinson Disease Association, which are part of a new coalition that advocates federal support for research on human embryonic stem cells. Scientists say this research holds promise for treating - perhaps even curing - many life-threatening diseases. …

According to published reports, the presidentially appointed National Bioethics Advisory Commission is poised to recommend that the federal funding ban on human embryo research be repealed. Patricia Norris, the commission's spokeswoman, did not return repeated phone calls from The Washington Times. Neither did Harold T. Shapiro, the panel's chairman, who is president of Princeton University. …


The Washington Post
Copyright 1999 The Washington Post
May 30, 1999, Sunday

HEADLINE: Kennedy Files to Detail Casket Disposal; Damaged Coffin Dumped Off Eastern Shore; Release Includes CIA Data on Oswald

BYLINE: Michael E. Ruane, Washington Post Staff Writer

The National Archives will release this week the latest cache of documents relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, reportedly including details of the dumping at sea of the bronze casket in which his body was transported from Dallas to Washington.

The release also will include 50,000 pages of CIA documents relating to the presumed Kennedy assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, as well as intelligence files on Cuba and other matters.

It is the latest unveiling of information gathered in accordance with the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which urged government agencies to review their files for information that could be released or declassified that might shed light on the assassination.

Although the release will include CIA materials and data about Kennedy's 1960 presidential campaign, the details about the casket are likely to draw the closest scrutiny.

The 43 pages on the casket are to be made available Tuesday at the National Archives center in College Park.

The information will reveal the disposition of the casket, the archives said, which reportedly had a handle knocked off as it was being used to transport the president's body from Dallas, where he was killed Nov. 22, 1963, to Washington. …

David Lifton, the Los Angeles historian who long has speculated about irregularities in the investigation of the assassination, was fascinated by the report. …

Lifton said one of the last times the casket may have been seen was when author William Manchester had it uncrated in a government warehouse as part of research on the assassination and noted that it had been damaged.

But William L. Joyce, associate university librarian for rare books and special collections at Princeton University, said potential new information about the casket's disposal was not necessarily a big deal.

Joyce, who also was a member of the assassination review board, acknowledged that the disposal story presented another "untidy" detail surrounding the assassination.

"Whether that confers additional meaning on the event is, in my view, very doubtful," he said. "I can almost hear the conspiracy buffs. I just don't think we can get all knotted up over this." The damaged casket used to transport President John F. Kennedy to Washington, shown above at Andrews Air Force Base, was dumped at sea.


The Dallas Morning News
Copyright 1999 The Dallas Morning News
May 29, 1999, Saturday

HEADLINE: A Call for Conversion Is it time for Jews to woo people of other faiths

SOURCE: Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

BYLINE: Diane Winston

DATELINE: NEW YORK

NEW YORK -- When social scientist Gary Tobin looks around his dining table he sees the future of American Judaism.

Dr. Tobin's wife, stepchildren and adopted son are all Jews by choice, and he believes that his faith's future depends on persuading non-Jewish spouses, offspring of intermarriages, marginal Jews and gentile seekers to convert, too.

"This is a personal subject for me," Dr. Tobin told some 70 participants gathered last week at the Museum of Jewish Heritage for a conference on his new book, Opening the Gates: How Proactive Conversion Can Revitalize the Jewish Community (Jossey-Bass Publishers). "My son Jonah, my three stepchildren and my wife are the future of Judaism."

Conversion is a hot-button topic among Jews.

Traditional Judaism discourages converts, and Jews have been wary of raising gentile ire by appearing to steal sheep. Yet intermarriage, attrition and a low birth rate have kept the number of American Jews stable for the past 50 years while the population at large has doubled. …

Diane Winston is a fellow at the Center for Study of American Religion at Princeton University.


The Dallas Morning News
Copyright 1999 The Dallas Morning News
May 29, 1999

HEADLINE: Trinity senior praises parents for instilling desire to try his hardest;

Disciplined life assists Bedford teen in success

SOURCE: Staff Writer of The Dallas Morning News

BYLINE: Lesli Marcus Gillman

EULESS - When John Chao was 5, his parents decided he had too much time on his hands. So they rented him a violin for $30 a month and signed him up for lessons.

Now, 12 years of practice and four much more costly violins later, his mother, Nancy Chao, credits much of John's success to the instrument.

"I think the music was a great influence. It helps him relax and use his brain," she said.

To John, the 16-year-old Trinity High School salutatorian, the violin is just part of a life that is both extremely hectic and exceedingly normal. …

Although his family has been a constant source of encouragement, the first few years of school were something of a struggle for John. Although he was born in New Jersey - where his father earned a doctorate in aerospace engineering from Princeton University - his parents are from Taiwan and spoke to John only in Mandarin for his first few years. When he began school, teachers called home recommending special classes.

Just a few years later though, they called back recommending that he skip eighth grade. His mother said his math scores were especially strong. …


The Irish Times
Copyright 1999 The Irish Times
May 29, 1999

HEADLINE: Our selves and other animals

The Lives of Animals by J.M. Coetzee. Princeton. 127pp, (pounds) 11.95 in UK

BYLINE: By JOHN BANVILLE

In the midst of the worst violence Europe has known since 1945, the issue of animal rights may seem an irrelevance. While human beings still slaughter, rape and "ethnically cleanse" (a phrase that should never be used without the moral cordon of quotation marks), surely, we may say, it is a waste of intellectual energy to wrestle with the question of how we should behave towards animals. Yet it is possible to entertain Milan Kundera's contention that our mistreatment of animals, rather than our mistreatment of human beings, is what absolutely condemns us as a species.

J.M. Coetzee, one of the subtlest and most serious novelists at work today, was invited to deliver the 1997-98 Tanner Lectures at Princeton University, and The Lives of Animals is the result. Although the lectures normally consist of philosophical discourses followed by formal commentary and debate, Coetzee, to the mild consternation of his hosts and respondents, chose to frame his contribution in the form of two short fictions, "The Philosophers and the Animals", and "The Poets and the Animals", in which the eminent Australian novelist, Elizabeth Costello, arrives at Appleton College - obviously based on Princeton - to deliver the Gates Lectures. …


Lewiston Morning Tribune
Copyright 1999 Lewiston Morning Tribune
May 29, 1999, Saturday

HEADLINE: Idaho congressional delegation not sold on minimum wage hike; It would do more harm than good, they say

BYLINE: Michael R. Wickline

Idaho's all-Republican congressional delegation is united against another campaign by President Clinton, Democrats and some moderate Republicans in Congress to raise the federal minimum wage.

Three years ago, the Republican-controlled Congress voted to phase in a 90-cent hourly increase to $5.15 in the federal minimum wage in 1996 and 1997. …

But Michael DiNoto, an economics professor at the University of Idaho, says a 2-year-old study released by Princeton University found virtually no effects on employment from minimum wage increases over history.

"It caused a controversy in the economics profession."

DiNoto argues minimum wage increases tend to restore businesses to normal profit levels as long as inflation is steady. …


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
May 29, 1999, Saturday

HEADLINE: Robert F. Mozley, 82, Professor And an Expert on Arms Control

BYLINE: By WOLFGANG SAXON

Robert Fred Mozley, professor emeritus of physics at Stanford University and an expert on nuclear arms control, died on Monday at Stanford Hospital. He was 82 and lived in Menlo Park, Calif., and Southport Island, Me.

The cause was complications from surgery, the university said.

Dr. Mozley worked at the Stanford Linear Accelerator, where he did research in high-energy physics on a particle-tracking device he pioneered. The device, a streamer chamber, allows physicists to study subatomic events. …

After teaching and doing research at Princeton University, he joined the Stanford faculty in 1953, became a full professor in 1962 and retired in 1987. As a member of the Faculty Senate, he was among the first to sound the alarm over increasing academic reliance on Pentagon grants and official efforts to designate unclassified research as secret. …


The Washington Post
Copyright 1999 The Washington Post
May 29, 1999, Saturday

HEADLINE: Researcher Cuts the Link to Explorer; There was no separation anxiety for Shane Brooks and Microsoft's Internet browser

BYLINE: David Streitfeld, Washington Post Staff Writer

"I've lost total control," Microsoft Corp. Senior Vice President James E. Allchin exclaimed. "You can't do anything on this machine now."

He was demonstrating via videotape how dire it would be if the software maker were compelled to remove the Internet Explorer browser program from its Windows 98 operating system, as the government was demanding. The short film, played in court early this year as part of Microsoft's defense in its antitrust trial, showed an Explorer-stripped laptop doing everything short of blowing up.

That was the result reported by the world's largest software company, which employs thousands of the smartest techo-whizzes. Shane Brooks, a research fellow at the University of Maryland who fiddles with computers for fun, had a rather different experience.

Like millions of consumers, Brooks bought Windows 98. He generally liked it, but quickly grew frustrated with how sluggish it made his ancient Pentium 133 laptop. "It was like there was a large weight sitting on my computer's chest," he said.

So he reconfigured the program by stripping out Explorer. Unlike the experience the Microsoft executive described, his computer still worked.

In fact, Brooks said, it worked better. Removing Explorer made it faster and freed up precious memory, but still allowed use of the Internet browser that Microsoft is accused of trying to drive into extinction, Netscape. …

Brooks didn't pay much attention to the first stage of the anti-trust trial, and in fact said he was barely aware it was happening. He didn't hear about government witness Edward Felten, a Princeton University computer scientist who demonstrated in court a program he had written to remove Internet Explorer from Windows.

Unlike Brooks, Felten had special help in the form of access to the Windows source code. Nevertheless, Microsoft said his program slowed Windows and prevented non-Internet functions from working. To prove its point, the company made the video that showed a machine running the Felten program on the verge of self-destructing.

"My take is that the central question was whether the Internet Explorer could be removed without sacrificing the tiniest detail of the way the system works," Brooks said. "And Microsoft would argue no, and the government guys would argue yes. …


The Atlanta Journal and Constitution
Copyright 1999 The Atlanta Constitution
May 28, 1999, Friday

HEADLINE: CATCH THESE; A memorable music festival in Decatur

BYLINE: Judith Green, Staff

Once there were a couple of composers who lived in or about Decatur. They wanted some of their music played where friends and neighbors could hear it. Thus was born, eight years ago, the Decatur New Music Festival.

Under the leadership of Anne Richardson, flutist, composer and director of the Neighborhood Music Schools program at Georgia State University, the festival is held in conjunction with the Decatur Arts Festival over Memorial Day weekend. Richardson follows previous directors Van Stiefel, who's working on a doctorate in music at Princeton University, and James Oliverio, composer in residence at Georgia Tech. …


THE BALTIMORE SUN
Copyright 1999 The Baltimore Sun Company
May 28, 1999,Friday

Deaths Elsewhere

Sheldon Judson, 80, a Princeton University geosciences professor who co- wrote textbooks and researched Stone Age archaeological sites, died May 20 in Princeton, N.J., of pancreatic cancer.


The Boston Globe
Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company
May 28, 1999, Friday

HEADLINE: Academic rarity: Brown to include a study of values

BYLINE: By Kate Zernike, Globe Staff

Treading into a field that most schools have long considered far too mine-laden, Brown University will integrate the formal study of values into its famously unstructured undergraduate curriculum beginning next year.

Educators have been made wary of such programs by critics who ask whether schools can teach values, and if so, whose they will teach.

But Brown officials say that with the repetitive shocks of mass shootings in schools and a lack of respect for the nation's leaders, political concerns about teaching values have given way to a yearning among Americans for agreement on a core set of principles. …

Until now, most programs in values or ethics have been concentrated at the graduate level, and specific to certain fields - ethics in law, for example, or bioethics. Dartmouth has a program for ethics in engineering. The closest program to what Brown will offer is at Princeton, where the University Center for Human Values has offered freshman seminars on everything from computer privacy to political theory. …


The Columbus Dispatch
Copyright 1999 The Columbus Dispatch
May 28, 1999, Friday

HEADLINE: SEMINARY PRESIDENT PUSHES STUDENTS TO PROMOTE CHANGE

BYLINE: Dispatch Religion Reporter

Wall Street's fast pace wasn't what Obery M. Hendricks Jr. wanted; nor was an economic-development job in government.

So he entered the ministry and in 1997 accepted the presidency at Payne Theological Seminary. …

Hendricks worked as an investment executive at several Wall Street firms from 1977 to 1986 and for a year as economic development director for East Orange, N.J.

"Ultimately, it just didn't offer enough satisfaction. I needed more than a job. I needed to engage my energy in something I believed in," Hendricks said.

That's when he entered Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey, where he received a master's of divinity in 1989. He received a doctorate in religion from Princeton University in 1995. …


The Jerusalem Post
Copyright 1999 The Jerusalem Post
May 28, 1999, Friday

HEADLINE: A Genocide Denied

BYLINE: Marilyn Henry

HIGHLIGHT:

The 1915 wholesale massacre of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks remains a core experience of the Armenian nation, shaping the bonds between the newly independent state and the diaspora. 2 boxes at end of text.

With a series of events that began this week, the Hebrew University is commemorating 30 years of teaching Armenian studies in Jerusalem. The university program - offering language, literature, art and history courses - is virtually unrivaled outside of Armenia. It is all the more remarkable because Israeli governments have been ambivalent about the fundamental element in modern Armenian history - the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by the Turks in 1915.

Jerusalem has been cautious not to express any sentiment about the genocide for reasons that are both emotional and political. It worries that recognition of the Armenian massacre would invite comparisons and diminish the uniqueness of the Holocaust. More important, Israel fiercely protects its political and military alliance with Turkey, and fears that acknowledging the genocide from the last days of the Ottoman Empire would harm its relations with Ankara. …

While there is virtually zero tolerance for Holocaust denial, there is tacit acceptance of the denial of the Armenian genocide in part because "the Turks have managed to structure this debate so that people question whether this really happened," says Lipstadt, the authority on Holocaust denial. "I think it's outrageous."

She was referring to Turkey's biggest carrot, its financing of academic programs in the US, including endowed chairs at Harvard, Georgetown and Princeton universities. The Princeton endowment appears to have been especially embarrassing because the Turkish chair was occupied by Heath Lowry, who was exposed as the ghostwriter of Kandemir's letter. …


National Public Radio (NPR)
SHOW: TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY
May 28, 1999, Friday

HEADLINE: WENDY FREEDMAN AND NETA BAHCALL DISCUSS THE UNIVERSE AND HOW FAST IT IS EXPANDING

ANCHORS: IRA FLATOW

IRA FLATOW, host:

Welcome back to TALK OF THE NATION/SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Ira Flatow.

We're going to take you to the outer reaches of the universe now and you won't need to stand in line or get popcorn all over the floor either, so don't worry about that. Long ago, say about 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding. And ever since then, astronomers and astrophysicists have tried to pin down exactly how fast that expansion is taking place, because the answer to that has a lot to do with big, big questions like: How old the universe is and what's going to happen to it in the distant future, and--I mean, we're talking billions of years from now.

Well, this week a team of astronomers working on a project on the Hubble Space Telescope, the key project of Hubble, in fact, announced that after eight years they have the best estimate for that number to date. And that number we're talking about is called the Hubble Constant and it will help clear up a lot of mysteries about the universe. And for the rest of this hour, we're going to be talking about research into astrophysics and the Hubble Constant--the Hubble Space Telescope, same name, different kind of thing. And joining me now are Dr. Neta Bahcall, a professor of astronomy at Princeton University Observatory in Princeton, New Jersey. She's also one of the authors of a paper in Science magazine this week reviewing some of the most recent cosmological research. And she joins us from the Princeton campus. …

FLATOW: Dr. Bahcall, how confident are you in this new estimate of the age of the universe?

Dr. BAHCALL: Well, it seems to be quite a robust estimate was in the range that we just heard that Wendy was talking about. There are many different measurements now regarding the mass density of the universe and some suggestions about whether the universe may be accelerating or not. Combining it with the measure of the Hubble Constant, that we just heard from Wendy, really gives quite a robust estimate for what the age of the universe is based on the model which is ranging from about 12 billion years to about 14 or 15 billion years if there is this extra energy, that sort of anti-gravity force in the universe that pushes the expansion and accelerates it. And that age seems to be very consistent with the direct observations of the age of the oldest stars in the universe. So we...

FLATOW: Now you had a problem for a while--Didn't you?--where some galaxies seemed to be younger than the universe.

Dr. BAHCALL: Well, we...

FLATOW: Or older than the universe was for a while.

Dr. BAHCALL: Well, it was...

FLATOW: A little touch and go there.

Dr. BAHCALL: It was so reported, but as we just heard, the age of the universe, as determined from the Hubble Constant, always has to assume how much matter exists in the universe, how much does the universe weigh. If we have very little matter, then the age of the universe for a given Hubble Constant becomes longer. So if people take into account that factor, then it not really is there--there really has not been a serious problem.

Dr. FREEDMAN: And there have been...

Dr. BAHCALL: It's a problem only if the universe had much more matter, the so-called critical matter, that just about stops the expansion of the universe. …


National Public Radio (NPR)
SHOW: ALL THINGS CONSIDERED
May 28, 1999, Friday

HEADLINE: US AND NATO OFFICIALS UNWILLING TO ALIGN THEMSELVES WITH KOSOVO LIBERATION ARMY; OFFICIALS ARE PLEASED WITH REBEL ADVANCES

ANCHORS: ROBERT SIEGEL

REPORTERS: TOM GJELTEN

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

A senior intelligence officer for the Joint Chiefs of Staff reported yesterday that the KLA has tripled its ranks in the last two months. He said thousands of Kosovar Albanian men had joined the rebels, even as their families were being expelled from Kosovo. US officials say the KLA's growing strength is good news. But they reject suggestions that the United States and its NATO allies should join forces with the KLA rebels in their battle against the Serbs. NPR's Tom Gjelten has the story.

TOM GJELTEN reporting:

Officially, the United State and its NATO allies do not support the Kosovo Liberation Army. And yet, allied intelligence agencies closely monitor the progress KLA units are making in their ongoing battle against the Yugoslav army and Serbian police in Kosovo. And NATO military commanders sometimes plan their bombing strategy in Kosovo to help the KLA. …

GJELTEN: More than two dozen members of Congress agree, as do a growing number of analysts. If the purpose of the NATO operation in Kosovo is to force the Yugoslav army and Serbian police to withdraw and allow refugees to return home, they argue, why not help those willing to fight and die for that same objective? Michael Doyle is the director for the Center for International Studies at Princeton University.

Mr. MICHAEL DOYLE (Director, Center for International Studies): The agenda of the KLA, to the extent that it includes pushing the Serb forces out of Kosovo and the return of their own population, is one that NATO shares. We don't share their entire agenda, but we share that one. And we can provide some support for them as they attempt to break through on a larger scale into Kosovo, and operate against Serb army forces in that country. …


PR Newswire
Copyright 1999 PR Newswire Association, Inc
May 28, 1999, Friday

HEADLINE: William Clay Ford, Jr. To Be Honored By the American Jewish Committee

DATELINE: BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich., May 28

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) will present its 1999 National Human Relations Award to William Clay Ford, Jr., Chairman of Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F). Mr. Ford will be honored at a special dinner event at Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, on June 23, 1999 at 5:30 p.m.

The AJC's National Human Relations Award is presented annually to individuals who have attained a leadership role in industry or the professions, and who have contributed significantly to the greater community through civic involvement and philanthropic endeavors. …

Born in Detroit in 1957, Mr. Ford earned his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and his graduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 


The Boston Globe
Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company
May 27, 1999, Thursday

HEADLINE: Firm beliefs on fairness lead to old foe; McLaughlin targets race-based advancement; Profile in the news

BYLINE: By Thomas Farragher, Globe Staff

His courtroom challenges forced Boston schools to jettison decades-old, race-based admission policies; now, his new clients contend the Boston Police Department illegally promoted blacks at the expense of whites.

But Michael C. McLaughlin recoils at suggestions that he has become the region's hired legal gun of choice, the lawyer to call whenever the white majority feels under assault by institutional policies designed to help minorities.

"I am not some elitist," McLaughlin, 50, said yesterday in his 24th-floor downtown office overlooking the Boston Common. "That is about as far from the truth as anything can be."

To his critics, however, that label fits a man some see as a publicity-craving lawyer whose private law practice has further widened the edges of racial division. …

In 1995, the lawsuit he filed on behalf of his daughter forced him from his old law firm. He said partners there, including prominent black civil rights attorney Henry C. Owens, told him to get another attorney to handle the suit, or leave. He has maintained the firm didn't want to be associated with a challenge to affirmative action; the firm insists he failed to give them prior notice of the lawsuit.

"That shocked the hell out of me," said McLaughlin, who got his law degree from Boston University in 1982 after spending years coaching championship crew teams at Princeton University.

McLaughlin chuckles at images critics project of him: a wealthy lawyer intent on protecting the privileged. "I inherited not one cent and had to make my own way," he said. …


Business Wire
Copyright 1999 Business Wire, Inc.
May 27, 1999, Thursday

HEADLINE: Business Week: Princeton Beats Harvard as Most Selective School

DATELINE: NEW YORK

May 27, 1999--Hail to the new Ivy League champ of exclusivity! Harvard University, the perennial No. 1 in the hard-to-get-into category, has been supplanted by Princeton University, Business Week reports. Princeton accepted a record low 10.8% of the 14,874 high school seniors who applied for admission this fall.

Harvard sent "yes" letters to 11.3%. Last year, Harvard's acceptance rate was 12.3% vs. 13.1% at Princeton. Despite its high rejection rate, Harvard is aggressively marketing itself. In May, it sent out 50,000 letters to high school seniors with strong records, encouraging them to "consider Harvard." Some counselors say the university just wants to increase next year's applicant pool to reclaim the exclusivity crown from Princeton. …


The Capital (Annapolis, MD.)
Copyright 1999 Capital-Gazette Communications, Inc.
May 27, 1999, Thursday

HEADLINE: POLITICAL NOTES Bradley raises funds in Severna Park

EDITOR'S NOTE: Political Notes is a compilation of political news items that appears periodically.

Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Bradley swept through Anne Arundel County over the weekend, enriching his campaign coffers by $100,000 with the help of a Severna Park couple.

Charles and Patricia Baum held a $1,000-per-ticket fund-raiser for Mr. Bradley Sunday evening in their home.

"He was very warm, very personable," said Mr. Baum, chairman of the Morgan Group. Mr. Baum attended Princeton University with Mr. Bradley, a former U.S. senator from New Jersey. The two men also were in the same eating club, Princeton's version of a fraternity. Mr. Bradley's national campaign finance chairman also is a former roommate of Mr. Baum's. …


The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)
Copyright 1999 The Commercial Appeal
May 27, 1999

HEADLINE: THE PEOPLE'S CRUSADER; AGAINST ANY ODDS, BONNYMAN WIELDS THE LAW

BYLINE: Marta W. Aldrich The Associated Press

DATELINE: NASHVILLE

Gordon Bonnyman is everywhere, it seems. Or at least everywhere there is a cause for Tennessee's poorest, least, lowest or lost.

He's there at a court hearing on nursing home or prison conditions.

Or at a senior citizens rally pushing long-term care for the elderly.

There, too, at legislative reviews for foster children programs.

Once the state's best-known Legal Services lawyer, Bonnyman now represents society's downtrodden as head of the nonprofit Tennessee Justice Center, which offers free legal services to poor people in civil cases.

His client list includes felons, the mentally ill, Medicaid recipients, neglected children and others. …

At boarding school in Pennsylvania, he was heavily influenced by a Quaker-sponsored project painting homes in poor neighborhoods. He went on to Princeton, then University of Tennessee Law School.

While a rather mediocre law student, he started his legal career with a passionate belief in the law as a tool for social justice. He counted civil rights lawyer Thurgood Marshall among his heroes. …


The New York Times
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
May 27, 1999, Thursday

HEADLINE: Coming Era of High-Speed Net Access Is Here and Now on College Campuses

BYLINE: By LISA GUERNSEY

EVERY time Barry Mason, a sophomore at Columbia University, logged on to the Internet in his dormitory room this past year, he experienced what most home users still consider a luxury of the future: a high-speed Internet connection.

Now that he is at home, in Elizabeth City, N.J., for summer break and dealing with his parents' dial-up modem, Mr. Mason is realizing how nice it is to have a connection that is, in theory, almost 200 times as fast. "When I go home," Mr. Mason said, "I really miss it."

Thousands of other privileged college students are very likely to be having the same thoughts this summer. While most home users are still waiting for broadband access to the Internet through high-speed cable or phone lines, students in university dormitories are already living in the future, and their experiences offer a glimpse of the benefits and problems that may lie ahead for much of the rest of society. …

"If I were to suddenly lose my Internet connection, I probably would not be able to communicate," said Noemi Millan, a freshman at Princeton University. If students suddenly discovered that their Internet access had been taken away, she added, "there would probably be a riot."

Ms. Millan said she went on line to post information, images and poetry on her home page, to read E-mail, to stay on top of class deadlines, to download entertaining animated programs and to "find little factoids instead of schlepping all the way to the library." A few weeks ago, she placed her order for Mother's Day flowers on line instead of getting on the phone. …


Newsday (New York, NY)
Copyright 1999 Newsday, Inc.
May 27, 1999, Thursday

HEADLINE: TESTING FAITH / JODI PICOULT'S NEW BOOK TACKLES SPIRITUALITY

BYLINE: By Katti Gray. STAFF WRITER

A SMILING JODI PICOULT, brazen and effusive, just put it out there: "John Grisham will always give you a legal thriller. Danielle Steele will always give you pure garbage... I really don't know where my ideas come from." Before an audience of 70 or so devotees, the Long Island-born novelist was patting her own back for telling a wholly different tale in each of her six novels, the latest of which hit stores in early May.

Her declaration meant to set her apart in a field of writers who churn out books, relatively speaking, like Detroit rolls out cars. And it was more than allowable that evening in a Huntington bookshop where worshipful fans included the writer's kindergarten teacher, mom and dad, the family ophthalmologist and his wife, the diminutive old woman who has virtually renamed Picoult "my granddaughter, the author" and so on.

They were a captive group, riveted on Picoult, hanging on her every word. She k new this.

"When will your next book come out?" was the first fan's question as Picoult wound down a reading from "Keeping Faith," her current seller. …

Faith's disconsolate young mother, her adulterous father, rabbis, priests and an anti-evangelist bent on exposing as hoax what is passed off as miraculous - including deconstructing Faith - also are key characters in the book. It aims, Picoult says, less to answer than to prompt queries about what constitutes spiritual belief. Is God man or woman or either? Christian, Jewish, Hindu or other? Does one encounter the Divine in the solitude of home or a sanctuary of religious adherents? "Keeping Faith" is set in New Canaan, a town resembling the community where Picoult resides with her three children and husband, a Princeton University classmate whose detachment from his Methodist roots approximates Picoult's disconnect from the Judaism only nominally observed in the Nesconset home where she was reared. …


The Record (Bergen County, NJ)
Copyright 1999 Bergen Record Corp.
May 27, 1999; THURSDAY

HEADLINE: HONORS PILING UP FOR STARS

COLUMN: COLLEGE NOTES

BYLINE: GREGORY SCHUTTA

Freshman Kim Veenstra, a former All-State shortstop from Eastern Christian, earned second-team All-Ivy League honors as the starting third baseman for Princeton. ….


SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
Copyright 1999 San Jose Mercury News
May 27, 1999, Thursday

HEADLINE: Countering Microsoft, Witness Says Windows 98 Browser Can Be Removed

BYLINE: By David L. Wilson

WASHINGTON--A Princeton University computer scientist insisted Wednesday that it is possible to remove the Web browser from Microsoft's Windows 98 operating system -- reinforcing the government's case in the key technological issue of the Microsoft antitrust trial.

Edward Felten, who testified as a government witness earlier in the trial, stuck to his contention that the browser and operating system are separate products under an aggressive cross-examination from Microsoft attorney Steven L. Holley. Felten was being deposed in preparation for his second trial appearance -- as a rebuttal witness for the government -- when the proceedings resume next week.

In the antitrust case, the government alleges that Microsoft has illegally linked or "tied" the browser and operating system together in order to gain ground in the browser market; Microsoft says that it has created a single product by integrating browser functions into Windows, meaning there can be no illegal tying. …


University Wire
Copyright 1999 The Chronicle via U-Wire
May 27, 1999

HEADLINE: LGBT Center coordinator bids adieu to Duke U.

BYLINE: By Jaime Levy, The Chronicle

SOURCE: Duke U.

DATELINE: Durham, N.C.

Jeannette Johnson-Licon has been an anchor during waves of change at the Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Life at Duke University. From the controversial renaming of Gothic Queers in the fall of 1997 to the departure of the center's first full-time director last winter, Johnson-Licon, the center's program coordinator and acting director, has been there.

But after Karen Krahulik, a New York University Ph.D. candidate in history and former director of Princeton University's LBG center, was named the Duke center's next director, Johnson-Licon shipped out-her last day was May 21.

Johnson-Licon, who was also a finalist for the directorship, said it was time for her to hand over the helm completely and let the incoming director shape the center's staff and goals. "The new director needs an opportunity for a program coordinator who shares her vision, the vision of the committee that chose her," she said. "My leaving is my way of showing support for the director." …


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