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URL: http://www.nytimes.com SUBJECT: CRIME RATE (90%); DOMESTIC OFFENSES (89%); POLICE FORCES (89%); MURDER (89%); VIOLENT CRIME STATISTICS (89%); INVESTIGATIONS (89%); DOMESTIC VIOLENCE (89%); CORONERS COURTS & OFFICES (78%); HOMICIDE (90%); TRENDS (76%); CITY GOVERNMENT (70%); CITIES (70%); PHYSICIANS & SURGEONS (67%); CRIME RATES (90%); COLLEGE & UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS (53%) GEOGRAPHIC: NEW YORK, NY, USA (96%) NEW YORK, USA (96%) UNITED STATES (96%) LOAD-DATE: January 1, 2008 LANGUAGE: ENGLISH GRAPHIC: Photo: At a makeshift memorial in Brooklyn, a woman identified as the victim's sister was overcome with grief. The slain man, Lesley Prosper, 37, was shot as he walked toward his apartment building on Central Avenue with his wife and children, his neighbors said. (PHOTOGRAPH BY CHRISTIAN HANSEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES) PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1228 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Can They Stay Out of Harm's Way? BYLINE: By J. MADELEINE NASH SECTION: Section F; Column 0; Science Desk; Pg. 1 LENGTH: 2144 words The morning was just starting to heat up when a biologist, Ricardo Costa, set out to look for jaguars on Fazenda San Francisco, a 30,000-acre cattle ranch, rice farm and wildlife reserve in the region of southwest Brazil known as the Pantanal. Soon, along a fringe of scrubby woodland, Mr. Costa spotted a young male jaguar lazing in sun-flecked shade. ''It's Orelha,'' he whispered, pointing out the tear in the animal's right orelha, or ear. As Mr. Costa watched from the driver's seat of a Toyota truck, the animal stretched and yawned, exposing teeth strong enough to crunch through the skull of almost anything. ''Wonderful!'' he said. The jaguar, Panthera onca -- the largest cat in the Americas and the third largest in the world -- still prowls the rangelands of the Pantanal, a 74,000-square-mile mosaic of rivers, forests and seasonally flooded savannas that spill from Brazil into neighboring Bolivia and Paraguay. From the jaguar's perspective, this vast, wildlife-rich area probably seems close to a slice of heaven -- or, at least it would if the big cats were not routinely hunted down in retaliation for cattle losses. Mr. Costa, for example, said that he worried about Orelha and his more skittish brother, Grandao. Two years ago, he said, an older, larger male who patrolled the same territory was killed when it ventured onto a neighboring ranch. And now Fernando Azevedo, the senior scientist with whom Mr. Costa has been working, says he has lost 4 of the 14 jaguars he was starting to study at Fazenda Sao Bento, about 60 miles from San Francisco. Once again, it appears, the animals were picked off when they wandered away from a ranch where they are protected, onto adjoining properties. Among the casualties, Dr. Azevedo suspects, were an adult female and her two nearly full-grown cubs. Convincing ranchers and ranch hands to end such killing has become a priority for conservationists in the region. The importance of the Pantanal was underscored last October when Thomas Kaplan, executive chairman of the foundation Panthera, an emerging force in big cat conservation, finalized the purchase of two large ranches and signed an agreement to buy a third, creating a property that will soon total more than 400,000 acres. The ranches, which will be run by Panthera, are particularly important because they connect previously isolated wildlife preserves. Now, jaguars will be able to travel safely from one sanctuary to the other. ''With jaguars we have the opportunity to play offense,'' said Dr. Kaplan, an entrepreneur and financier who in 2006 founded Panthera. ''There are certain areas, like the Pantanal, where the wind is at your back.'' Dr. Kaplan said that Panthera's plan was to continue running cattle on the ranches while testing a broad range of techniques for reducing livestock-jaguar interactions. The results, he hopes, will encourage others to adopt range management practices that encourage co-existence over conflict. At stake in the Pantanal, conservationists say, is a significant fraction -- perhaps 15 percent -- of the world's remaining population of jaguars. Cattle ranching and jaguar conservation do not need to be mutually exclusive, said Alan Rabinowitz, executive director of the science and exploration program at the Wildlife Conservation Society, based in the Bronx. ''Cattle open up the landscape,'' Dr. Rabinowitz said, and enhance habitat for the jaguar's wild prey. ''If you were to take out the cattle and let large areas revert to scrubby vegetation, you'd have far fewer jaguars in the Pantanal than you do today.'' Jaguars can also provide ranchers with an additional source of income. For example, several ranches in the Pantanal, San Francisco among them, run ecotourism operations that have turned a liability into a valuable asset. Conservationists say that the next decade will be pivotal for jaguars, in the Pantanal and throughout its range, which runs from northern Argentina to the borderlands shared by Mexico and the United States. No one knows the precise rate at which the number of jaguars is declining or just how many jaguars there are. But the World Conservation Union pegs the total free-ranging population at fewer than 50,000 adults and classifies the animal as near threatened. Jaguars may not yet be in such desperate shape as Asian tigers, whose noncaptive breeding population has plummeted below 2,500, or African lions, of which there are perhaps only 20,000 to 30,000 left in the wild. But if conflicts with people and their livestock are not soon resolved, conservationists warn, jaguars could quickly trace a similar trajectory. At first pass, the conflict between jaguars and ranchers would seem to be intractable. ''The cats are where the cows are, and the cows belong to people,'' said Almira Hoogesteijn, a research veterinarian at the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico. But even though jaguars kill and eat cattle, they do so less often than one might imagine. A quantitative picture of the dietary habits of jaguars emerged from a study conducted by Dr. Azevedo at San Francisco in 2003 and 2004. Over the course of nearly two years, Dr. Azevedo and his field assistants collared 11 adult jaguars and tracked their movements. They also methodically collected their scats and examined the carcasses of their prey. The contents of the scats revealed that the giant rodents known as capybaras were the jaguars' most common prey, followed by caimans and marsh deer. Of 113 carcasses confirmed as jaguar kills, capybaras made up 35; caimans, 23, and cattle, 32. Dr. Azevedo, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sao Paulo, then measured the cattle that were killed against a larger background. In all, 169 cattle deaths occurred at San Francisco during the study period, he and his former thesis adviser, Dennis Murray of Trent University in Canada, reported in the September issue of The Journal of Wildlife Management. Nineteen percent were lost to jaguars. Out of a 5,000-head cattle herd, the jaguar's take faded even more in significance: it amounted to less than 1 percent. San Francisco keeps its jaguars in line with a variety of tactics, said the ranch's owner, Roberto Coelho. Among the strategies is using bulls and older cows with horns to ''baby-sit'' young, clueless animals and immediately moving cattle away from a paddock whenever depredation occurs. In addition, Mr. Coelho said, San Francisco's extensive rice fields are an effective barrier between the cattle paddocks and the property's riparian forests. Among the important things to understand about jaguars, depredation experts say, is that they like to hang out in wooded areas close to water. Consider the problems that Teresa Bracher has been having on the four ranches she owns in prime jaguar habitat along the Paraguay River, the Pantanal's main artery. For a time, depredation losses may have approached 8 percent, said Ms. Bracher, a committed conservationist as well as a rancher. For assistance, Ms. Bracher turned to Peter Crawshaw Jr., a leading Brazilian jaguar expert based at the Pantanal National Park. Dr. Crawshaw suggested a spectrum of nonlethal jaguar deterrents, Ms. Bracher said, and she and her cousin, who runs the cattle operation, have implemented every one. Among other things, they deployed guard dogs and surrounded their cattle with electrified fencing. They installed bright lights around the paddocks and instituted regular patrols. They even set off noisy fireworks at night, when jaguars are most active. As a result, depredation has significantly declined. Like many other ranchers in the area, Ms. Bracher is waryof one antipredation measure: substituting water buffaloes for cattle. Water buffaloes easily turn feral, creating a problem as large as the one they are supposed to solve. But, said Rafael Hoogesteijn, a Venezuelan veterinarian who is an internationally respected depredation expert, a properly managed water buffalo herd can be as close to predator proof as a group of ungulates gets. When a jaguar or puma appears, water buffaloes protectively encircle their young. They will even menace the predator by advancing on it, with the big bulls in the lead. In a soon-to-be-published study, Dr. Hoogesteijn and his sister, Almira, report on the experience with water buffaloes and cattle at six ranches in Venezuela. On three, they note, jaguars managed to snatch a few calves when the buffaloes were first introduced. Then the herds learned to defend themselves, and the jaguar attacks ceased. These intimidating herbivores, the Hoogesteijns found, appear to surround cattle in a broad, protective umbra. On the Venezuelan ranches, jaguars preyed upon cattle significantly less often when they were placed in the same paddocks as buffaloes. ''With cattle, you will always have losses,'' said Rafael Hoogesteijn, who has agreed to become the supervisor of Panthera's ranching operations in the Pantanal. ''But with buffalo, you can have true co-existence.'' What frustrates conservationists here is that multiple techniques for minimizing the problems caused by jaguars exist, and yet, instead of being a last resort, the first reaction too frequently is to pick up a gun. This occurs despite the fact that the jaguar is protected in Brazil, as, indeed, it is across most of its range. Enforcement, however, is all but nonexistent. As Dr. Hoogesteijn and others see it, the current system of incentives is perverse. Ranchers are not penalized for shooting jaguars, but they also are not rewarded for resolving predation problems in an ecologically sensitive way. Programs that compensate ranchers for their losses might help, some believe. Others note that such programs are costly and, if badly designed, can perpetuate poor range management practices. A survey of 50 ranchers in the northern Pantanal published two years ago suggested that the people there were deeply conflicted where jaguars are concerned. Well over half of the respondents said that they could not tolerate jaguars on their own ranches, and yet nearly three-quarters thought jaguars should be protected. Thirty-eight percent ranked jaguars as a larger source of economic loss than floods, droughts, rustling and disease. Ranchers, depredation experts have found, tend to exaggerate their losses to jaguars. In part, that is because jaguars are eager scavengers and so can be observed feeding at carcasses they played no part in killing. But the tendency to exaggerate also stems from ranchers' often being unaware of the extent to which diseases like leptospirosis and brucellosis rob them of their profits. These diseases, Dr. Hoogesteijn said, attack the reproductive tract of cows, causing abortions and stillbirths. On one large Venezuelan ranch, he once calculated, the annual loss from problem pregnancies and births probably amounted to 400 of 3,000 ''potential calves,'' or 10 times the number of real calves known to have been killed by jaguars and pumas. Nonetheless, problem jaguars do exist. And not a few bear old gunshot injuries that handicap them in stalking and killing wild prey. Some conservationists concede that hunting a problem animal may sometimes be a solution. But more headway may be made by focusing on the human side of the problem, said Silvio Marchini, a wildlife biologist who worked in the Pantanal before moving to the Amazon. ''There's an assumption that the reason people kill jaguars is because they cause economic damage. But social and cultural attitudes may also be very important.'' As Marcos Moraes, the owner of Sao Bento, put it, ''We need a new generation to come along and change the old ways of thinking.'' In the Pantanal, jaguar hunting is part of a tradition as deeply ingrained as fox hunting once was in the English countryside -- except that here, it is not the well-to-do landowners who most enthusiastically join the chase but their hired hands, the Pantaneiro cowboys. For them, jaguar hunting is a form of bush entertainment, said Sandra Cavalcanti, a jaguar expert who will soon receive her Ph.D. from Utah State University. There's also a macho component. ''Killing a jaguar is considered a manly thing to do,'' Ms. Cavalcanti said. Later this year, Ms. Cavalcanti, who has joined the staff that Panthera is assembling, hopes to begin addressing this problem by starting a cowboy outreach program, which could include things like medical services, instruction in range management and depredation control. Jaguars in the Pantanal seem to be on a teeter-totter that could tilt strongly in one direction or the other. Given the stakes, Ms. Cavalcanti said, researchers no longer have the luxury to just study these elegantly patterned beasts. To save them, she said, ''we have to act.''
TRACES: A jaguar kill at Fazenda Sao Bento, above. At another Pantanal ranch, below, a biologist, Ricardo Costa, examines scat from a jaguar. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY THOMAS NASH) MAP: Pantanal, Brazil. (SATELLITE PHOTOGRAPH BY NASA ) PUBLICATION-TYPE: Newspaper Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1229 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Road To Nowhere BYLINE: By DAVID BROOKS SECTION: Section A; Column 0; Editorial Desk; OP-ED COLUMNIST; Pg. 17 LENGTH: 821 words The most impressive thing about Mitt Romney is his clarity of mind. When he set out to pursue his party's nomination, he studied the contours of the Republican coalition and molded himself to its forms. Earnestly and methodically, he has appealed to each of the major constituency groups. For national security conservatives, he vowed to double the size of the prison at Guantanamo Bay. For social conservatives, he embraced a culture war against the faithless. For immigration skeptics, he swung so far right he earned the endorsement of Tom Tancredo. He has spent roughly $80 million, including an estimated $17 million of his own money, hiring consultants, blanketing the airwaves and building an organization that is unmatched on the Republican side. And he has turned himself into the party's fusion candidate. Some of his rivals are stronger among social conservatives. Others are stronger among security conservatives, but no candidate has a foot in all camps the way Romney does. No candidate offends so few, or is the acceptable choice of so many. And that is why Romney is at the fulcrum of the Republican race. He's looking strong in Iowa and is the only candidate who can afford to lose an important state and still win the nomination. And yet as any true conservative can tell you, the sort of rational planning Mitt Romney embodies never works. The world is too complicated and human reason too limited. The PowerPoint mentality always fails to anticipate something. It always yields unintended consequences. And what Romney failed to anticipate is this: In turning himself into an old-fashioned, orthodox Republican, he has made himself unelectable in the fall. When you look inside his numbers, you see tremendous weaknesses. For example, Romney is astoundingly unpopular among young voters. Last month, the Harris Poll asked Republicans under 30 whom they supported. Romney came in fifth, behind Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, John McCain and Ron Paul. Romney had 7 percent support, a virtual tie with Tancredo. He does only a bit better among those aged 30 to 42. Romney is also quite unpopular among middle- and lower-middle class voters. In poll after poll, he leads among Republicans making more than $75,000 a year. He does poorly among those who make less. If Romney is the general election candidate, he will face hostility from independent voters, who value authenticity. He will face hostility from Hispanic voters, who detest his new immigration positions. He will face great hostility in the media. Even conservative editorialists at places like The Union Leader in New Hampshire and The Boston Herald find his flip-flopping offensive. But his biggest problem is a failure of imagination. Market research is a snapshot of the past. With his data-set mentality, Romney has chosen to model himself on a version of Republicanism that is receding into memory. As Walter Mondale was the last gasp of the fading New Deal coalition, Romney has turned himself into the last gasp of the Reagan coalition. That coalition had its day, but it is shrinking now. The Republican Party is more unpopular than at any point in the past 40 years. Democrats have a 50 to 36 party identification advantage, the widest in a generation. The general public prefers Democratic approaches on health care, corruption, the economy and Iraq by double-digit margins. Republicans' losses have come across the board, but the G.O.P. has been hemorrhaging support among independent voters. Surveys from the Pew Research Center and The Washington Post, Kaiser Foundation and Harvard University show that independents are moving away from the G.O.P. on social issues, globalization and the roles of religion and government. If any Republican candidate is going to win this year, he will have to offer a new brand of Republicanism. But Romney has tied himself to the old brand. He is unresponsive to the middle-class anxiety that Huckabee is tapping into. He has forsaken the trans-partisan candor that McCain represents. Romney, the cautious consultant, is pivoting to stress his corporate competence, and is rebranding himself as an Obama-esque change agent, but he will never make the sort of daring break that independent voters will demand if they are going to give the G.O.P. another look. The leaders of the Republican coalition know Romney will lose. But some would rather remain in control of a party that loses than lose control of a party that wins. Others haven't yet suffered the agony of defeat, and so are not yet emotionally ready for the trauma of transformation. Others still simply don't know which way to turn. And so the burden of change will be thrust on primary voters over the next few weeks. Romney is a decent man with some good fiscal and economic policies. But in this race, he has run like a manager, not an entrepreneur. His triumph this month would mean a Democratic victory in November.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company 1230 of 1231 DOCUMENTS The New York Times
Late Edition - Final Ettore Sottsass, Designer, Is Dead at 90 BYLINE: By ROBIN J. POGREBIN SECTION: Section B; Column 0; The Arts/Cultural Desk; Pg. 7 LENGTH: 893 words Ettore Sottsass, an eminence grise of postmodern design who helped found the influential Memphis Group and was responsible for the familiar bright red plastic Olivetti typewriter, died Monday at his home in Milan. He was 90. His death was confirmed by Francesco Rutelli, the Italian culture and tourism minister. Although trained and active as an architect, Mr. Sottsass secured a permanent place in pop culture with his designs of everyday items, including office cabinets, table lamps, ice buckets and silverware. ''He was truly a giant of design,'' said Paola Antonelli, the senior curator in the Museum of Modern Art's department of architecture and design. ''He had a capacity to really feel the times that he was living in and to change with them.'' Recently, Mr. Sottsass experienced something of a renaissance. Last March, the Design Museum in London devoted an exhibition to his work called ''Work in Progress.'' In September, both the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Friedman Benda gallery in Manhattan featured his pieces in exhibitions. In 2006, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art presented what was billed as the first major American survey of his work. And in early December, a Sottsass retrospective opened in Trieste, Italy, observing his 90th birthday, on Sept. 14. The exhibition, called ''I Want to Know Why,'' includes 130 of his designs and continues until March 2. ''I would like the visitors to leave crying,'' Mr. Sottsass said of the exhibition in an interview with the news agency ANSA. ''That is, with emotion.'' Born in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1917, Mr. Sottsass studied architecture in Turin, Italy, and opened his first studio in Milan in 1947. He worked as a design consultant for Olivetti from 1958 to 1980, creating the Elea 9003 calculator and the popular portable red typewriter, released on Valentine's Day in 1969. Mr. Sottsass referred to his typewriter as the ''anti-machine machine.'' Its features included a carriage that dropped to the level of the keyboard and a storage case, though it was the color that made it memorable. ''Every color has a history,'' Mr. Sottsass said two years ago. ''Red is the color of the Communist flag, the color that makes a surgeon move faster and the color of passion.'' In the 1970s, Alessi hired Mr. Sottsass, who designed various items for the company, like ice condiment sets, soup plates and coasters. He also designed a decanter for Baccarat; a chair for Knoll; and carpet for Namastre. In the 1980s, Mr. Sottsass was one of the founders and the leading figure of Memphis, the Milan design group famous for brightly colored postmodern furniture, lighting and ceramics. Its collection includes glassworks, and large sculptural cabinets made of acrylic, aluminum and tropical wood. Mr. Sottsass was known for his playfulness and wit as well as his whimsical ornamentation. His Adesso Pero stained-wood bookshelf from 1992 looks like three red lightning bolts shooting into a red platform. His Tahiti lamp, from 1981, resembles a tropical bird with a long yellow neck and boxy red beak. ''He never lost the love of the object,'' said Susan Yelavich, an assistant professor at Parsons the New School for Design. ''There's a sensuality, a sheer hedonism, that is so welcome and undeniable.'' Mr. Sottsass was influenced by a wide range of artists and decorative styles. Reviewing a 2004 exhibition of his work at the Barry Friedman gallery in New York, ''A Master Returns,'' Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times: ''The columnar, horizontally striped Superbox cabinets of 1968 may bring to mind Italy's striped Romanesque cathedrals, and work of American Minimalists like Anne Truitt and Agnes Martin, as does his famous striped 'Nefertiti' desk of 1970. The gray translucent fiberglass forms of his Mobili Grigio bedroom suite (1969-70) suggests a cartoon Art Deco, but also the gleaming fiberglass wall sculptures by the California artist Craig Kauffman.'' Because of Mr. Sottsass' quirky combination of the prosaic and the irreverent, his work has historically been something of a tough sell with collectors. ''Ettore's work makes such a strong statement that it's hard to decorate with it,'' Marc Benda of Benda Friedman said on the occasion of the gallery's Sottsass show. ''It's hard to fit it into a larger ensemble.'' Mr. Sottsass was part of an iconoclastic generation of Italian designers that included Castelli Ferrieri, Pier and Achille Castiglioni, Gae Aulenti and Joe Colombo, who transformed design with their use of new technologies and materials. He collaborated with well-known designers like Aldo Cibic, James Irvine and Matteo Thun. His own architectural projects included Milan Malpensa Airport, a luxury yacht interior and a house for the design entrepreneur David M. Kelley in Silicon Valley. Last October, he told The New York Times that his primary concern in building was for the human experience. ''My definition of architecture is to design a place where you stay, where you live,'' he said. On the occasion of the Sottsass exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2006, which he helped design, Mr. Sottsass said he found the notion of a retrospective ''a bit macabre.'' ''It's like having a birthday party where too many relatives show up,'' he said, ''a sign that too much time has passed.'' Directory: ~hesterj -> Entrepreneur Entrepreneur -> Byline: By richard siklos section: Section C; Column 5; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1 Length Download 3.51 Mb. Share with your friends:
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