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Founded in 1876 Tuesday, June 21, 2005 Edition N 932

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  14 non-starters could be disciplined by FIA  

MOTOR RACING  
Formula One

PARIS  Formula Ones governing body yesterday summoned seven teams using Michelin tyres to a hearing and sharply criticized the French manufacturer for advising the teams to withdraw from Sundays United States Grand Prix on safety grounds. The FIA hearing in Paris on June 29 could lead to a range of punishments including fines, docked points or even suspension  possibly throwing the F1 season into chaos with 10 races left.  
Michelin provides seven of the 10 F1 teams with tires. Only six cars  using Bridgestone tyres  started the US race in Indianapolis after 14 drivers left the track after the warmup lap. Teams from Renault, McLaren-Mercedes, Toyota and Williams-BMW, none of which raced on Sunday, were told to attend the Paris hearing.  
Two Michelin tyres failed in Friday practice sessions  one causing a wreck that prevented Ralf Schumacher from competing  prompting Michelin to rule its tyres were unsafe for the Indianapolis track.  
But FIA said it had clear rules which everyone had to keep.  
These cannot be negotiated each time a competitor brings the wrong equipment to a race, FIA said in a statement.  
Michelin had unsuccessfully asked FIA to ease its rule forbidding teams to change tyres after qualifying. FIA also refused to consider installing a chicane. Michelin then advised its teams not to compete.  
What about the US fans? What about Formula One fans worldwide? Rather than boycott the race the Michelin teams should have agreed to run at reduced speed in turn 13, FIA said, referring to the part of the Indianapolis circuit which Michelin said was too fast for their tyres. By refusing to run ... they have damaged themselves and the sport.  
Michelin defended its decision. Frederic Henry-Biabaud, Michelins deputy director of competition, said. We feel it is a reasonable decision and we were professional to bear in mind primarily the safety of the drivers, Henry-Biabaud said. We had no other choice.  
He called the United States a safety-minded country and said there would have been an uproar in the event of an accident.  
MICHELIN DEFENDS  
Henry-Biabaud said Michelins involvement in F1 would continue, and dismissed speculation only one tiremaker would be allowed to supply cars from now on.  
Henry-Biabaud said the problems with the tyres were largely due to the design of the Indianapolis track. At Indianapolis, the tire coating suffers, he added. The circuit is very traditional but the straight line before the banking delivers massive pressure on the car and the tyres. For the car to do the whole race we have to be sure the tyres can last.  
Henry-Biabaud said FIA should have built a temporary chicane before the banked corner to reduce speeds and lessen pressure.  
We are disappointed a chicane was not put in as we would have had a very good race, he said. They are the sole judges, that is their decision and we respect that. But people must also respect our decision.  
FIA said a chicane would have been unfair on others.  
The Bridgestone teams had suitable tires. They did not need to slow down, FIA said. The Michelin teams lack of speed through turn 13 would have been a direct result of inferior equipment, as often happens in Formula One.  
The FIA also pointed out that each team is allowed to bring two sets of tyres, including a slower tyre suitable in all circumstances. Apparently, none of the Michelin teams brought a backup to Indianapolis, it noted.  
PART OF LARGER BATTLE  
In Frankfurt: the dispute was about tire safety, but it was also part of a larger, bitter battle to see who controls Formula One.  
Fielding only six of 20 cars on Sunday underlined how the sport is fractured with a breakaway series looming in 2008. It also damaged F1 in the United States, where the sport has a scant following compared to its wide popularity in Europe, Asia and South America.  
Formula One is starkly divided.  
In one camp is Max Mosley, the president of motor-racings world governing body  the FIA. He is joined by F1s multibillionaire commercial director Bernie Ecclestone, and Ferrari  the sports most powerful team. In the other are the nine remaining teams, and key Formula One manufacturers BMW, Mercedes and Renault. The group is considering running a breakaway series in 2008, and also has the support of Japans two manufacturers in F1  Toyota and Honda.  
Formula One teams have complained that Ecclestone shares too little of the sports commercial rights income, which was estimated at 800 million dollars in 2003. Teams receive about 23 percent. Ecclestone has amassed a fortune estimated at 3.7 billion dollars in three decades of running F1.  
In Indianapolis: Formula One has struggled to win over the United States since a grand prix in Phoenix 14 years ago sold fewer tickets than an ostrich race across town. Sundays US Grand Prix did nothing to enhance its reputation. In one stroke, the race wiped out whatever gains had been made over the last few seasons and dealt the supposed glamour sport a major setback in a key market for sponsors and manufacturers.  
An estimated crowd of 120,000 people, one of the biggest of the year at a grand prix, paid good money to watch a motor race at the Brickyard on Sunday. What they got was just six cars, four of them the slowest in Formula One, with angry fans hurling beer cans and bottles on the track in frustration.

  5,000-year-old Iceman on display suffering from bacteria  
ROME  Researchers suspect that the corpse of a 5,000-year-old mummy frozen in the Italian Alps might have been contaminated by bacteria since its discovery by a hiker in 1991, a doctor who cares for the body said last.  
X-rays have shown bubbles in the bones that could be caused by bacteria, said Eduard Egarter Vigl, in charge of preserving the mummy at the South Tyrol Archaeological Museum in Bolzano, northern Italy.  
The museum is trying to find local companies that can analyze the air in the sealed-off chamber where the mummy is kept to test for the presence of bacteria, Egarter Vigl said in a telephone interview.  
He denied media reports that the bacteria could cause the disintegration of the Iceman, also known as tzi. But if bacteria are present, disinfection will be necessary to prevent possible damage to the mans remains, he said.  
Egarter Vigl said the bubbles, which caused light patches to appear on tzis skeleton, could also be caused by air entering through cracks in the mummys skin and bones, which would present no risk to the mummys survival.  
German hiker Helmut Simon discovered tzis well-preserved body accidentally during a 1991 hiking trip.  
Oetzi is kept in an igloo made out of ice tiles to keep him in cold and humid conditions. Museum visitors can view Iceman through a small window.  
Oetzi has provided researchers with a wealth of information about the late Neolithic Age, or 3,300 to 3,100 BC.  
He was carrying a bow, a quiver of arrows and a copper ax, prompting speculation that he was a hunter or warrior.  
X-rays have revealed that tzi was wounded by an arrow, with the flint arrowhead remaining in his left shoulder.  
Previous tests have shown that his last meals included venison, unleavened bread and some greens.  
Egarter Vigl said the museum was also considering requests to carry out more research, including DNA tests, to discover further details of tzis life.                 (AP)
  5,000-year-old Iceman on display suffering from bacteria  
ROME  Researchers suspect that the corpse of a 5,000-year-old mummy frozen in the Italian Alps might have been contaminated by bacteria since its discovery by a hiker in 1991, a doctor who cares for the body said last.  
X-rays have shown bubbles in the bones that could be caused by bacteria, said Eduard Egarter Vigl, in charge of preserving the mummy at the South Tyrol Archaeological Museum in Bolzano, northern Italy.  
The museum is trying to find local companies that can analyze the air in the sealed-off chamber where the mummy is kept to test for the presence of bacteria, Egarter Vigl said in a telephone interview.  
He denied media reports that the bacteria could cause the disintegration of the Iceman, also known as tzi. But if bacteria are present, disinfection will be necessary to prevent possible damage to the mans remains, he said.  
Egarter Vigl said the bubbles, which caused light patches to appear on tzis skeleton, could also be caused by air entering through cracks in the mummys skin and bones, which would present no risk to the mummys survival.  
German hiker Helmut Simon discovered tzis well-preserved body accidentally during a 1991 hiking trip.  
Oetzi is kept in an igloo made out of ice tiles to keep him in cold and humid conditions. Museum visitors can view Iceman through a small window.  
Oetzi has provided researchers with a wealth of information about the late Neolithic Age, or 3,300 to 3,100 BC.  
He was carrying a bow, a quiver of arrows and a copper ax, prompting speculation that he was a hunter or warrior.  
X-rays have revealed that tzi was wounded by an arrow, with the flint arrowhead remaining in his left shoulder.  
Previous tests have shown that his last meals included venison, unleavened bread and some greens.  
Egarter Vigl said the museum was also considering requests to carry out more research, including DNA tests, to discover further details of tzis life.                 (AP)
  A jazzy visit to the life of Louis Armstrong  

BY CATHERINE FOSTER  
The Boston Globe

Trumpeter and raspy vocalist Louis Armstrongs public face was a consistently happy one.  
But in working on a musical valentine to Armstrong, Ambassador Satch The Life and Music of Louis Armstrong, coauthors Andre De Shields and James Mirrione found two times in his life when his heart was broken.  
Once by racism, when he was asked to be the ambassador of goodwill to the world by America at the same time his people were being treated as second-class citizens, says De Shields from New York. And the second was after World War II, when technology introduced a different kind of velocity to US life and beboppers came on the scene, playing 10 notes to every one of Louiss, and accused him of being an Uncle Tom.  
Ambassador Satch, which stars De Shields and covers Armstrongs life from his beginnings in New Orleans to the soundstages of Hollywood, opens June 30 at the Cape Playhouse.  
De Shields has twice worked at the Dennis theater: as a singer in the 1982 production of Aint Misbehavin, and last summer as Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind. Hes best known for his work in four Broadway musicals: The Wiz (the title role), Aint Misbehavin, Play On, and The Full Monty.  
Ambassador Satch emerged out of two earlier shows. In 1992, Carnegie Hall, with a Rockefeller Foundation grant, hired De Shields to direct and Mirrione to write a program called Jazzed. They developed a show called Ghost Cafe, in which Bessie Smith, Fats Waller, and Louis Armstrong meet in jazz heaven.  
We used these three icons as a demonstration that one can begin with nothing and end up with everything, an extravagant life, says De Shields. When the actor hired to play Armstrong pulled out, De Shields stepped in. Once that project was over, the pair extracted the Armstrong material, rewriting it as West End Blues: The Louis Armstrong Musical, which played in New York in 2002.  
A few years later, De Shields was in London performing The Full Monty, and Mirrione was doing a residency at the University of Leeds. A London theater producer who owned the Criterion Theatre suggested they do West End Blues on the traditionally dark Monday nights. But the pair realized it needed work.  
We had a two-act play with one guy delivering a long monologue, and Louis Armstrong was not an egotistical man, De Shields says. The producer said it needed someone else onstage and a pretty woman. Ah, what better way to reveal the humanity of this great US icon of the 20th century than to ask his four wives what it was like to live with him? It took the burden of telling this big story off my shoulders.  
So now Harriet D. Foy plays the wives in a show that starts as an Armstrong concert. A mysterious voice interrupts the show; a bebopper who insults him. In defending his life, Armstrong spills out his story in flashbacks.  
Twenty songs fill the show, including such hits as Mack the Knife, Hello, Dolly!, and What a Wonderful World.  
The musical climax is Black and Blue, De Shields says. It coalesces all these emotions that have been playing in his life, from the unschooled child, the revered innovator of jazz, the discredited musician, the immortal icon. After that, the only place we can go for the 11 oclock resolution is Wonderful World.  
Robin Williams, he says, used that song in Good Morning, Vietnam to calm the savage hearts of soldiers. Its a lullaby forgrownups.

  A nation is born!  
We are glad to announce the launch of A nation is born! 1810-1816, the latest in our Herald Learner Booklets series. Our series is the first educational material on Argentine history produced in English for Argentine schools, and we believe it will provide you and your students with opportunities for language development, project work and crosscurricular activities.   
 This supplement was sponsored by Ford Motors Argentina, in an effort to provide our schools with enhanced learning opportunities. Thanks to their support, this material is free of charge for educational institutions. If you want to receive it, contact us so that we can arrange for a day in which you can come to our offices to pick up your copies of the material. Material is distributed on a first-come-first-served basis, so make your order soon!   
 If you use this material in your classrooms, we would like to ask you for only one thing in return: a letter thanking Ford Motors for their support, and explaining how you have used this material with your students. When you come to pick up your copies, please leave a thank-you note (preferably in the schools stationary) stating the name of the school and the coordinator or teacher/s who are going to use it. This will allow us to improve our upcoming issues of the Herald Education Booklets, and will show Ford Motors Argentina that their efforts have bore fruit.   
 For enquiries and sales contact Ricardo Adaniya at  or 011-4342-8476. 
  A new age of Zionism in Israel  
By MARGARET COKER  
KIBBUTZ EIN HASHOFET, Israel   
Growing up Israeli in the 1960s and 1970s, Yaniv and Yair Sagi lived what they considered the ideal Zionist life, toiling on their kibbutz dairy farm and trading in their overalls for army uniforms when their country beckoned.  
By adulthood, the two brothers had taken dramatically divergent paths: Yaniv remained true to the secular, leftist values of the kibbutz. Yair adopted the conservative views of religious settlers in territories Israel captured in the 1967 war with neighbouring Arab states.  
The Sagis have spent their lives confident that they were building the model Jewish state. But as Israel starts its 57th year as a nation, society has changed its mind about what that model is  and the Sagis lives appear out of touch with this new reality.  
Prime Minister Ariel Sharons decision to evacuate Jewish settlers and soldiers from the Gaza Strip and a small pocket of the West Bank in August  which cleared its last legal hurdle with an Israeli Supreme Court decision June 9  reflects a new chapter in Israels history.  
Zionism, the ideology upon which Israel was founded in 1948, was once animated by the ideas of secular socialism. Over decades, it evolved to include a Jewish religious revival and expansion of settlements on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip.  
This struggle over Israels manifest destiny has been shaped equally by the Holocaust, multiple wars with Arab nations and friction among the nations mostly European, Middle Eastern and US immigrants and its native-born.  
Todays Israel is a country transformed by globalization, shifting demographics and a grinding war with the Palestinians. Most citizens have sidelined the old romantic notions of Zionism. The Jewish state is now a more deeply pragmatic place where individualism trumps the socialism espoused by the left and Realpolitik prevails over the biblical prophecies championed by the right.  
The majority of Israels 6.8 million people are glad to leave Gaza, a parched, crowded strip of land whose name in Hebrew is used synonymously with hell because of its status as a killing ground for their soldiers.  
But Sharons plan has exacerbated longstanding tensions between secular and religious Zionists like the Sagi brothers, one of whom believes in a Israeli and Palestinian state existing side by side while the other views a Jewish presence in Gaza and the West Bank as a holy mission.  
Zionists on both sides of the ideological divide see the so-called Gaza disengagement plan as a threat to their dreams of a better Israel. The Sagis are worried about the future of their nation and where they will fit in.  
Israel is really in a crisis. Since 1967 weve had conflict between those who see life in the biblical land of Israel as the life of Zionist ideals, and those who see living in greater Israel as destroying those ideals, said Yaniv. Whats coming next for Israel is not a victory for either of these camps. Its a new Israel, an Israel where heroes are gone (and) where pragmatism wins.  
Clinging to the old ways  
About 120 kilometres north of Jerusalem, in the verdant hills of the Galilee, Yaniv Sagi has watched his blond hair thin as he has tried to keep alive his hometown, a remnant of a rapidly fading world.  
Atop a broad hill sits Kibbutz Ein Hashofet, a community founded in 1937 where 100 families live in single-story stucco cottages with red-tiled roofs. Towering elms canopy the sidewalks and the streets are blissfully free of cars. The whitewashed dairy barns are reminiscent of the US Midwest.  
On a recent afternoon, 41-year-old Yaniv and other grinning parents in shorts and sandals waited at the doors of the community school for classes to adjourn so they could play with their children in the playground.  
The Israelis who founded this and other kibbutzim hold a hallowed place in the nations mythology. Like US pioneers of the 1800s who moved west of the Mississippi, the early kibbutzniks were scrappy, fervent patriots who moved from Europe to build a state and make the desert bloom.  
Their communal enclaves nurtured self-reliant Jewish men and women who would later dominate the ranks of Israels military, political and cultural elite.  
It was one for all and all for one, explained Yaniv, whose father, a Romanian Jew and Holocaust survivor, arrived here when he was 10 years old and later married another kibbutznik. Together, they raised their three sons to value manual labour, negotiate rather than fight and care for societys weakest.  
We grew up believing that there is no Israel without the kibbutz. We were told that if you give yourself to the kibbutz and the state, then both will take care of you, said Yaniv, a wiry former army paratrooper.  
By the 1990s, however, Ein Hashofet and the kibbutz ideal had fallen out of favour in Israel as both an economic and political model. Globalization and a high-tech driven economic boom inspired a consumerism that the country had never experienced. Meanwhile, continued attacks against Israelis by Palestinians undermined Israeli support for peace negotiations.  
Yanivs response to the demise of the kibbutz as a pillar of Israeli life was to cling more tenaciously to the values they exemplify. His handiwork is evident in his hometown, where as general secretary of the kibbutz, a position akin to mayor, he has helped save it from bankruptcy.  
Now among the peeling stucco cottages where founding kibbutz members live are custom-built duplexes offered free to younger members and their families as an incentive to keep them rooted in the kibbutz and spurn higher-paying jobs in the cities.  
Near the cow barns is a small factory where kibbutzniks manufacture spare parts for sport-utility vehicles. The grade school accepts the children of Israeli yuppies who value the old-fashioned kibbutz educational methods for their offspring but dont want to embrace the lifestyle themselves.  
His efforts to keep Ein Hashofet thriving have kept Yaniv grounded in the hard realities of Israel. His quick strides and forceful diction arent the mannerisms of an armchair liberal. They reflect years spent on the front lines watching Israeli and Palestinian lives torn apart in conflicts that have sprawled across his whole lifetime.  
With a clear-eyed stare devoid of despair, he realizes full well that his vision of a secular, social-democratic Israel, as well as his views about kibbutzim and the Palestinians, are less popular than ever.  
We faced an economic crisis and we saw we had to change our lifestyle. This didnt affect my (political) beliefs. I believe in equality for Israelis in Israel and for Palestinians inside a Palestinian state. That, unfortunately, is not what many Israelis believe, Yaniv said.  
Still, he is unwavering in his belief that he still can play a role as moral guidepost for his country. The withdrawal from Gaza will leave approximately 250,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank. Sharon says he has no intention of evacuating them, a decision that muddies the notion that the Palestinians could build their own viable, independent state.  
Yaniv feels that his leftwing Meretz party should foster domestic political pressure to force Israel to leave the West Bank, even though that notion is far less popular than the withdrawal from Gaza.  
He (Sharon) wants to wash his hands (of Gaza) now that he sees political advantage to it, not because he thinks that Palestinians should have their own state. Thats not my idea of Jewish values, Yaniv said.  
As plans for the Gaza withdrawal push ahead, political rhetoric across Israel has reached the boiling point. Sharon has warned of the possibility of civil war. Several cabinet ministers have received death threats for backing the plan. Some settler leaders have called on soldiers to mutiny.  
Hope and prayers for a Greater Israel  
Seventy kilometres away from Ein Hashofet in a settlement high on a windswept plain near the Israeli-Syrian border, Yair Sagi, like his brother Yaniv, also seeks to keep alive a besieged dream. But hes having a harder time than Yaniv coming to grips with the fact that society seemingly overnight has spurned his vision.  
Unlike the kibbutzniks, who have battled for survival for at least a decade, the religious settlers until very recently enjoyed government support and a measure of public backing.  
Yair, 37, wants to keep both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in Israels hands because he believes that the land belongs to the Jewish people by virtue of the Old Testament story of Gods covenant with Abraham. As a religious Zionist, Yairs view is that reclaiming what he sees as the Jewish birthright will move his nation further along the path of spiritual redemption.  
The secularists, like my brother, think that theyve won enough battles, that its time to secure peace by giving land. They arent looking at things the way that I look at them, Yair said.  
When Yair, a studious-looking man with soft brown eyes, takes issue with Yanivs ideas about Zionism, it is gentle chiding rather than a rebuke. But it is pointed, nonetheless.  
After Israel expanded its frontiers in 1967, in what became known as the Six-Day War, the bronzed and bearded settler replaced the kibbutznik for many Israelis as the new national hero.  
Armed with Bible verses declaring the newly conquered territories the domain of Jews and not Palestinians, the settlers added religion to the well-established notion of the Zionist farmer-warrior. They also adopted old kibbutznik anthems, mimicked their austere lifestyle and moved into the military ranks.  
Although religion was largely spurned on the kibbutz, Yair found comfort in the Orthodox Jewish beliefs after a self-described identity crisis in the 1990s. During three years in Jerusalem studying the Torah, the body of Jewish learning centred on the first five books of the Bible, Yair absorbed the dream of Eretz Israel, an Israel encompassing all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.  
The true goal of Zionism is for the Jews to rule all of the land of Israel, and by doing that establish the values of Judaism, Yair said.  
The isolated, agricultural community has an atmosphere similar to Ein Hashofet. Kindergarteners walk to school without fear of traffic or strangers. No televisions disturb the evening calm. Neighbours pitch in when a mother or child is sick. No one is alone.  
Yair and the rest of his 50-family community now feel an acute sense of abandonment due to Sharons withdrawal plans. Worse, they see their spiritual dream threatened.  
Yairs days studying the Bible and working at the settlements juice manufacturing plant are interrupted by heated discussion: If the Prime Minister who once advocated the building of settlements can now easily uproot the Gaza communities, how soon will he begin talk of removing those living in the Golan or the West Bank?  
He and other like-minded settlers are working on a plan to stop what they feel is an unholy act. But the residents from Qeshet and other settlements are in a moral quandary over how to protest the Gaza plan. Should they refuse to obey army orders for their annual reserve duty and threaten Israels civil order? Or should they confine their dismay to civil demonstrations?  
As plans for the Gaza withdrawal push ahead, political rhetoric across Israel has reached the boiling point. Sharon has warned of the possibility of civil war. Several Cabinet ministers have received death threats for backing the plan. Some settler leaders have called on soldiers to mutiny.  
(NY Times)
  A victory for CAFTA  
WASHINGTON  Free trade proponents scored a victory last Tuesday when the Senate Finance Committee voted 11-9 in favour of a draft Central American Free Trade Agreement.  
But lawmakers delayed dealing with the bitterest dispute: how to protect sugar.  
Tuesdays vote marked the first step in an elaborate dance designed to bring the long-delayed CAFTA agreement, a top priority of the Bush administration, to a vote in Congress, where opposition remains strong.  
The pact would end most tariffs on goods traded among participating nations. The sugar industry estimates CAFTA would result in an additional 140,000 metric tons of sugar imports over 15 years.  
Tuesdays informal Senate committee session, known as a mock mark-up, provided senators with an opportunity to suggest changes. On Wednesday, the House Ways and Means Committee is widely expected to pass its own draft of CAFTA implementing legislation.  
After the House committee vote, the stage will be set for the Bush administration to formally submit the legislation. Then Congress will have just 90 days to vote for or against it under the fast-track trade negotiating authority that Congress granted the White House in 2002.  
Any amendments adopted by the committees this week would not be binding, but would give the administration a sense of lawmakers concerns and allow them to adjust its language before submitting it.  
For example, Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., said that while he voted for the draft in committee, he could change his mind. I still have the opportunity to vote no on the final legislation unless sugar growers win concessions.  
U.S. sugar producers and processors say passage of CAFTA would kill their industry by throwing open the doors to unfair competition from low-cost foreign producers.  
Sen. Kent Conrad, D-ND, noting that sugar is a $2 billion industry in my state, said that while opening small Central American nations to US goods would do little to boost the U.S. economy, the pact could wipe out thousands of sugar-related jobs. It puts that entire US sugar industry at risk, he said.  
After the vote, he told reporters he held off offering amendments involving sugar to avoid complicating negotiations between industry officials and the White House.  
Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said concerns about sugar should not thwart ratification because CAFTA is crucial to promoting capitalism and democracy in this hemisphere.  
Over 20 years ago, Congress first opened our markets to products from Central America to help stabilize a region where civil strife, wars and political violence were part of daily life, he said.  
In approving the agreement, we have very little to lose and much to gain, he said.  
Besides the Central American countries of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, the treaty also involves the Caribbean nation of Dominican Republic and is sometimes referred to as DR-CAFTA.  
The deal was hammered out more than a year ago, but President Bush has been reluctant to push for approval because of uncertainty that it would win the needed House and Senate majorities. Besides the sugar industrys fierce opposition, labor groups and environmentalists oppose the pact.  
CAFTA proponents include makers of cheeses, snacks, pork products and other processed foods; grain farmers; pharmaceutical companies, and textile makers who sell yarn and fabric to Central Americans.  
Bush, speaking at a Social Security event in University Park, Pa., Tuesday, said that for the sake of fairness, and for the sake of the agricultural economy, the United States Congress needs to pass the CAFTA trade agreement now.  
But at Tuesdays hearing, Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., sharply criticized Bush for not doing more to drum up support. The president needs to get personally involved in explaining its benefits, he said.  
Passage of CAFTA would be a major step toward the administrations long-term goal of creating a Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement, which would turn 34 countries in the Western Hemisphere into a single trading zone involving some 800 million people.  
For procedural reasons, the Finance Committee vote was a nonbinding tally, and the committee was expected to meet again Tuesday evening to formally ratify it.  
The vote broke along party lines, except for two Republicans, Olympia Snowe of Maine and Michael Crapo of Idaho, who voted against the draft legislation, and two Democrats, Blanche Lincoln of Nebraska and Ron Wyden of Oregon, who voted for it.  
The committee rejected a proposal by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., to ensure that child labor laws are enforced. But Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Peter Allgeier advised the panel that CAFTA already contains provisions requiring countries to abide by their own labor laws, and that Kerrys amendment would force the administration to reopen the complex agreement.  
But the committee did accept a proposal by Wyden to extend to service workers the Trade Adjustment Assistance program that helps U.S. factory workers laid off because of trade.       (Cox News)
  A voice from North Korea echoes in the White House  
I was introduced as someone who wrote a book that was read by George Bush, he said in a recent interview at a museum cafe in Seoul, South Korea, only 150 miles south of the North Korean slave-labor camp where he was imprisoned with his family in 1977. He was 9 years old.  
Burning with memories of his familys 10-year imprisonment in the camp, which still functions hidden from outside eyes but not from satellite cameras, Kang teamed up with Pierre Rigoulot, a French journalist, to write a memoir, The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag. Printed in five languages since 2000, including English, the book was well received just about everywhere but in South Korea, where it languished in obscurity, its harsh critique of the North out of step with South Koreas official policy of engagement.  
Despite its considerable merits, the book seemed destined to fade from view, and Kang with it, until this spring when, at the urging of the former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, Bush picked it up. Pretty soon, with the president recommending it to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other top aides, the book jumped to the top of the Bush administrations summer reading list.  
On June 13, Kang, 37, received the ultimate book endorsement when he was ushered into the Oval Office for a 40-minute meeting with Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and the national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley. On June 10, Bush had allotted only a few more minutes for a meeting with South Koreas president, Roh Moo-hyun.  
He was more interested in the pains North Koreans are going through, more so than I had previously thought, Kang said in a telephone interview on June 16, after returning to Seoul from Washington. He kept on repeating how deeply sorry he was about the situation. To hear a president say these deep things made me feel that he cared.  
The White House stamp of approval has conferred on Kang a measure of celebrity that had eluded him when the book was published. Kang, who is taking a crash course in English, now travels monthly to Washington, where he will address a Freedom House conference on human rights in July. After that, he will give lectures at American churches and campuses, talking about North Koreas human rights abuses.  
In August, he will visit Midland, Texas, Bushs hometown, to speak at Rock the Desert, an evangelical concert devoted this year to North Korea. With orders spiking on Amazon.com, he has hopes for a new edition.  
Bush has displayed similar enthusiasm for other books, notably The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, by Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident who is now an Israeli politician. Subsequently, it was widely noted, the theme of promoting democracy, especially in the Middle East, ran through the Inaugural and State of the Union addresses.  
I felt like his book just confirmed what I believe, Bush said of Sharanskys work in late January. He writes it a heck of a lot better than I could write it, and hes certainly got more credibility than I have. After all, he spent time in a Soviet prison and he has a much better perspective than Ive got.  
In late April, the presidents reading of The Aquariums of Pyongyang seemed to bolster his longstanding hostility toward North Korea. As American diplomats tried to revive stalled talks on North Koreas nuclear weapons program, Bush told reporters in Washington that Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, was a dangerous person who ran huge concentration camps.  
Since then, Bush administration officials have said that any package solution for North Koreas nuclear weapons program will have to include progress on human rights.  
I felt that he agreed with me in that the human rights issue was more important than the nuclear issue, said Kang, who directs a rights group in Seoul called the Democracy Network Against North Korean Gulag.  
Over tea at the fashionable museum cafe on a recent Sunday afternoon, Kang, with his new wife, Yoon Hae-ryon, and a finely tailored suit, seemed to be on the far side of the planet from Yodok, the labor camp in which he survived for a decade on a starvation diet fortified with salamanders, cockroaches and rats.  
His book opens with his comfortable childhood in Pyongyang, North Koreas capital, where he raised tropical fish in an aquarium. But in 1977, he and his father, uncle, grandmother and 7-year-old sister were arrested and sent to Yodok. His grandfather, who had been a successful businessman in Japan, and who had his choice of moving to the South or the North, had been jailed for an unspecified offense.  
Opened in 1959, the Yodok camp Kang describes was run as a business enterprise, with gold mines, cornfields and logging operations operating entirely on unpaid prison labor. Following the beliefs of the North Korean authorities that political deviance is hereditary, entire families were routinely incarcerated, and still are, recent defectors say.  
Children studied in the mornings and worked in the afternoons, cultivating cornfields, excavating clay or carrying freshly cut timber. Kang wrote of walking 12 miles with a log on his shoulder. He described attending public executions where prisoners were forced to hurl rocks at corpses, yelling, Down with the traitors of the people!  
To ward off protein deficiencies, inmates ate whatever meat they could find.  
The way to eat a salamander is to grab it by the tail and swallow it in one quick gulp before it can discharge a foul tasting liquid, he wrote. Stocks of salt-cured rat meat helped prison families get through the winter. Rat skins were used to patch the prisoners lone set of shoddy clothing issued each year.  
In February 1987, Kangs family was unexpectedly released from the camp, part of a small release tied to Kim Jong Ils birthday.  
North Korea has yet to react publicly to the literary and public relations success of its former prisoner. But in 1999, the state-run Korean Central News Agency reacted harshly to Kangs testimony in Washington before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, calling him riffraff devoid of human dignity and values who was engaging in a smear campaign.  
Now a celebrity in the defector community, Kang said he hoped he could get the United States to put more pressure on North Korea about the human rights issue.  
Kang wrote of the power of listening to foreign radio programs in a country where state-supplied radios received only the official station. If the U.S. can persuade people that concentration camps are destroying families, he said, it could work against Kim Jong Il much more quickly than the nuclear issue.
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  Adelphia founder John Rigas sentenced to 15 years  
NEW YORK  Adelphia Communications Corp. founder John Rigas was sentenced yesterday to 15 years in prison for his role in looting and hiding debt in a scandal that bankrupted the cable television company.  
US District Judge Leonard Sand said he would have imposed a much harsher sentence but for Rigas age  he is 80  and poor health.  
Earlier, Rigas waved to a crush of cameras as he and his son Timothy, the companys former chief financial officer, arrived at the courthouse in Lower Manhattan.  
The son was awaiting sentencing yesterday afternoon.  
The pair had faced up to 30 years in prison each on their bank fraud convictions alone. They were also convicted of securities fraud and conspiracy.  
Federal sentencing guidelines would make the sentence far less than 30 years, but the Supreme Court also ruled earlier this year that federal judges should consider the guidelines as advisory, not mandatory.  
(AP)  

  Africa: debt, aid and race  

Gwynne Dyer                               

globetrotter

We are very sorry and apologize to viewers and other people who felt offended, announced the Japanese cosmetics firm Mandom early this month, but mass ritual suicide would have been a more appropriate form of apology. The company had aired a TV commercial that showed several black people wiping the sweat from their brows with a Mandom facial wipe while a chimpanzee wearing an afro wig imitated them.  
Meanwhile, Augsburg city zoo in southern Germany has just finished a special event in which an African village was erected between the baboon cage and the zebra cage. Black people living in Germany were persuaded to populate the village wearing various sorts of tribal regalia and playing drums, cooking food for sale or selling curios. The good citizens of Augsburg were astonished when people from elsewhere took exception to this display.  
Germans and Japanese are less sensitive about race in general and about Africa in particular than, say, people in France or the United States, where a significant minority of the population is of African descent, but patronizing attitudes about Africa are chronic in all the rich countries. Take, for instance, the current debate about increasing aid to African countries and cancelling their debts.  
The leaders of the eight biggest developed countries will probably make a deal at next months G8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, that doubles aid to Africa and slashes the debts of its poorest countries. Prime Minister Tony Blair, this years host, is determined to make Africa a priority, and Bob Geldof is seeking to repeat his success with the Live-Aid concerts twenty years ago by staging Live8 concerts. But what good will they actually do for Africa?  
This is where the debate begins, and most people on both sides seem to see Africans as wayward children. Africans are just as intelligent and resourceful as other people, and if their countries are still poor it is because they face special and very intractable problems, but the argument in the rich countries takes almost no account of this.  
The pessimists point out that vast amounts of aid money have been poured into Africa over the years  around 5,000 dollars per African  without relieving the continents poverty. The problem, they say, is the near-universal corruption of Africas ruling elites: there are 100,000 millionaires in Africa, and yet an African child dies of malnutrition or preventable disease every three seconds. Cancel the debts and pour more aid in, and the same elites will steal that, too.  
No, say optimists like Blair, things have changed now. A new generation of African leaders is bringing democracy and good governance to the continent, and so long as we put strict conditions on how the new aid and debt relief will be used, this time round most of it wont be wasted.  
It is a debate in which both sides essentially believe that Africans are childlike. One side assumes it openly: dont give them any more aid until they behave better. The other side is subtler: yes, they are backward, but now they have better leaders who wont steal the money. We give monkeys in the zoo more respect than that.  
Africas problem isnt dishonesty or immaturity, which are fairly evenly spread around the planet. It is too many relatively small ethnic groups trying to share the same country. Social traditions that expect successful people to support even distant relations often make the situation worse, but no other continent has such extravagant ethnic diversity, so its really up to Africans themselves to overcome the problem. The G8 can help, but only in limited ways.  
Much of Africas debt burden was not really aid in the first place, but money that the West (and the old Soviet Union) handed over to keep their African clients loyal during the Cold War, knowing full well that it would be stolen. A lot more was tied aid that funded foolish mega-projects in order to create work for Western companies. So cancel the debt with no nonsense about the beneficiaries proving that they can behave responsibly. And if you do give aid, give it without crippling conditionalities.  
This is where Africans really get treated like backward children, forced to privatize everything in sight in obedience to the fundamentalist market doctrines that now hold sway in most of the West (which, by the sheerest coincidence, creates new investment opportunities for Western companies). Consider Ugandas experience, for example.  
Uganda, a reasonably well-run country, was forced to impose user fees on basic healthcare and primary education in the late 1980s to qualify for World Bank debt relief and aid  so school attendance collapsed and the death rate among the rural poor soared. Eventually, in 1997, President Yoweri Museveni rebelled and restored free primary education throughout Uganda. Primary school enrolment more than doubled.  
In 2001 he restored free basic healthcare, and the number of hospital outpatients almost doubled.  
There will be an orgy of self-congratulation at the G8 next month as African debt is allegedly cut and aid is allegedly raised, and many well-meaning people who have pressured their leaders on this issue will feel that something has been accomplished. It can be, but only if they insist on knowing what strings are attached to the help. Africa is not poor because Africans are more stupid or less honest than people elsewhere. 

  AGP releases figures for first four months  
The General Administration of Ports has published its annual report on the state of the Buenos Aires port, which includes the statistics of bulk and container volumes shipped to and from the port of Buenos Aires so far this year.  
According to these figures, the total bulk volumes have increased every month so far this year, with a particularly sharp rise between February and March, when the number of tons shipped climbed from 594,747 to 737,015. Although this considerable increase is partly due to seasonal factors, the upward trend continued in April, with bulk cargo rising again, to an estimated 760,598 tons.  
Meanwhile, container numbers have remained impressive, although the number of TEUs handled by the port peaked in March, reaching 72,204 containers, 34,369 of them used for exports and 32,178 for imports. In April, the estimated number of containers handled in the Buenos Aires port was down slightly, at 66,447.  
Liquid bulk cargo, which had been nought in January and February, reached 66,053 tons in March and 10,158 tons in April. In turn, solid bulk volume has seen a healthy activity level in April, totalling 141,880 tons, with the rest of the activity in this category taking place in January, but much lower volume handled.  
As the trade surpluses have reflected during the first four months of the year, exports have outperformed imports for both bulk and container cargo, with the sole exception of liquid bulk cargo, with some 76,000 tons imported and none exported.  
Otherwise, export volumes remain roughly twice as high as import volumes in the general and bulk cargo category. The numbers for April in this category, which includes basic commodities, reached 251,738 tons for imports and 508,860 for exports.  
In the case of container cargo, the differences between exports and imports were considerably less, with exports outperforming imports by only some 2,000 tons per month. Overall volumes themselves in this category were smaller, with April estimates posting 34,269 tons of exports and 32,178 tons of imports.
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  Ancic beats Llodr to win first career title  

TENNIS  
Ordina Open

DEN BOSCH, Netherlands  Croatias Mario Ancic underlined his grasscourt credentials yesterday, beating defending champion Michael Llodr 7-5 6-4 to win the Ordina Open.  
The third seed, a semifinalist at Wimbledon last year and the 10th seed next week, produced an outstanding serving display and broke once in each set to claim his first ATP title.  
This was my third final so I was really fighting to win it, a jubilant Ancic told the crowd.  
Michael is a great player on grass so I knew it was going to be tough, but I played some good points when I needed them.  
In soaring temperatures Ancic, who had lost his two previous finals, dropped just three points on serve in the opening set and broke Llodr in the 11th game when the Frenchman double-faulted.  
Llodr saved two break points in the fifth game of the second set but Ancic ripped a forehand winner to break and held his nerve to clinch victory.  
Ancic said he was now looking forward to going at least one better than last year at Wimbledon, where he lost to United States Andy Roddick in the semifinals.  
I think this is great preparation for Wimbledon, he said.  
It was my third year here, last year I reached the semifinals here and I played great at Wimbledon, so I hope to continue the tradition.  
Llodr, who had won just four matches in 2005 before this week, could only laugh at times as ace after ace went past his racket. The Frenchman admitted he had been outplayed.  
Of course when you lose in a final its disappointing, he said. But Mario played so well today and it was tough for me to return his serve.  
When I did have an opportunity he hit a big serve. Last year I won and this year I came second. Thats life.

Wimbledon  
SHARAPOVA STALKER BANNED  
In Wimbledon: a man believed to be stalking defending Wimbledon champion Maria Sharapova has been banned from the grounds of the All England Club.  
Matthew Anthony Page will not be allowed to enter the club during the two-week tournament, which starts today, Wimbledon spokesman Johnny Perkins said yesterday.  
The police have also been notified, but Sharapova said she didnt know anything about it.  
I havent heard anything about that. I dont read the papers or anything, the second-seeded Russian said.  
Sharapova said she felt safe because she has five bodyguards with her at all times.  
I feel secure. Im always surrounded by people, said Sharapova, who plays Nuria Llagostera Vives in the first round tomorrow. If I was worried every step I was taking, I dont think I would be walking around.  
FEDERER FAVOURITE  
The two-time defending champion is the 4-7 favourite, according to British bookmaker William Hill. Andy Roddick, who lost to Federer in last years final, is second choice at 9-2, followed by 2002 winner Lleyton Hewitt at 12-1.  
Bookmakers are falling out of love with local favourite Tim Henman. William Hill quoted odds of 14-1 for four-time semifinalist Henman to become the first British man to win Wimbledon since Fred Perry in 1936. Odds are the same for Spanish teenager Rafael Nadal, who won the French Open two weeks ago.  
On the womens side, Justine Henin-Hardenne and defending champion Maria Sharapova are co-favourites at 3-1. Two-time champion Serena Williams is at 7-2, with Kim Clijsters at 11-2, top-seeded Lindsay Davenport at 11-1 and two-time winner Venus Williams at 12-1.  
The chances of a British woman winning Wimbledon for the first time since Virginia Wade in 1977 are 1,000-1. Odds are the same that aliens will land on the White House lawn, William Hill said.  
COUNTERFEIT TICKETS  
Wimbledon officials found what they believe to be counterfeit tickets for sale on eBay, and theyre investigating the source and authenticity.  
The tickets and accompanying wristbands were for the players box at Centre Court, meaning they wouldnt normally be for sale by the All England Club.  
Wimbledon spokesman Johnny Perkins said the club believes the tickets, which sold for 3,000 pounds, are fraudulent because wristbands have not yet been handed out to players. He said officials found out about the tickets because they monitor the Internet.

  Andrew Graham-Yooll monday wake-up  

PJ issue

This Monday, the last day of autumn, or fall, if you prefer, or first day of winter, prompts the thought as to whether men will return to using pyjamas this season. Last December the specialist fashion houses of New York and London announced that the bedroom and lounge garment would be all the rage in the northern winter, but given the nature of the clothing it is not simple to be sure that such was the case. However, as most whims in the north become legislation in the south, the question as to PJ popularity this winter may be guessed at but not ascertained.  
There are good reasons for using the bedroom garb, and perhaps the decision has to be taken with the ageing of children who usually force change in domestic nudity. Fathers suddenly discover the need to cover up, the top half at least. The other deciding factor is not quantifiable, but some fashion experts are of the view that the unlimited view of flesh on television and in advertising may prompt reaction, and so bedtime naturalists dress for sleep.  
John Lennon (1940-1980) made pyjamas a very attractive indoor suit when he and Yoko Ono made their bed-ridden peace protest in 1969. President Gerald Ford (1913) might have incurred the wrath of the politically correct in this century for his pipe smoking and use of pyjamas in the White House when he was in office (1974-77). Ford never made either practice a success. By then, pyjamas had suffered a severe crisis and women were burning bras on the White House lawn. Bras are another story.  
Just as Clark Gable is said to have killed sales of the vest, or undershirt, when he took off his shirt and showed bare flesh in Frank Capras film, It Happened One Night (1934), when pyjamas lost favour in Hollywood in the 1960s sales plummeted. Thanks to Harry Potter and his friends wearing tough boarding school striped flannels, the garment might make a comeback, but as yet it has not been reported.  
In the early sixties, in my late teens, I went shopping in San Telmo for a pair of pyjamas. I bought them but never wore them much after the shop owner said that the pair offered was of such quality that it could be used to go to the shops or to sit out on the pavement. How old could he have thought me to be? The feeling of a generation in this hemisphere is that Jorge Amado put an end to pyjamas with his novel, Doa Flor and Her Two Husbands (1966), where the second and quite severe looking spouse makes love to his young wife without removing his pyjamas. This investigation continues in the spring.

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  Argentine Creevy banned for 3 months  

Comment...

By Frankie Deges  
For the Herald

MENDOZA  The biggest news at the IRB U21 World Championship was the banning for three months of Argentinas best player in this tournament, Agustn Creevy. The San Luis flanker who couldnt recall if he had even been sin-binned ever before, was cited after an incident against Wales last Friday.  
On Sunday, he sat at a Judiciary Meeting which lasted over an hour, in direct communication with an IRB Judiciary Officer who was in Canada. Brian Mew, a Canadian lawyer, received footage of the incident on e-mail and determined that Creevy, already a full international with the Pumas, was guilty of kicking (Law 10.4 (c)) and acts contrary to good sportsmanship (10.4 (k)) and handed him a three-month suspension.  
Unfortunately, I only spoke into a microphone and the lawyer on the other side could not see my face when I gave my side of the incident. He might have seen I wasnt lying, said Creevy, who faces a few anxious hours as he waits to hear from the IRB after an appeal was launched by his teams management.  
The ban was only made officially available to the media yesterday; a local newspaper had it in their front page that same morning so it was too late. We informed of the decision once it was formally received on Monday morning, explained Tournament Director Simon Jelowitz, from the IRB, who confirmed the procedures had been correct.  
During the third round game, Creevy was held by a Welsh defender  trying to get out of his grasp, he kicked him with his heel in an apparently reflex motion. When the Welsh player shouted, Creevy is said to have gone back to apologize, not that it counted.  
The previous foul-play incidents had been dealt WITH by Argentine Judiciary Officers, yet being an Argentine player this was not permitted under tournament rules. Inconsistencies in the application of the bans have now come to light.  
A Welsh player, who dangerously stomped on a New Zealanders neck and was instantly sent-off and got a six weeks ban; Creevy, for what seemed to be a lighter incident  unspotted by the referee (although this isnt a factor to be considered)  will be unavailable, pending a final judiciary decision, until mid-September from all rugby.  
Argentina will have to find enough inner strength to maintain their new goal, which is to finish in fifth place. They will play against England today, in a crucial game.  
The semifinals of this superb U21 World Championship, where the standard of matches has been very high and delighted the thousands of spectators that have crammed the various venues in use, are the kind of matches every rugby fan would want to watch. Both are mouth-watering match-ups: New Zealand will want to get their show back on track and beat a very strong South African side. The second semifinal will pitch France and Australia, two sides with wonderful backs.  
LOST OPPORTUNITY  
After the announcement a month ago that the Argentine Pumas were more than happy to play in an enlarged Six Nations, if invited, and given that for quite some time we have been blowing our own trumpet when it comes to the merits of the Pumas in international rugby, the loss against Italy was hard to digest.  
One of the strengths of any future presentation to the Six Nations Committee or the IRB should be the consistency of the Pumas in playing and even beating teams of similar ranking  namely Scotland, Italy and Wales. As much as it could be said that Fridays loss was a one-off, it couldnt have come at a worst time.  
Italy were hungrier in Crdoba, but what should be worrying coach Marcelo Loffreda more than anything was that his team underestimated the Italians, a team that has always been troublesome for the Pumas  ever since the first ever test between both nations in 1978.  
The return of a few first choice players  namely Pichot, Roncero, Hasan and Martn Aramburu  did not add anything extra to the team. The Pumas benchmark should be the drawn game against Lions. With their backs against the wall and facing one of the biggest ever challenges, they played well over their fighting weight. That night in Cardiff, probably the Lions were the ones doing the underestimation.  
Lesson: never underestimate the opposition. Ever.

  Argentine humour highlights  
 Mafalda & friends (3), by Quino. English translation by Terry Cullen, edited by Andrew Graham-Yooll. Published by Ediciones de la Flor, Buenos Aires. Both non-Spanish speakers abroad or visiting this country, and Argentines reading English may find a source of delight in this English-language version of the celebrated comic strip featuring the lovely, intelligent girl forever ensuring Quinos fame. The English sounds rather like that of an educated American-born speaker, but whats best about it is that it does convey the idiosyncrasies of the different characters, particularly when this is the main thing that foreigners formerly unfamiliar with them need to grasp. Thus, for instance, Mafalda is seen looking at some pictures in the paper her father is reading, and asking him, My God! Are those poor people caught in a flood or something? to which Dad replies, No, Mafalda... These are ads for the cinema. Upon which Mafalda ponders: Well, never mind, we should still send them some clothes (which can be read both as part of her usual concern for the world  and world peace  at large, and as a critique of Hollywood disaster movies). Opposite to Mafalda is Susanita (the girl that seems an antecedent for Maitenas harebrained women), sounding very much her part when wondering: Why are workers in this country always poor and dark, and not blond with cars like in the USA? The two girls are typically confronted when, passing by the side of a homeless beggar on the sidewalk, Mafalda comments, My heart aches for the poor, to which Mine too says Susanita. For Mafalda to state: We should give them a job and a roof over their heads, and welfare...! to which comes Susanitas remark in counterpoint: Wouldnt be enough just to hide them? Among other key characters in the comic strip, take Manolito (the young Galician son of a storekeeper, rather loutish and with a mercantilistic spirit  who you may truly enjoy but has irked some members of the Galician community in Argentina). He is found in another kind of counterpoint with Mafalda, who looks at a bird on a tree and says: There... that pigeon doesnt know about  money, but still its happy, to go on asking her friend: Do you believe money is everything in life, Manolito? To which the boy replies: Of course not, money isnt everything ... There are checks, too. By the way, this book is dedicated to The Beatles (a genuine icon for many a generation, including this reviewers) and on page 27 we see Manolito surrounded by a crowd watching him in awe, as if he were some kind of freak, on which he comments: It seems theyve heard I dont like the Beatles!  From the same publishers:  
 Gaturro (5 and 6), by Nik. More comic books attesting to the popularity of the lovely cat that so delights us feline lovers (finally finding relief after so many years of mice supremacy in both animated cartoons and comic strips). So three cheers for the kitten and his author!  
 Inodoro Pereyra (29), by Fontanarrosa. More funny adventures of a gaucho at a loss before oncoming modernity, with suitable comments by his sidekick, dog Mendieta.  
 Macanudo (2), by Liniers. An intriguing variety of comic characters (among  
them penguins and cats), making both hilarious and insightful comments on reality.  
 Vida del senador Juan Domingo Hiplito Angulo, by David Rotemberg. An imaginary senator exposing the corruption and selfishness of certain politicians (including himself?), with laughs chastising otherwise unpunished evils.  
 Mentirillas, seguida de El lado oscuro de la pelvis, by Leo Maslah. Humorous, quasi detective stories by a celebrated Uruguayan author and song-writer.  
 El ltimo padre, by Rodolfo Braceli. Poems supposedly sent in a bottle to the cosmos, addressed by a father to his imaginary children, telling them of love and tolerance so much needed in this world.  
 Echndonos de menos, by Roberto Grriz. A waiter as narrator, exposing the souls of the well-to-do people (including a military man) attending a posh wedding.   
                                                         IP            

  Art house  
a meeting with portuguese cinema. Organized by the Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires and the Fundacin Cinemateca Argentina. At Teatro San Martn, Av. Corrientes 1530. Sat 25 2.30/5/7.30/10pm: El fantasma (O Fantasma, directed by Joao Pedro Rodrigues, 2000) - Sun 26 2.30/5/7.30/10pm: Antes que el tiempo cambie (Antes que o Tempo Mude, directed by Luis Fonseca, 2003). $5.  
the benny hill show. Tue 21 to Fri 24 6pm: The Benny Hill Show (1969-1971 - Chapter 3). At British Arts Centre (BAC), Suipacha 1333. Free.  
III festival feisal el cine de los estudiantes. Shorts on Latin America. June 23 to 26 from 2pm to 12pm at MALBA, Av. Figueroa Alcorta 3415. $5 (free for students and $2.50 for pensioners).  
great divas of italian cinema. Wed 22 7pm: Dos mujeres (La Ciociara, directed by Vittorio De Sica, with Sophia Loren, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Eleonora Brown, Carlo Ninchi, Andrea Checchi and Pupella Maggio, 1960). At Centro Cultural Recoleta, Junn 1930. Free.  
german cinemas jewels. Sat 18 5.30pm: El tro de la estacin de servicio (Die Drei von Der Tankstelle, Wilhelm Thieles, 1930). At Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Av. del Libertador 1473. Free.  
cinema and music. Fri 17 6pm: Encuentro con Venus (Meetin Venus, by Istvn Szab, with Glenn Close, Niels Aresturp, Macha Meril and others, 1990). At Centro Cultural Konex, Av. Crdoba 1235. $5.  
cinema and literature. Sat 18 5.30pm: La piel de zapa (Luis Bayn Herrera, on Honorato de Balzacs novel, 1943). At Centro Cultural Konex (see above). Free.  
tony richardson: a retrospective. June 21 5/8pm: Mademoiselle (1966). At British Arts Centre (BAC), Suipacha 1333. Free.  
family features through italian history. Every Mon 7pm at Asociacin Dante Alighieri, Tucumn 1646. Free.  
rainer werner fassbinder. Fri 17 9pm: La serpiente dentro del alma de la serpiente (chapter 12) - Dentro y fuera de los mundos y el secreto del miedo al miedo (chapter 13). At Cineclub Eco, Av. Corrientes 4940 2 E. $5.  
mexican cinema and documentaries. Organized by the Embassy of Mexico. Fri 17 4pm: No desears a la mujer de tu hijo (directed by Ismael Rodrguez, 1949). At Arcos 1650. Free.
  Art vs. fame in Britain: will Kahlo bemuse or beguile?  
That, however, is the challenge facing "Frida Kahlo," a new retrospective at Tate Modern through Oct. 9. Few Britons will know about Kahlo's damaged body, fervent leftism and turbulent love life in post-revolutionary Mexico  or even her heralded afterlife as an American feminist icon. To many people drawn to this exhibition, she is therefore famous largely out of context, which means that the 87 works on display must speak for themselves.   
Conversely, for those already familiar with Kahlo's paintings, politics and personality, what is perhaps most interesting about this show is how it will be received here.   
Although Tate Modern is counting on "Frida Kahlo" becoming a summer blockbuster, because it opened only June 9, it is too early to measure attendance or public reactions. But what is already apparent is that many British art critics seem bemused by Kahlo, concluding that she was not a very good painter and, at the same time, confessing a certain fascination with the raw power of her work.   
"Kahlo was always better at inventing images than she was at actually painting them," Andrew Graham-Dixon wrote in The Sunday Telegraph of London. "Working in a self-consciously nave manner, she could in many cases hide her technical deficiencies while giving free rein to her imagination. She had a truly difficult and painful life, and her best pictures by far are those in which she responds to its vicissitudes."   
Another critic, Waldemar Januszczak, tracking Kahlo's passage from "nothing to everything," set out to demystify her. "In the poker game of politically correct contemporary aesthetics," he wrote in The Sunday Times, "Kahlo constitutes a perfect flush. She is a woman. She is Mexican. She is bisexual. She is disabled."   
Yet, of her famous self-portraits, he conceded, "In their sheer fierceness, these extraordinary pretend selves" are rivaled only by the self-portraits of van Gogh, "who also took up painting while convalescing."   
Appropriately, then, the show opens with Kahlo's birth as an artist when she was bedridden for months after a traffic accident at age 18. Already here, her drawings and paintings beg viewers to share her pain, a physical pain that was a constant in her life: she had polio as a child, she underwent a score of back operations, she lost a leg to gangrene shortly before her death. But her emotional and existential pain also found release in her art.   
Her form of confession was highly theatrical. In her day-to-day life, she knew how to be noticed, as given to dressing as a man as to wearing elaborate Mexican Indian costumes and jewelry. And in her art, her self-portraits in particular involved complex staging, her stern face (with trademark moustache and monobrow) variously surrounded by leafy plants, flowers, monkeys, butterflies, cats and parrots, at times evocative of Rousseau.   
To today's eyes, other paintings in which she records her physical calvary suggest Surrealism. In "The Broken Column" (1944), she portrays her naked torso, with a metal rod in place of her spine and thick straps and nails holding her body together. In "The Little Deer" (1946), her face is attached to the body of a deer, which is bleeding from nine arrow wounds. And in "Without Hope" (1945), ailing in bed, she appears to be vomiting animals, fish and a skull.   
As it happens, years earlier, Andre Breton declared Mexico to be "the Surrealist place par excellence" and Kahlo herself to be a Surrealist. But when he tried to recruit her into his circle, she rejected him. "They thought I was a Surrealist, but I wasn't," she protested. "I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality." And on another occasion, she noted. "I always paint whatever passes through my head, without any other consideration."   
That was not strictly true. Her art evidenced all sorts of influences, some European like Cubism and, yes, Surrealism, others Mexican, not only that of her husband, the great Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, but also of Aztec and Roman Catholic iconography and obsession with death. She was very Mexican, but her mother was of mixed Spanish and Indian descent and her father was a German Jew. This very hybrid contributed to her originality.   
In the show's informative catalog, its British curators, Emma Dexter and Tanya Barson, emphasize the politics in Kahlo's life, but in reality it had minimal bearing on her art and was more intellectual divertimento than ideological commitment. When she met Rivera in 1927, marrying him the next year, Rivera was already engaged in the confused leftist nationalism born of Mexico's 1910-1917 Revolution. And she simply followed him.   
This meant taking a zigzag path in and out of the Mexican Communist Party, welcoming Trotsky when he fled to Mexico (and, in Frida's case, perhaps having a fling with him), returning to Stalinism, accepting commissions from American capitalists, then denouncing them. Kahlo's last public appearance before her death in July 1954 was at a demonstration protesting the American-backed invasion of neighboring Guatemala.   
But her true dialogue was with herself, and the main witness was her art (she also wrote poetry). In 1932, she suffered a second miscarriage while visiting the United States and ended up hospitalized. In "Henry Ford Hospital," she portrays herself lying in a pool of blood on a hospital bed, attached to a floating embryo by a vein. In "My Birth," the same year, her adult head is seen emerging from between the thighs of her mother, whose face is covered with a sheet.   
In several self-portraits, including the striking "Self-Portrait as a Tehuana," she paints an image of Rivera on her forehead, unsurprising given that their stormy relationship was marked by their frequent affairs (in Frida's case, with men and women, including perhaps Georgia O'Keeffe). "The Two Fridas," a double self-portrait in which the figures are linked by veins from their hearts, dates to their brief divorce in 1939.   
Even then, though, she considered herself first and foremost Rivera's wife. And after her death, that was also how she was remembered in Mexico. But then, in 1983, Hayden Herrera's book, "Frida: The Biography of Frida Kahlo," seemingly plucked her from obscurity and initiated her remarkable transformation into, in Januszczak's words, "the most famous woman artist in the world."   
So, to judge by this show, does Kahlo the artist travel as successfully as Kahlo the celebrity? Probably not. Yet the exhibition does help clarify why she is famous  not for her brushstrokes, but for her extravagant, imaginative, exhibitionistic and, above all, tragic being. To appreciate Kahlo is to empathize with her.
  As more Africans join insurgency, US expands training  
About 25 percent of the nearly 400 foreign fighters captured in Iraq come from Africa, according to the military's European Command, which oversees military operations in most of the African continent.   
Some recruits have joined the network of the militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, which has carried out many of the sophisticated attacks and suicide car-bombings that have killed hundreds of Iraqis in the past several weeks, the officials said.   
A small vanguard of veterans are also returning home to countries like Morocco and Algeria, poised to use skills they learned on the battlefield in Iraq, from bomb making to battle planning, against their native governments, the officials said.   
To combat the immediate threat and to prevent terrorists from gaining new safe havens in the region, the Bush administration is expanding a small military training program that has operated on a shoestring the past two years into a more ambitious program spending $100 million annually to provide airport security, money-handling controls, school construction and other assistance to nine African nations.   
As part of this broader strategy, the United States on Monday began training exercises in Mali, Chad, Mauritania, Niger and Algeria. Four other countries  Senegal, Nigeria, Tunisia and Morocco  will also participate by the time the exercises finish in two weeks. About 1,000 U.S. troops, including 700 Special Operations forces, will train 3,000 African soldiers in marksmanship and border patrol and airborne operations.   
"For a change, we're trying to get ahead of the power curve in a region that we believe is susceptible to use by terrorists," Theresa M. Whelan, the Pentagon's top Africa policy official, said. "It's a deterrent."   
U.S. military and intelligence officials say vast swaths of the Sahara, from Mauritania in the west to Sudan in the east, which have been smuggling routes for centuries, are becoming areas of operation for terrorist groups, including al-Qaida, which has quietly stepped up its recruiting efforts in the region.   
The countries there are some of the poorest in the world and have scant resources to monitor their borders or patrol the large remote areas of their interiors, where drug smugglers, weapons traffickers and terrorists had established land routes after routes in the Mediterranean began to be patrolled more intensively.   
"Al-Qaida is assessing local groups for franchising opportunities," said Maj. Gen. Richard P. Zahner, chief intelligence officer for the European Command, who will assume that post for the military headquarters in Iraq this summer. "I'm quite concerned about that."   
Among the local terrorist groups is the Salafist Group in Algeria, which abducted 32 European tourists in early 2003.   
Last week, the Algerian group claimed responsibility for a surprise attack last Saturday against an isolated Mauritanian army outpost that left 15 Mauritanians and nine insurgents dead. The group said in a message posted on a Web site in Arabic that the assault was a direct response to the training exercises that were "put in place by the enemy of God, America, and its agents in the region," The Associated Press reported.   
U.S. military officers and defense officials, who spoke in authorized interviews but on the condition of anonymity, citing security considerations when they travel overseas, said the number of African militants and the funds they have provided for the fighting in Iraq - between $10,000 and $100,000  is not large compared to support from countries like Syria or Saudi Arabia. "But it allows those elements to get in and be players," one officer said.   
Not all northern African militants turning up in Iraq belong to a group like Salafist or the Moroccan Islamist Combatant Group. But the skills they learn and the connections they make with other insurgents there is making Iraq a training ground and networking hub for terrorists, these officials say.   
"They're getting to use those training skills, hone them and eventually go somewhere else and use them," one defense official said. "The bottom line is you've developed a new extremist. It doesn't paint a pretty picture down the road."   
The Pentagon is also paying more attention to other parts of Africa. About 1,300 U.S. troops are based at a former French Foreign Legion compound in Djibouti to conduct counterterrorism operations in the Horn of Africa. Maj. Gen. Samuel T. Helland, the U.S. commander, said his forces are using civil-affairs projects, not combat missions, "to isolate the terrorist from his support, which is the population."   
U.S. forces two years ago began training and equipping six light infantry companies of roughly 150 soldiers each from Mali, Mauritania, Chad and Niger in a program called the Pan Sahel Initiative. The Sahel straddles the southern edge of the Sahara. "It was barely a drop in the bucket given the nature of the problem we were dealing with," Whelan said.   
The European Command lobbied hard to expand the $6 million program, and in March the Bush administration approved the new effort, the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative, with plans to finance it with $100 million a year for five years, beginning in 2007, Whelan said.   
Under the plan, the military will train battalions of 500 soldiers from the nine countries, and provide Toyota Land Cruisers, radios, uniforms, global-positioning devices and fuel trailers. U.S. instructors would also teach the African militaries how to coordinate planning and operations with each other.   
"They need the ability to support military teams, hundreds of miles away, with communications and logistics," said Rear Adm. Hamlin B. Tallent, the European Command operations director. "If they want to do maneuver operations, this is clearly a capability that doesn't exist now."   
In addition, Whelan said, the initiative calls for the Justice Department to help train local police; for the Treasury Department to assist on developing financial controls; for Customs to help with border security, and for the Agency for International Development to finance school construction.   
"This assistance will provide countries in northern Africa with an enhanced ability to interdict transnational terrorists and other criminal elements," said Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., who heads the House International Relations terrorism subcommittee.
  At a Glance  
Tom Cruise pranksters could face charges  
LONDON  Four pranksters arrested for squirting water at Tom Cruise at the British premiere of War of The Worlds could be charged with assault on the Hollywood star, police said yesterday.  
The men, who were filming a comedy sketch, will be interviewed by officers later in the day.  
We will see whether to pursue the charges, see whether the victim wants to pursue it, a Scotland Yard spokesman said.  
Cruise, 42, was on a red-carpet walkabout prior to the screening of the latest adaptation of the H.G. Wells classic in Londons Leicester Square on Sunday when a bogus journalist stuck a joke microphone in front of him. As Cruise started to talk, he was squirted with water from the microphone prompting the star to lose his cool.  
Im here giving you an interview, answering your questions and you do something really nasty ... youre a jerk ... jerk ... youre a jerk, the actor told the prankster in front of legitimate reporters.  
Cruise said it was disgusting that someone should act in such a way.  
I really work hard to make people feel good, he said as he towelled himself dry.  
The joker and his three-man camera crew were filming a sketch for a new entertainment show for publicly owned UK broadcaster, Channel 4.  
A crowd of about 5,000 fans had waited hours in temperatures that hit 32 degrees Celsius to see their idol and his new fiancee Katie Holmes. She attended the London premiere but was not standing next to him when the squirting took place.  
DiCaprio assaulted  
LOS ANGELES  Actor Leonardo DiCaprio was treated at a hospital for stitches to close a cut in his head after a woman hit him with a beer bottle at a Hollywood Hills party, according to media reports on Sunday. The Osar-nominated star of The Aviator and Titanic required about a dozen stitches, People magazine online and Los Angeles television station CBS2 reported.  
John Lennon memorabilia on sale  
LONDON  A major collection of John Lennon memorabilia, including an oil painting from his student days and a handwritten All You Need Is Love manuscript, will go on sale in London in July, an auction house announced yesterday.  
Other items on offer include a table from the home Lennon shared with his first wife Cynthia, a tunic thought to have inspired the costumes on the Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover, and a bedspread from his Montreal bed-in for peace with Yoko Ono.  
Cooper Owen, which specializes in auctions of music and film memorabilia, said it expected the July 28 auction at The Hippodrome nightclub in central London to raise 2 million dollars.  
Fergie gets her own sandwich in New York  
NEW YORK  Britains Sarah Ferguson yesterday unveiled the Duchess of York, a new sandwich named after her by a New York deli, but pleaded with dieters not to finis h the cheese-drizzled concoction.  
Once derided as the Duchess of Pork by the British tabloids for her portly physique, Ferguson cut a svelte figure in a cream-colored pinstripe blazer and matching skirt as she introduced the grilled chicken breast topped with melted Muenster cheese and wasabi horseradish mayonnaise.  
                               (AP-Reuters)
  Audio reviews  

Backstreet Boys, Never Gone (Jive)

Stick the new Backstreet Boys disc in your computer and youll see that it shows up in iTunes as part of the pop category.  
But dont be fooled. With their first release in nearly five years, the Backstreet Boys have plunged deeply and irreparably into the adult contemporary pool.  
The fivesome  Kevin Richardson, Brian Littrell, AJ McLean, Howie Dorough and Nick Carter  had already begun dipping their toes into these waters when their rivals, N Sync, were experimenting with two-step and beat-boxing and singing about one-night stands.  
But you cant be a boy band forever, and Never Gone represents what appears to be the inevitable, bland transition into musical adulthood.  
The first song  the promising Incomplete  rises and falls and rises again with a simple but melancholy piano melody. From there its an insipid mix of mid-tempo love songs and ballads  I Still..., Safest Place to Hide, and the title track  any of which would be suitable on the soundtrack of a forgettable romantic comedy.  
Weird World is an anomaly, though  their well-intentioned but clunky attempt at social relevance, with overly literal lyrics like: Sent a message to a GI. in the desert, said, Thank you, man, for bringing another dawn. Back here its her and me, and were having our first baby. Hes out there, takin em on.  
Theyre not normally mentioned in the same breath  in fact, this may be the first time in recorded history!  but the Backstreet Boys new album calls to mind a classic line from Neil Young.  
Its better to burn out than to fade away, Young sang on My My, Hey Hey.  
In this case, fading away  and leaving all those giddy fan-girl memories shining and intact  would have been preferable.

Foo Fighters, In Your Honor (RCA)

The Foo Fighters arent just trying to keep a following of fans with their newest album In Your Honor. One decade and three albums after rising from Nirvanas ashes after Kurt Cobains suicide, theyre out to become the greatest rock band of a generation.  
Lofty ambitions indeed for Dave Grohl, the former Nirvana drummer turned Foo Fighter frontman. But by striking a perfect balance on the 20-track, double album between hard driving anthems and pensive acoustic melodies, the band that few took seriously years ago just may have done it.  
Split between hard and loud on one disc, soft and quiet on the other, the album opens with the title track In Your Honor, a toss-up between high-energy guitar riffs and machine-gun drums. The song comes on strong, never lets up and slaps listeners from the every direction they werent looking.  
Friend Of A Friend incorporates chord structures reminiscent of Kurt Cobains and seeps with the deep reverence Grohl knows. He plays an old guitar with a coin found by the phone. It was his friends guitar, Grohl whispers, only thinly veiling the period following Cobains death. Ironically, the song sounds similar to Nirvanas own acoustic album.

  audio reviews  

By BEN RATLIFF  
The New York Times

Listen Here!, Eddie Palmieri (Concord)

The great salsa innovator Eddie Palmieri goes outside his normal sphere in Listen Here!, a Latin record with jazz-soloist guests.  
Palmieri has admitted that he has not spent much time studying the mainstream-jazz repertory. Though he is an exciting improviser, he tends toward the updated Cuban rhythms and mostly static harmonies that he and his bands have played since the 1960s. So he is joined here by some well-known soloists from the other side of the fence, including the violinist Regina Carter, the guitarist John Scofield and the saxophonists Michael Brecker and Donald Harrison. It proceeds in the old style of one genre meets another, rather than proposing a top-to-bottom integrated approach. It definitely doesnt sound like what Latin jazz in New York has become.  
Palmieri  who is to play on Saturday at Carnegie Hall during the JVC Jazz Festival  always sounds as if he is struggling to wrest control over the situation, even in the most familiar circumstances. Its what makes him great. In some cases the guests do enliven Listen Here!; Carter plays dazzlingly on In Flight, with vocalizations and a rhythmic sharpness that fits the rhythm section. And Brecker puts in a glibly energetic solo on the title track, written by Eddie Harris.  
But on that same tune, after the tenor-saxophone finishes and a short bass solo follows, Palmieri winds up into one of his sprawling, clear-cutting improvisations. Its only about a minute long, but he uses silence generously around tumbling and climbing figures. 

  BEING IS BECOMING  
Would-be human beings at birth,men and women enter life as potentialities; the continuous form of the verbal noun, declares the conception of evolvement. In time, we develop rationality,and the full-blown cycles close,when we lastly walk into the sunset.  
Being born out of a couple does not help us make the grade, Since human nature, a desirable end, seems remote from the circumstance of being cast naked upon a naked earth  
Woman bears down a creature of demands,a lovable someone with a racing heart,a needy bundle with a sucking reflex,who cannot tell himself from others, and fails to realize, that the feet which wiggle and kick are its own.  
Babys charm lies in its helplessness;a tiny lump of incomplete awareness, dependent on its people; this cuddly toy brings forth from adults a benign smile, and a wave of restrained tenderness.I feel the soft spot we have for it is the homage wordliness pays to innocence.  
Anbal Goi (April 2005)
  Bollore in talks to sell shipping unit  
PARIS  The Bollore Group said on Friday it had started exclusive talks to sell its shipping business to French shipping company CMA CGM.   
A spokesman for financier Vincent Bollore told Reuters the business comprised mostly 50 ships from the Delmas unit and had a turnover of some 800 million euros.   
The talks will be conducted on an exclusive basis until July 29, the group said in a statement.   
The spokesman added that Bollore had informed his shipping units works council that he had received several offers for the business and had started exclusive talks with CMA CGM.   
French daily Le Figaro said earlier on Friday that Bollore, the top shareholder in advertising company Havas, had said at his investment holding companys annual shareholder meeting earlier this month that he would accept no less than 600 million euros for the business, which he acquired for 250 million in 1991.   
Vincent Bollore has said at the shareholder meeting the economic climate was exceptional in the sector and that three shipping firms had made offers, a Bollore spokesman said.   
Business monthly Capital in its June edition had reported the deal was for 437 million euros and that Bollore would use the cash to raise his stake in Havas to as much as 33 percent  the threshold for launching a takeover bid.   
The Bollore spokesman declined to say what Bollore would do with the funds from the sale.   
Bollore increased this week his holding in Havas to 22.01 percent from 20.39 percent after winning four seats on Havass board, defeating management opposition and putting pressure on Havas Chief Executive Alain de Pouzilhac to resign.   
Pouzilhac has called for a board meeting on June 21 after meeting Bollore on Thursday  
(Reuters)  

  Brainy folate  
WASHINGTON  Taking large amounts of folic acid improved the memory of older adults, Dutch scientists reported yesterday in the first study to show a vitamin pill might slow the mental decline of aging.  
The research adds to mounting evidence that a diet higher in folate, a B vitamin found in grains and certain dark-coloured fruits and vegetables, is important for a variety of diseases. Its proven to lower womens risks of devastating birth defects of the brain and spinal cord, and research suggests it helps ward off heart disease and strokes.  
Its not clear how folic acid might work to protect the brain. Some studies suggest folate lowers inflammation; others suggest it may play a role in controlling dementia-related genes.  
As people age, some decline in brain function is inevitable. The Dutch study tested whether otherwise healthy people could slow that brain drain by taking double the recommended daily US dose of folic acid  the amount in 1.1 kilos of strawberries.  
The folic acid protected users brains, lead researcher Jane Durga of Wageningen University reported at a meeting of the Alzheimers Association.  
The study involved healthy older people, not those with Alzheimers symptoms, so it doesnt show if folic acid might ward off that disease.  
Thats the key question, Durga said.  
Still, folic acid offered significant brain protection, said Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist Marilyn Albert, who chairs the Alzheimers Associations science advisory council.  
Scientists have long thought that folic acid might play a role in dementia. Previous studies have shown people with low folate levels are more at risk for both heart disease and diminished cognitive function; clogged arteries slow blood flow in the brain.  
I think I would take folic acid, assuming my doctor said it was OK, Albert said, noting that long study of folic acid shows these levels are safe.                          (AP)
  Brazil and Argentina optimistic about trade talks  
Economy ministers from Brazil and Argentina meeting in Buenos Aires said that they are optimistic that both countries can reach agreements to overcome trade differences.   
Brazils Finance Minister, Antonio Palocci and his Argentine counterpart, Roberto Lavagna held a press conference also attended by Venezuelas economy minister, Nelson Merentes, at which energy issues were discussed.   
Shortly before the conference Palocci and Lavagna had held a meeting with President Nstor Kirchner in Government House.   
Interesting progress has been made, Lavagna said in response to a question on the status of Argentinas complaints about trade asymmetries with Brazil.   
We made a first proposal in September 2004 and received a counteroffer from Brazil. This year we made a new offer and received a reply from Brazil that has narrowed the differences, Lavagna said.   
The minister added that shortly there will be a technical meeting to analyze codes of conduct and competition clauses.   
Palocci said he agreed with Lavagna. We are optimistic. The current trade spats will each time be less.   
Although neither minister gave details of the negotiation Palocci commented that we shouldnt talk of safeguards in reference to the sorts of measures applied by Argentina in the past.   
The Mercosur trade bloc is scheduled to hold a presidential summit in Asuncin this weekend.   
Although there was no official statement made, president Kirchner is reported to have raised the issue of the energy crisis in the southern cone with Palocci, an issue that he raised with Chilean President Ricardo Lagos at a meeting last week.   
Lavagna denied that the ministers had discussed setting up a new South American bank although he said that they had discussed the functioning of development and financing banks in the recent past in the respective countries.   
We analysed some ideas about new financing methods. Rather than suggest new structures at the moment we analysed those that exist and how they can be improved, Lavagna said.
  British only  
By Alicia Lpez Oyhenart  
For the Herald  

 Browsing websites in search for relevant data has become a common practice. The Internet broadens horizons and helps develop language skills. For this issue I am offering a review of some websites devoted exclusively to the British  history and culture general features which will be relevant to ELT.  
*United Kingdom ()   
This webpage is actively linked to various websites, which allows both students and teachers to double-click any category needed to get detailed information on say,. UK education, geography, feasts, food, history, organizations and institutions etc. The website contains valuable and up-to-date information Besides, it provides extensive data about Ireland, Canada, Australia, the USA and New Zealand, soon also about South Africa. Worth mentioning is a vast collection of dictionaries, i.e. Acronym Finder, A Dictionary of Slang, A Dictionary of UK slang, A Dictionary of British Slang , Encyclopaedia Britannica and many more. Another important feature is the English Resources section divided into the following sections: poetry, reading, drama, Shakespeare, genre, biography, language, and media. There are various language activities, test papers and worksheets under each category   
*Woodlands Junior School ()   
One of the most comprehensive and richest EFL/ESL sites on the Web, oriented to the student. Its user-friendly layout encourages students to upgrade their language skills and broadens their knowledge about British history and culture appealing to  them with colourful photos. It features a calendar of traditions and customs observed in the UK. The section Songs, Sayings and Superstitions provides a selection of English proverbs and sayings together with the most popular and characteristic British songs. Various student discussions forums are extremely friendly. This website offers a decisive advantage to learners, i.e. worksheets supporting the material found on the pages ().  
*BBC Timelines ()   
An educational website launched by BBC, divided into sections: British Timeline, Northern Ireland Timeline, English Timeline, Scottish Timeline and Welsh Timeline. By double-clicking each section a list of topics devoted to given periods of history unfolds. Every entry features historical events and figures part of the cultural heritage of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. This page includes lots of links to other websites of interest grouped under Related Links. Really unique is the Multimedia Zone which tempts with its interactive games, virtual tours (a free VRML plug-in such as Cortona is provided by the page), animations and photos. A student-friendly design of the For Kids section () enables learners of different language level to explore the history and culture of the UK in animations and short films   
* All Info About English Culture ()   
The site offers articles that keep the readers up-to-date with the latest news and developments in England, a Bi-weekly Newsletter that  keeps viewers abreast of what is happening there and Seasonal Features.. A selection of topics including: Archaeology, Architecture, Art, Customs/Traditions, Festivals/Holidays, etc. give relevant information on a given question.   
*About (&)   
The website features articles on Great Britain and Ireland, dealing specifically with their history, culture, current events or places worth visiting with city and region guides accompanied by maps as well as peculiarities of the British and the Irish.   
*VisitBritain ()   
Two of its most prominent sections are Destination Guides, a selection of richly illustrated articles with outline and route maps attached giving the taste of Britains distinctive places, and Experiences, offering a wide variety of articles on Britains landmarks and cities. This website depicts England, Scotland, Wales and the Channel Islands from the travellers perspective and therefore may be a useful supplement to English classes. It is linked to other websites, e.g. Visit London (), which is the official London site with short articles outlining the citys most representative features and sights. Comprehensive data are grouped into the following sections: Attractions, Eating Out, Entertainment, Royal London etc. City Search is of invaluable help when looking for specific information, e.g. Londons attractions. Furthermore, Visit Britain links to Visit England (), an essential guide to English sites of interest and cities that make it conspicuous. A reference map with counties and regions marked enables a closer look at their peculiarities, yet Visit London and Visit England are rather traveller- and teacher-oriented .  
* I-UK ()  
The website, maintained by the British Council, UK Trade & Investment and Visit Britain, discloses information on Visiting the UK, Education, Life & Culture, each of them subdivided into further categories offering a vast array of articles on a given topic and related links for more detailed search  
*HeartoScotland ()  
A rich source of informative articles on Scottish customs and traditions, as well as its historical and cultural heritage, ranging from Scotlands national dishes through the origins of whisky, tartans and feasts to Scottish myths, legends and poems.   
* Irish Culture and Irish Customs ()   
A website devoted exclusively to Irish traditions and customs all outlined in short brilliant articles accompanied by rich illustrations. Kids Ireland () is a monthly column where Irish stories and legends are re-told making them more accessible for less advanced students of English                               
Alicia Lpez Oyhenart, an ISP JVGonzlez graduate, is an experienced teacher trainer with a post graduate degree at Columbia University. She has published several course books through KEL Ediciones and contributed to the Herald since 1999. She is the Editor of , the first Argentine Internet activity magazine for teachers Contact: 
  British, American or somewhere in between?  

Two countries divided by a common language.  
                              Oscar Wilde

English is not the language with the largest number of native or first language speakers, but it has become a Lingua Franca all over the world. Although English will not remain dominant amongworld languages, there is no doubt that it is and willbe a vital linguistic tool for business people,academics, tourists and citizens of the world, who need to communicate easily for the present and future to come.  
English, much like other languages, can take many forms depending on who speaks or where people do this.  In addition to geography, factors such associal class, ethnic groups, and gender affect the language causing great differences in pronunciation,vocabulary and grammar.  
English varies between and within those countries where it is spoken. It is difficult to describe this language as any one thing.  
Teachers should work with the variety that best reflects the language in use, the English that will be understood by most other English speakers in the world.  
Teachers should expose students to language varieties (listening and reading) in order to prepare them for the moment when they come into contact with different varieties.  
Certainly, we should not expose beginnerstudents to this experience. It would becounter-productive. But when their level improves, we should give them the opportunities to encounter more and different accents of the language.  
Teachers should encourage their advanced learners to cope with the normal range of listening and texts that they will use at some later stage.  

 Juan Carlos Di Sanzo. Lezama, Bs. As.

NEXT ISSUES DEBATE:The earlier the better? (see front page for details)

  Building a global village whose bricks are art  
Check out Jonas Mekas films in the Lithuanian Pavilion, a German friend whispered in my ear, as if offering a hot tip for the fifth race at Santa Anita. And two Bulgarians gave reserved nods to several installations in the big international survey of mostly young artists at the Arsenale (among them, a chandelier made of 14,000 tampons by the Portuguese artist Joana Vasconcelos, and Regina Jose Galindos films of herself shaving off her body hair, having her hymen surgically replaced, and protesting violence against women in her native Guatemala by dipping her feet in blood and walking down the street).  
Reactions to biennales are always Rashomon-like. That the current festival is generally regarded as pensive and a bit risk-averse is partly a response to the previous biennale, a fiasco that would make nearly anything else seem prudent and sober.  
Call this the first fairly adult biennale in memory. More relaxed and far more professional than last time, it stresses installations and videos, standard festival fare, steering conspicuously clear of much of the current market taste for baubled craftiness and youth as an end in itself. Gallerists I came across seemed anxious to press on to the fair in Basel and get back to business.  
Put together by Maria de Corral and Rosa Martinez, savvy Spanish veterans (and the first women in charge here in the shows 110-year history), this biennale is less macho, more cross-cultural, smarter, more attuned to womens issues but anti-didactic, and more sensuously experiential (even contemplative in parts, if thats imaginable in such an environment). Calm may be putting it too strongly, but the show is definitely saner and more pleasurable than in the past.  
Its common now to say that the commercial art fairs, like those in Basel or Miami, are the new biennales, vast malls of eclectic taste, dealer-run, not dictated by curators or hidebound by tradition, not hampered by lofty expectations or stuck with a slow schedule. Some museum survey shows now seem anxious to emulate the fairs, pandering to collectors, skipping big ideas, seeking to get ahead of the curve.  
The Venice Biennale, consensus has long had it, is the great white elephant of festivals, its national pavilions quaintly anachronistic in a global age. Its founding purpose  to introduce audiences to art they couldnt see back home  is said to be no longer relevant with jet travel, the Internet and so on, a relic from the days of steamer ships and the telegraph. Venice persists as the watering hole for the wandering art herd only because, well, its Venice. Paul Allen couldnt moor his 413-foot yacht at a biennale if it were in Atlanta or Cleveland.  
But I wonder. Visitors here actually seem to talk about art, not so much about money or real estate or collectors. They grumble, of course, but they grumble mostly about the art. The biennale is still about power, politics and tourism. Lest anyone forget that, the American artist Barbara Kruger put the words power and money in English and Italian on columns in front of the Italian Pavilion, the most conspicuous spot in the show. Among the consequences of such forces are that Gregor Schneider, the German artist, wasnt allowed to replicate the Kaaba from Mecca in San Marco; that Illy coffee stands are everywhere; that the ticket prices have been hiked; and that the Chinese, with whom the Italian government is anxious to trade, have been given a handsome space for their much promoted pavilion (a disappointment, visually speaking).  
Leave it to the Guerrilla Girls (on huge hoardings near the entrance of the Arsenale) to note that, aside from Egypt and Morocco, no African countries are represented this time around. But earlier I mentioned who liked what because the biennale  when, like this year, it doesnt kowtow too much to fashion  is still fairly global. By persisting with national pavilions, each organized independently by its own country, the biennale remains a grab bag. Corral and Martinez have done their part to broaden the spectrum by emphasizing Latin American artists. But Im not just talking about the sum of places artists are from.  
I mean theres a mixing of priorities and tastes, born of different contexts, which require efforts of translation. Perhaps I misunderstand the Chinese pavilion (I did like a video at the end analyzing the feng shui of the biennale), but at least one is made aware here that cultural gaps exist, that the whole world does not just answer to one power, share one concern, come down to the same almighty dollar.  
And in a rising climate of alarming nationalism, this may be the biennales major cultural contribution. More than trying to sum up the state of current art (a vain enterprise anyway, which no one really takes seriously), the virtue of a fair like this is perhaps in its most antique formulation: to simulate a global village, a genial and peaceful common ground, amid the honeysuckle and lapping waves, where a conversation about art can take place, one whose subtext is mutual understanding.  
For my part, I found plenty to think about this time. Mekas installation is, as the German promised, affecting, a mature suite of home movies and other films made over half a century, a creative life in sum. In the Arsenale, the Lebanese artist Mona Hatoums circle of slowly raked sand stuck with me, along with the Korean-born Kim Soojas six-channel film of a woman, back turned, standing unnoticed in the middle of several crowded cities; and the New York-based Stephen Deans trio of videos of various mobs, color-drenched panoramas, both terrifying and ecstatic.  
So did (briefly) Ricky Swallows carved wood sculptures in the Australian Pavilion, neat feats inspired by Dutch still lifes, and Hans Schabus towering wood and tar-paper mountain, subsuming the Austrian Pavilion with stuffed birds and gangways that climb to a skinny porthole with a broad perch on Venice.  
Corrals show, housed in the Italian Pavilion, which makes a notorious maze of a building functional, is on the whole blessedly adult. It builds a foundation with blue-chip standards like Philip Guston and Francis Bacon to support pictures by Marlene Dumas (a la Gerhard Richter) and Gabriel Orozco (colorful geometric paintings), as well as works by Mark Wallinger (who videotaped himself dressed as a bear and living in the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin), Tacita Dean (a haunting film of buildings and a sunset reflected in the bronzed windows of a decrepit East German government palace) and William Kentridge (a wistful homage to the days of early filmmakers, with musical accompaniment, showing the artist at work, the reels sometimes running jerkily backward, so that Kentridge miraculously rubs a charcoal self-portrait back into focus).  
Ed Ruscha, the American representative, takes subtle measure of the architecture of the American Pavilion, with its classical, mirrored wings, by juxtaposing two suites of five pictures each: one, from 1992, is gritty, grisaille imaginings of industrial buildings in Los Angeles, and the other is recent versions of more or less the same places, altered, fenced in or gone, in candied colors. Mature, laconic and strangely grave, the work conveys an acute attention to place and light, and an almost wistful sense of time past.  
My French friend was also right. Messagers installation is a treat, with that hypnotic room of billowing red fabric, a lava sea of swimmy shapes within which lighted shapes appear, a cycle of civilization as if underwater, an Atlantis of dreams. And speaking of Danes, on an island in the Lagoon, Olafur Eliasson (half-Danish, half-Icelandic) has devised a pavilion, with views onto the water and ramps leading into a blackened room with a thin beam of light, like a horizon line, 360 degrees around, its intensity and color slowly shifting. The light is a Venetian spring day condensed into 14 minutes. A visitors senses adjust to the changes, bringing body and sight slowly into equilibrium.  
Finally, in the Church of San Stae, as a satellite of the Swiss Pavilion, Pipilotti Rist is projecting onto the ceiling a giddy, psychedelic kaleidoscope version of heaven: naked nymphs prancing with ripe fruit in tropical locales. Viewers recline shoeless on cushions, 50 at a time. Tiepolo, Cranach, Duchamp and Helio Oiticica come to mind all at once  or at least, Cranach on acid. Very cool. Very Zen.
  Business in Brief  

Fathers Day sales up 2%  
Sales on Fathers Day this year rose 2 percent, compared to the same date last year, according to a survey by the Argentine Confederation of the Medium-sized Companies (CAME). Credit cards were out to capture spending, reinstating the six payment plan at zero interest, which were extended until yesterday, according to a press release from the confederation. Sales concentrated on household and personal use items, posting a 12 percent rise in wine sales, and an 8 percent rise in spirits. Mobile phones and computer accessories also benefited from six month payment plans and special promotions to boost sales. Sporting goods sales, particularly alternative brands, and footwear, also rose by 5 percent, compared to the same date last year.

Suez to sell off stake in waterworks company   
The French Suez Group will negotiate the sale of 52 percent of its stocks in Aguas Provinciales Santa Fe with the Argentine Emgasud SA company, according to a press release from the French companys headquarters. Aguas Provinciales de Santa Fe provides running water and sewage services to some 1.8 million people in 15 districts in that province. The waterworks company came into crisis a couple of months ago, when the French group informed Jorge Obeids government their decision to retire from the concession.

Ferrer could become IDB president  
President Nstor Kirchner said yesterday that former Economy Minister Aldo Ferrer is one of the Argentine candidates to replace Enrique Iglesias, as head of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). There are several candidates, Kirchner told reporters, Aldo Ferrer is one of them. President Kirchner ruled out that Economy Minister Roberto Lavagna as a possible successor to Iglesias, refuting versions from the press.

Venezuela begins exporting fuel oil to China  
CARACAS  Venezuela has begun exporting fuel oil to China under a trade agreement between the oil-rich South American nation and Asias energy-hungry economic powerhouse. Venezuelas state-run oil company Petrleos de Venezuela SA sent an initial shipment of 1.8 million barrels of fuel oil to China last week, according to information posted on the companys website yesterday. During a trip to Beijing in December, President Hugo Chvez signed a series of trade and cooperation agreements with his Chine counterpart, Hu Jintao, for the joint development of Venezuelan oil fields. China has pledged a credit line of US$40 million for Venezuelan agriculture, and help for the Chvez administrations plans to launch a satellite. Chinese firms are also to build railroads in Venezuela.

Switzerland wants free trade agreement with US  
ZURICH  Switzerland wants a free trade agreement with the US to remove average import duties of 4.5 percent on Swiss processed goods, Finance Minister Hans-Rudolf Merz said yesterday. Such an agreement would create preferential access for Swiss exporters to one of their most important markets, Merz said, according to a text of his speech to the Swiss-American Chamber of Commerce in Zurich. The Finance Minister cited existing free trade agreements between the United States and other countries, saying that they were harming the competitiveness of Swiss industries such as chemicals and watch making. The potential for discrimination in relation to the Swiss economy is growing, in view of numerous American initiatives, Merz added.

Minimum wage hike agreed in Chile   
SANTIAGO  The government and workers reached an agreement yesterday to raise the minimum wage to the equivalent of US$217 per month. If approved by Congress, the measure will come into effect on July 1, and also foresees an increase for next year, to reach the equivalent of US$230. The Workers Union Centre (CUT) believes it has been a good, but not an excellent, negotiation. We are pleased to have achieved some progress in the minimum wage, said Arturo Martnez, the president of the main union organization in the country. Labour Minister Yerko Ljubetic said that this is a good agreement within the context of a solid economic reactivation, and the recovery of employment. This is the first agreement to be reached in years between the government and CUT.

Discrepancies on remittances to Mexico  
MEXICO  In recent years, the Bank of Mexico has reported a historic growth in the remittances that Mexicans send home from abroad, although some questions have begun to arise about the accuracy of these figures. The Central Bank recently said that remittances, almost entirely sent from the US, totalled US$16.6 billion in 2004, but the Social Development Secretariat (Sedesol) points out that the amount probably did not reach US$10 billion. It is surprising that two institutions would have such a significant discrepancy... these are scandalous differences, said Rodolfo Tuirn, one of the officials in charge of the Sedesol study.

  Campbell surprise US Open champion  Cabrera 33rd  

GOLF  
US Open

By David Mackintosh  
For the Herald

PINEHURST, North Carolina  New Zealands Michael Campell won the US Open at Pinehurst yesterday in the most stoic fashion, outplaying the field and taking full advantage of a ghastly collapse by defending champion Retief Goosen.  
Campbell carded 1-under par 69 for a total of 280, fulfilling the early-week forecast that even-par for the four championship rounds at Pinehurst No. 2 would be the winning score. Tiger Woods finished runner-up, a 69 for 282, but although he posed the only back-nine threat to Campbells victory, over the closing holes he unable to convert the vital putts that might have led to a playoff.  
Despite having won six times on the European Tour (three times in 2000) Campbells only brush major championship fame came in 1995 at St. Andrews, where he led after the third round, only to miss the playoff between John Daly and Costantino Rocca by one stroke. Ten years later, aged 36, New Zealander Campbell found his way into this event by way of the first US Open qualifier held in England.  
I almost did not come, a tearful Campbell said after a moving trophy presentation ceremony. Ive had so many ups and downs in my career, and Ive just kept persevering and working on my game, no matter how bad things got. This is truly unbelievable. I thought at the beginning of the round if I could shoot something around 3-under for the day Id have a chance so all I did was try and play my best aggressive golf.  
Then I made a few long putts and some important par saves and suddenly, well, Im here. It just goes to prove that perseverance pays. I think I deserve it. Ive worked hard for it. And Ive got it!  
Goosens birdie-less 81, plummeting him from a three-stroke overnight lead to share of 11th place, was as inexplicable to him as it was to the vast crowds whod come to watch him rubber-stamp a third US Open crown: I dont know what happened, Cool-Goose told the same group of writers who one day earlier had pretty much conceded him the title.  
I just never got going. I made a few mistakes early on but when I made a good par-save at the 8th I thought Id got my game back on track. But my putter would not work and really from the 12th onward (where he started a string of five consecutive bogeys) I knew it was over.  
While Woods and Goosen were dropping shots to par on the opening holes, Campbell was already in high gear, reaching the turn in level-par, then turning up the heat with long-putt birdies at the 10th, 12th and 17th, permitting the luxury of bogeys at the 16th and 18th without ever putting the title in danger. I changed my entire putting set-up just two weeks ago, Campbell added. Id have to say that change has really paid dividends!  
Angel Cabreras disappointing week finished on a distinctly negative note, six bogeys and just one birdie 75 for 292, 12-over par for the week and a nine-way share of 33rd spot.

Saint-Omer Open  
SWEDE BACKSTROM BEATS BRITON DWYER IN PLAYOFF  
In Saint Omer, France: Swede Joakim Backstrm claimed the Saint-Omer Open title and a one-year European Tour exemption when he beat Britains Paul Dwyer in a sudden-death playoff yesterday.  
The pair had finished a stroke ahead of the field on four-under-par 280 and Backstrm, who birdied the last to get into the shootout, then took the title with a par at the first extra hole after Dwyer missed a two-foot putt to bogey.  
As the tough course and conditions took their toll, Backstrms one-under-par 70 and a 68 by Dwyer took them to the top of the leaderboard before the Swede earned instant promotion to the full European Tour with his maiden victory.  
Having a one-year exemption means everything, said Backstrm.  
Ive been sitting by my phone most weeks, wondering whether I was going to get into tournaments and now I can plan my schedule.  
Britains James Heath looked to have the title in his grasp when leading by two strokes with four holes to go but the 22-year-old Nick Faldo protege had problems with his grip in humid conditions, double-bogeying the 15th through missing the green.  
A bogey on the last ended his chance of taking part in the playoff.  
Heaths closing 72 left him sharing third place with two more Swedes, Michael Jonzon and Steven Jeppesen, with the disappointed British youngster now having to regroup if he is to realize his ambition of earning a tour card from seven invitations this season.

  Chabn mulls leaving BA area  

Omar Chabn, the main suspect in the Repblica Croman rock club blaze, is considering to move to a small town in Buenos Aires province or even to another province in order to avoid demonstrations against him, his lawyers said yesterday.  
Chabn was freed on bail last week and is now living in the flat of his ageing mother in the Greater Buenos Aires district of San Martn.   
Since his arrival there last Tuesday, the place has seen nearly around-the-clock demonstrations by relatives and friends of the victims of the rock club fire, which killed 194 people.  
Chabns lawyer Pedro DAttoli said yesterday that his client is very concerned about his relatives and neighbours, who are also suffering the demonstrators harassment.  
Under the terms of his bail, Chabn has to notify the judge investigating the rock club inferno, Julio Lucini, and the litigant lawyers in the case of his whereabouts. This means that wherever Chabn decides to go, the relatives of the victims will know.  
Chabn spends his time at her mothers reading the case against him and reading books, DAttoli added.  
Chabn, who is facing charges of manslaughter, was the manager and alleged owner of the club in the city neighbourhood of Once. The place caught fire after a flare fired by a fan of the rock band Callejeros ignited an inflammable soundproof ceiling material minutes after a gig started on December 30. The place was overcrowded and became a death trap as its main emergency exit was locked. It was the worst non-natural tragedy in the history of Argentina.  
The Buenos Aires province government has asked Judge Lucini to move Chabn somewhere else, as the San Martn district authorities have complained that his presence is disrupting normal life in the area.  
The incident happened in the city of Buenos Aires, the judge is a national judge, everything in the case is related to the city of Buenos Aires, so I think Chabn should be placed somewhere in the city of Buenos Aires, said provincial Security Minister Len Arslanin yesterday.  
The provincial administration has allocated 70 police officers to watch Chabn at a cost of around 4,000 pesos a day. Provincial government authorities have said the special protection cannot last for long.  
We have already told the judge that the province cannot provide so much security for too long, said provincial Security Secretary Martn Arias Duval.  
Buenos Aires City Mayor Anbal Ibarra, meanwhile, urged the public to be rational and accept the court ruling that allowed Chabn to walk free pending trial after paying a half-a-million-peso bail. Ibarra has been in political dire straits since the blaze. 

  (Herald staff with Tlam)

  China making progress towards WTO compliance  
After three-plus years since its joining the WTO, foreign business executives see China as making some progress toward meeting its formal WTO obligations but compliance is still incomplete. Substantial problems remain, especially at provincial and local levels, in intellectual property rights enforcement, regulatory transparency and business dispute resolution.  
While multinational firms from the around the globe have been rushing to make China a major focus of business strategy and investment, two thirds of executives surveyed reported that doing business in China is more difficult than in other markets. Of the 99 firms surveyed- all of them with substantial operations in China-over 50 percent felt that the Chinese central governments implementation of WTO obligations is only fair to poor, and the results get worse for sub-national government implementation. The responses of the US and Japanese firms surveyed to these and a range of other questions about the Chinese business climate were similar and tended to be more critical-in some cases substantially more critical-than those of the UK firms.  
The survey shows that multinational firms give the Chinese central government generally passing grades for meeting its formal WTO obligations. But the actual implementation of those obligations-in protecting and enforcing intellectual property rights, in providing a transparent regulatory environment, and in establishing processes for fair and equitable resolutions of business disputes-still needs to be substantially improved. This is particularly the case at the provincial and local levels about which the firms in the survey reported most dissatisfaction.  
Protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) was the number one concern for the executives. Some 62 percent of those responding gave low marks to Chinas IPR enforcement at the provincial and local levels, as did 56 percent for enforcement at the national level and 52 percent for the national-level legal and statutory framework of IPR. Half or more of those responding also gave low marks to legal reforms to align Chinas laws with international standards (53 percent) and the transparency of laws and regulations (50 percent).   
The resolution of business disputes emerged as another major issue for the foreign executives.   
The majority (62 percent) of companies that had had a business dispute with a local Chinese company described the problem of resolving disputes in China as serious; 30 percent said this was a very serious problem. More than half (58 percent) of companies that had disputes in China had experienced problems of either nonpayment or discounting of a payment on a contractual agreement. Companies that had had a dispute reported taking multiple actions to try to settle the dispute. However, most said they would avoid local courts and official Chinese arbitration systems. Moreover, a plurality of executives reported that favoritism toward local business interests is a major problem in the local Chinese court system. Overall, only half reported being satisfied with the resolution of disputes.   
More than three out of five (61%) of the companies in the survey reported being satisfied with their own governments efforts to ensure that China meets it WTO obligations. But about a third of US (34%) and quarter of UK firms (24%) reported being unsatisfied.  
The Business Climate in China Today: Attitudes of British, Japanese, and US Companies survey was undertaken by the Center for International Business of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth in order to learn about the current business climate for companies.
  Chinese Puppy cooler  
ap  
Puppies nap near a frozen bottle of water yesterday during a warm afternoon in Beijing. Summer temperatures in the Chinese capital often reach the high 30 degrees Celsius, prompting humans and animals alike to seek alternative forms of cooling.
  Chinese vice premier criticizes US restrictions on Chinese textile imports  
HONG KONG  Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi praised the European Union last Monday for settling a trade dispute over Chinas surging textile exports, and criticized the US for slapping a restriction on textiles before talks could resolve the disagreement.  
Wu said in a keynote speech to the biggest Asia-Pacific business organization that it was natural for countries to have some friction as global trade brings economies closer together.  
The key is how to handle this friction, she told the Pacific Basin Economic Council.  
Wu complained about Americas recent decision to impose a 7.5 percent cap on the increase in Chinese textiles this year. This severely harmed Chinese textile enterprises that were enjoying the benefits of globalization, she said.  
We strongly urge nations to respect WTO regulations and to use fair negotiations and cooperative efforts to properly manage the textile issue, she said.  
The US started restricting Chinese textiles after international textile quotas were scrapped on Jan. 1. The US and the European Union have complained that cheap Chinese textiles have been flooding their markets and that measures are needed to better manage the swelling imports.  
Both the US and the Europeans insisted that under the rules of the World Trade Organization, they can restrict imports that are disrupting their markets. But China has argued that they have yet to clearly prove market disruption.  
Over the weekend, the EU and China agreed on limits on Chinese textile exports. The deal allows for gradually rising caps on increases in Chinese textile exports to Europe over the next three years, with all limits to be done away with in 2008.  
Wu said the agreement was proof that two sides can use the principles of equality, mutual interest and mutual respect to resolve trade disputes.  
China has no agreement with the United States on textiles.            (AP)
  cinema june 20, 2005  

Information published is correct to the best of our   
knowledge, but subject to   
unannounced changes.  
Downtown  
ABASTO SHOPPING  
Av. cORRIENTES 3200  
Phone: 4866-4800  
 Niera a prueba de balas - The Pacific (NR) In Spanish  at 11am., 1:05, 3:35, 5:50, 8:15 & 10:45pm.   
  Batman inicia - Batman Begins (NC13) at 11am., 12:20, 1, 1:50, 2:40, 4:40, 5:30, 7.30, 8:20, 10:30 & 11:10pm.     
 La casa de cera - House of Wax (NC16.) at 1:15, 6:10 & 11pm.      
 Cama adentro (NR) at 11:25am., 4 & 8:50pm.    
 Robots (NR) In Spanish at 11:05am.   
 Star Wars Episode III. Revenge of the Sith (NC13) Subtitled   
at 7:50  & 11pm.                   
 Star Wars Episodio III. La venganza de los Sith  (NC13)  in Spanish at 11:05am., 1:45 & 4:45pm.  
 Sr. y Sra. Smith (NC13) at 11:10am., 12, 1:50, 2:40, 4:40, 5:30, 7:30, 8:20, 10:30 & 11:10pm.  
 Melinda y Melinda (NC13)  at 11:15am., 1:20, 3:40, 6, 8:30 & 10:50pm.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             
 La cada (NC16) at 12:15, 3:35, 7 & 10:20pm.     
 Pap se volvi loco (NR) at 11 & 11:40am., 1, 1:40,  3:15, 4, 5:40, 6:20, 8, 8:45, 10:30 & 11:15pm. 

ATlas Patio Bullrich  
Posadas 1245. Phone: 4816-3801                            
 Cama adentro (NR) at 1, 4:40 & 10:10pm.  
 De-Lovely (NR)  at 3, 5:20,  8 & 10:30pm.   
 La cada (NC16) at 1:20, 4:30, 7:30 & 10:20pm.   
 Melinda y Melinda (NC13)  at 12:30, 2:30, 4:30, 6:30, 8:30 & 10:30pm.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       
 Sr. y Sra. Smith (NC13) at 12:50, 3:20, 6, 8:20 & 10:40pm.  
 El hombre del bosque - The Woodsman (NC16) at 12:30, 2:20, 4:20, 6:20 & 8:20pm.  
  Una mujer infiel - The Door on the Floor (NC16)  at 12:50, 3:20, 5:40, 8 & 10:30pm. 

ATLAS SANTA FE  
aV. sANTA fE 2015  
Phone 4823-7878   
Sala 1  
 Melinda y Melinda (NC13)  at 12:50, 2:50, 5, 7, 9 & 11pm.       
SALA 2  
 Una mujer infiel - The Door on the Floor (NC16)  at 1:25, 3:40, 6. 8:15 & 10:30pm.  

CINE Electric  
lavalle 836  PHONE: 4322-1846   
sala 1  
 Cruzada (NC13) at 1:15, 6 & 10:35pm.  
 Miss Simpata (NC13) at 4:55 & 8:35pm.    
sala 2  
 La marca de la bestia (NC16) at  1, 5 & 8:55pm.   
 Sahara (NR) at 2:45,  6:45 & 10:40pm.    
Sala  3  
 La llamada 2 (NC16) at 1:05, 5:05 & 8:55pm.     
 Constantine (NC16) at 3, 7 & 11pm.

cinemark 8 Puerto madero  
ALICIA Moreau  de Justo 1960.  
Phone. 4315-3008 .  
 Una mujer infiel - The Door on the Floor (NC16)  at 1, 3:20, 5.45, 8 & 10:20pm.   
 Starwars Episode III (NC13) In English at 1:45, 4:45, 7:45 & 10:45pm.  
. La cada (NC16) at 1:30, 4:35, 7:35 & 10:35pm.     
 Pap se volvi loco (NR) at 1:40.,  3:15,  5:35, 7:55 & 10:10pm.      
 Sr. y Sra. Smith (NC13) at 12:30, 3:05, 5:40, 8:15 & 10:50pm. .  
 Niera a prueba de balas - The Pacific (NR) In Spanish  at 1:20, 3:40 & 6pm.  
 Batman inicia - Batman Begins (NC13) at 12:45, 2, 3:55, 4:55, 6:50, 7:50, 9:50 & 10:40pm.   
 La intrprete (NC13) at 8:20 & 11pm.

 COMPLEJO DE CINE TITA MERELLO  
sUIPACHA 442. PHONE. 4322-1195  
sala 1 - mirtha legrand  
 Slo un ngel (NC13) at 1, 2:45, 4.30, 6:15, 8 & 11:45pm.  
.sala 2 - AMELIA BENCE.  
 La esperanza (NC13) at 1:10, 4:35 & 8:05pm.  
 Ronda Nocturna (NC16) at 2:50, 6:20 & 9;50pm.  
sala 3 - DELIA GARCES  
 Oro Nazi en la Argentina  (NR) at 3, 6:25 & 9:55pm.  
 Hermanas (NR) at 31:20, 4.45 & 8:20pm.

COMPLEJO MONUMENTAL  
lavalle 739.  phone. 4322-1515  
  Batman inicia - Batman Begins (NC13) at 12:45, 2.15, 3:15, 4:15, 5:45, 7:25, 9:45 & 10:45pm.  Sun. late night