less of gender. Perhaps Rosalind was
merely a very good scientist, not a great one. Or, perhaps, given a little more
time, she would have discovered the structure of DNA herself. Crick has
generously ventured that she was three months away, but it is doubtful that
Rosalind realized it, given her decision to leave the investigation of DNA to
take up the crystallographic study of viruses.
Still, as Maddox notes,
"Rosalind's Photograph 51 was the pivotal moment in the discovery of the
double helix." Doesn't that make her partly responsible for that
discovery? Well, there are two senses of "responsible": a moral sense
and a causal sense. Rosalind was not morally responsible for the discovery,
because she didn't willingly share or publish her most important data and she
spurned would-be collaborators, including Watson and Crick. It was Wilkins who
showed Photograph 51 to Watson. Maddox absolves Wilkins of the charge that it
was unethical of him to have done so, but still maintains that Wilkins's action
was "unwise." It is hard to see why. The ban on Watson and Crick's
working on DNA had nothing to do with gentlemanly fair play; it was an attempt
to allocate scientific resources efficiently—resources that were quite scarce
in postwar Britain. Besides, Rosalind had already had the photograph for nine
months without interpreting it correctly—whereas Watson saw its significance at
a glance. What was unwise—and a little cowardly—was Watson and Crick's
unwillingness to admit to Rosalind that they had been given access to her
photograph, and their failure to acknowledge her experimental work more
graciously, at least during her lifetime.
Was Rosalind, then, at least causally
responsible for the DNA discovery, in the sense that it would not have happened
without her? It is true that Photograph 51 helped to confirm the double-helix
model. As Watson wrote in the epilogue to "The Double Helix" (added
to make amends for his waspish treatment of Rosalind in the book), "The
x-ray work she did at King's is increasingly regarded as superb." But she
had been entrusted with the best DNA sample and the most sophisticated
fine-focus cameras. There is no reason to think that Wilkins, had he been given
charge of these resources, would not have obtained comparably crisp X-ray
photographs—or, at least, some that were good enough to yield the few basic
measurements that Watson and Crick needed.
Rosalind's later scientific career was
highly successful and relatively happy. She travelled extensively in the United
States, lecturing on coal to "the carbon crowd" and on the crystallography
of viruses to scientific audiences. She had friendly encounters with Jim Watson
(who by now had become something of a celebrity, appearing in an issue of Vogue
opposite Richard Burton). America seemed to bring out the sunny side of this sometimes
dour woman. "I have completely fallen for Southern California," she
wrote in one of the many letters quoted by Maddox. (Among her Fanny
Trollope-like observations was that Americans "seem to make nearly all
their own furniture. It is a curious result of high standards of
living—everybody earns a lot, so nobody can afford to pay anybody else.")
While Rosalind was in California, around her thirty-sixth birthday, she became
aware of persistent pains in her lower abdomen. Less than two years later, she
was dead of ovarian cancer. It seems likely that her constant exposure to X
rays was one of the causes.
Had Rosalind lived, would she have
shared the 1962 Nobel Prize awarded for the discovery of the double helix?
Maddox poses this inevitable question, only to banish it to the same idle file
as "What if Kennedy had not gone to Dallas?" It's unlikely that
Rosalind would have been named a co-winner along with Watson, Crick, and
Wilkins, for the Nobel committee's practice—later codified as a rule—is never
to divide a prize among more than three people. But Wilkins's claim to the
laurel was surely weaker. His main contribution to the discovery of the double
helix was not his experimental work, which was minimal after Rosalind's
arrival, but his role as a go-between for the London and the Cambridge labs.
Another "what if" is worth
considering. What if Linus Pauling had had access to one of Rosalind's
photographs? Pauling's command of stereochemistry had already enabled him to
work out the helical structure of proteins single-handedly. The information he
had about DNA was meagre, though, and had been gleaned from old X-ray images
that were a misleading blur of its wet and dry forms. Had Pauling come to
London and had a glance at Photograph 51, he would surely have deduced the
correct structure as quickly as Watson and Crick did. But Pauling was a
campaigner against nuclear weapons. A witness before a committee of the House
of Representatives had accused him of Communist sympathies. He was kept from
seeing the King's College X-ray pictures by a State Department travel ban. As
it happens, Pauling did win a Nobel Prize, his second, in 1962, the same year
that Watson, Crick, and Wilkins did; but his was for peace.
llllllllll
Apparent gaps in White House e-mail
archives coincide with dates in late 2003 and early 2004 when the
administration was struggling to deal with the CIA leak investigation and the
possibility of a congressional probe into Iraq intelligence failures.
The gaps - 473 days over a period of
20 months - are cited in a chart prepared by White House computer technicians
and shared in September with the House Reform and Government Oversight
Committee, which has been looking into reports of missing e-mail.
Among the times for which e-mail may
not have been archived from Vice President Dick Cheney's office are four days
in early October 2003, just as a federal probe was beginning into the leak of
Valerie Plame's CIA identity, an inquiry that eventually ensnared Cheney's
chief of staff.
Contents of the chart - which the
White House now disputes - were disclosed Thursday by Rep. Henry Waxman, a
California Democrat who chairs the House committee, as he announced plans for a
Feb. 15 hearing.
Waxman said he decided to release
details from the White House-prepared chart after presidential spokesman Tony
Fratto declared "we have absolutely no reason to believe that any e-mails
are missing."
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=a1206a74-5f7f-443f-97f5-9b389a4d4f9e&m=0
Among the periods of time for which
the chart indicates e-mail is missing is a five-day span starting on Jan. 29,
2004, when the White House was dealing with the possibility of an election-year
probe by Congress into Iraq intelligence failures.
Not archived by the office of the vice
president is e-mail for Jan. 29-31, 2004, according to chart information
released by Waxman. In addition, all e-mail from the White House Office in the
Executive Office of the President was listed as missing for one of those days.
The chart indicates that e-mail also
was not archived by the White House on the following Monday - Feb. 2, 2004 -
the day President Bush took a big step in averting what could have been a
politically troublesome congressional inquiry. He ordered an independent investigation
into intelligence failures in Iraq.
The president conferred that day with
former chief weapons inspector David Kay, declaring, "I want to know all
the facts."
The commission named by Bush reached a
harsh verdict about the U.S. intelligence community's performance, but the
panel stopped short of addressing the White House's use of the intelligence
data to support the idea of war with Iraq.
The White House says computer back-up
tapes should contain substantially all e-mails between 2003 and 2005. However,
the White House recycled backup tapes until sometime in October 2003, taping
over existing data. That could mean some e-mail is gone forever if it is also
missing from archives.
An example might be any missing e-mail
from Cheney's office in the early days of the CIA leak probe. The White House
has not said when in October 2003 it halted the recycling of backup tapes.
E-mails in early October 2003 could
reveal key discussions between White House personnel in the week after the
Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into the leak of Plame's CIA
identity. The White House denied that Cheney chief of staff I. Lewis
"Scooter" Libby or top presidential adviser Karl Rove were involved
in the leak, an assertion that turned out to be false.
"Can it be a mere coincidence
that some of the missing e-mail correspond to a key period during the Valerie
Plame investigation?" asked Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens
for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. "Given everything else we
know, that is nearly impossible to believe."
Her organization is one of two private
advocacy groups suing the White House in the e-mail controversy.
At issue on Oct. 1, 2003, was the push
by congressional Democrats for Attorney General John Ashcroft to step aside and
appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate the White House.
Ashcroft eventually recused himself,
and at the end of 2003 U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed by a
Justice Department official to head the probe. Two years later, Libby was
indicted, and he was later convicted of obstructing the investigation. His 30-month
prison sentence was commuted by Bush. Rove was questioned by a federal grand
jury five times but was never charged.
In January 2006, shortly after Libby
was indicted, a letter from Fitzgerald to Libby's lawyers was the first public
disclosure that the White House was having a problem with its e-mail system.
Fitzgerald wrote: "We have
learned that not all e-mail of the Office of Vice President and the Executive
Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through
the normal archiving process on the White House computer system."
The White House says the e-mail matter
arose in October 2005 in connection with the Justice Department's CIA leak
probe, in which Fitzgerald later that month obtained a grand jury indictment
against Libby for perjury, obstruction and lying to the FBI.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, we
are again reminded why consumers have a healthy distrust of insurance
companies. After years of religiously paying premiums for the peace of mind of
knowing they were covered, hundreds of thousands of policyholders found they
had been paying money for nothing.
Insurance companies have employed
hardball tactics like delaying or denying the payment of legitimate claims,
altering policies, lowballing, aggressively fighting valid claims and even
alleging fraud long before Katrina. And for good reason: every dollar saved on
paying claims is a dollar that increases profits and drives up stock value.
With insurance company CEOs receiving annual compensation greater than the
gross national product of many nations, it's easy to see why profits might get put
ahead of the interests of policy holders.
After Katrina, the international
consulting firm McKinsey & Co. was retained by many insurance companies to
stem the anticipated tide of claims payments. McKinsey had introduced a
strategy of "deny, delay and defend" under which insurers offer some
customers less than full value of their claims and deny payment and
aggressively litigate other claims. A policyholder is then forced to sue to
recover what is owed and must incur both the cost of litigation and further
delays in obtaining payment.
Many policyholders simply accept what
is offered to avoid having to hire counsel and bring suit, and because of the
costs involved, those who bring suit net out much less than the policy provides
for. The strategy works very well, at least for stockholders of insurance
companies. Despite the historic losses caused by Katrina, the property casualty
insurance industry (those who sell coverage on homes and cars) is reaping huge
profits. Property casualty insurers reported their highest profits ever, $64
billion, in 2006. This trumps the previous record profit of $44 billion they
made in 2005, even after accounting for Katrina claims. Experts predict that
2007 looks like another stellar year for the industry.
The insurance industry has awakened to
the fact that its reputation has been seriously damaged by Katrina. "I
know that we cannot wave a magic wand and convince the vast majority of the
public to love us," says David Sampson, president of the Property Casualty
Insurers Association of America.
The company has hired Frank Luntz, a
Republican pollster and accomplished wordsmith, best known for labeling
President Bush's pro-logging industry policy "the Healthy Forests
Initiative."
But a battery of public relations
consultants will not solve the public's mistrust of the insurance industry if
the end result is just word games, smoke and mirrors. Here's a thought: why not
try paying legitimate claims on time? When a tragedy occurs, why not send in a
quick response team with check-writing authority right away instead of spending
days in the board room dreaming up ways to avoid or delay paying policyholders?
How about throwing McKinsey's "deny, delay and defend" strategy into
Lake Pontchartrain and focusing instead on improving business practices? And rather
than spending a fortune to lobby against laws that would protect consumers, why
not actively work to reduce the preventable losses your policyholders regularly
sustain?
Acting in good faith isn't just good
public relations or a sound business practice for insurance companies: they
have a fiduciary duty to promptly pay the legitimate claims of their
policyholders.
Many states are busy trying to enact
new laws that will force insurance companies to act more responsibly. In
November, voters in Washington state approved a ballot measure allowing
policyholders to sue for restitution if an insurance company
"unreasonably" denies a legitimate claim. The law is similar to one
in Pennsylvania that holds insurance companies accountable for misconduct. This
gives policyholders some protection against "deny, delay, and defend"
tactics. That may explain why the insurance industry spent $11.5 million to try
to defeat the measure in Washington -- breaking a state record for spending on
a referendum.
Fortunately, voters saw through the
insurance companies' clever ads and approved the measure. More states should
follow Pennsylvania's and Washington's example.
Rule No. 1 for how to succeed in any
business is to play by the rules and treat customers honestly and fairly. Only
by treating their policyholders as well as they do their shareholders can
insurance companies hope to win back the public's trust.
In 1941, Rasha Shuster and her two
sisters escaped from their hometown just before the Germans slaughtered the
12,000 Jews who lived there. A peasant sheltered the girls for three weeks.
Then his neighbor betrayed them. The local police killed Rasha's sisters, but
she heard the gunshots and ran for her life. After weeks of wandering in the
forests and finding only temporary shelter, she was taken in by a middle-aged,
truly destitute peasant living alone in a shack. She hid there for 21⁄2 years.
Later, she recalled: "When I asked him why he was doing this and risking
his life . . . he answered that it was because I was not guilty of
anything."
The town where Rasha Shuster lived and
where thousands of Jews died wasn't in Germany or Poland or anywhere else in
the Europe so often described in Holocaust narratives. Shuster was from
Stoklishki, Lithuania, and the police -- eager to do the Nazis' bidding by
shooting her sisters -- were fellow Lithuanians. Her first-person account is
found in "The Unknown Black Book," an extraordinary collection of
eye-witness reports, diary entries and other accounts of the mass murder of
Jews far from the gates of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Of the six million Jews
murdered in the Holocaust, more than 2.5 million died in territories controlled
by the Soviet Union before the war. Most of the victims were slaughtered in
open-air massacres.
"The Unknown Black Book" is
the first publication of materials excluded for political reasons from
"The Black Book," a collection of survivors' testimony that was
compiled toward the end of the war but then ran afoul of the Stalinist regime
-- even after it was heavily censored -- and fell into political limbo for
decades. The project traces its roots to February 1942, when the Soviet
government established the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) in an effort to
drum up international support as the Red Army struggled to withstand the
onslaught of the German Wehrmacht.
Headed by the Yiddish actor Solomon
Mikhoels and staffed by other well-known actors, writers and poets, the JAC did
its job for a year, publishing articles, making radio broadcasts and hosting
visitors in Moscow. But when the fortunes of war changed after the Soviet
victory at Stalingrad in 1943, the regime began to have second thoughts about
the JAC.
As Soviet forces advanced to the west,
revealing the Nazis' systematic extermination of Jews, the JAC felt duty-bound
to collect and present the evidence of genocide. The committee started
gathering eyewitness testimony about the atrocities and planned to publish a
collection of the accounts. The JAC had thought its "Black Book"
effort, led by well-known Soviet Jewish writers Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily
Grossman, would both serve the Soviet cause and record the Jews' terrible fate
under German rule. But when it became apparent that any accounting of the
genocide would include descriptions of the often enthusiastic cooperation
between Soviet citizens and Nazi occupiers, the government balked, accusing the
JAC of focusing on "the vile activity of traitors among the Ukrainians,
Lithuanians, and others."
Publication of "The Black
Book" was deemed "inexpedient." In January 1948, Solomon
Mikhoels was assassinated on Stalin's orders, heralding the beginning of an
anti-Semitic campaign that ended only with Stalin's death in 1953. The secret
police soon arrested the leaders and staff of the JAC on charges of
"bourgeois nationalism." Following mock trials, 13 of them were
executed in 1952.
For several decades thereafter only a
few experts knew about the existence of the Russian "Black Book."
Incomplete versions of it began appearing in the 1980s; in 1993, the first
complete version of "The Black Book" was published in Lithuania with
newly discovered material from Russian archives and with government-censored
sections restored. That same year, "The Unknown Black Book" was
published in Russia. Now we have a translation by Christopher Morris and Joshua
Rubenstein, edited by Mr. Rubenstein, the Northeast regional director of
Amnesty International USA, and Ilya Altman, co-chairman of the Russian Research
and Educational Holocaust Center in Moscow.
It is impossible to convey the full
impact of these testimonies in a short review. But a few examples may provide
an inkling of the nature of the material. Sara Gleykh described the destruction
of the Jewish population of Mariupol, a city in the Ukraine. The Germans
arrived there on Oct. 8, 1941, and immediately instituted anti-Jewish measures.
On Oct. 18, Sara's family was ordered to leave their apartment for
resettlement: Neighbors, told that they could "take whatever they
wanted," Sara recalled, "all rushed into the apartment" and
"quarreled over things before my eyes, snatching things out of each
other's hands and dragging off pillows, pots and pans, quilts." That day,
the 9,000 Jews of the city were murdered. Sara, who lost her entire family,
climbed out of the mass grave and eventually reached the Soviet lines.
In Minsk, Tsetsilia Shapiro, a
26-year-old doctor, found herself enclosed in the city's ghetto -- guarded
mostly by Belorussian policemen -- with a newborn baby and a 5-year-old boy.
When she begged a former colleague and professor of medicine to help her find
work in the countryside, he responded: "We don't send kikes to work. We
exterminate them if they don't understand that they're supposed to drop dead
from hunger." When the Germans began murdering the Jews with gas vans, as
extra entertainment "young women had their hair tied to the axles of the
vehicles in such a way that they were dragged alive through the city"
while "the killing by gas of those who were inside the mobile vans was
being carried out." Shapiro escaped with false papers to Gomel, where the
chief of police, a former Red Army officer, sent her to a German racial
"specialist." Fortunately, he determined that she was
"undoubtedly" of Aryan descent.
Shapiro's son survived in an
orphanage, protected from German inspections by not having been circumcised.
Another witness from Minsk, Tamar Gershakovich, maintained that "many
Russians and Belorussians, risking not only their own lives but the lives of
their families, hid Jewish children in their homes." But accounts from
Lithuania paint a grim picture of local participation in murder and robbery.
The Lithuanian underground fighter Dr. Viktor Kutroga described how Lithuanian
"partisans" -- meaning civilian collaborators -- "burst into
Jewish apartments, killed men, women, and children, and looted the property of
those murdered" as soon as the Germans marched into Kovno on June 23,
1941. On Sept. 1, he wrote: "The mass extermination of Jews in the
provinces by members of Lithuanian 'partisan' units under the leadership of the
Germans has begun. . . . The Jews have been made to dig their own graves. Then
they have to bring their sick and their children and remove their outer
clothes. After that, they are shot in groups. . . . All of this is happening in
broad daylight, often in front of thousands of witnesses. . . . The slightly
wounded were finished off with bayonets or else buried alive; the small
children were treated the same way. Often, the 'partisans' simply killed
children with shovels."
Dr. Kutroga pointed out that many
Lithuanian intellectuals and clergymen, and even some German soldiers, were
appalled by these actions. But in many accounts we find that those who
ultimately saved Jews were wretchedly poor peasants. Major Z. G. Ostrovsky, who
collected testimonies in Lithuania, wrote: "There were hundreds of
reported cases of Lithuanian peasants hiding Jews who had fled from the
ghetto."
But those were exceptions. Reysa
Miselevich, from the region of Zhmud in northwestern Lithuania, escaped the
destruction of the entire Jewish population there in July 1941, when they were
incarcerated in improvised camps guarded by Lithuanians. Conditions were
appalling, and young women were regularly raped. Toward the end of the month
all the male Jews, numbering some 5,000, were first subjected to prolonged
torture and humiliation and then murdered. "The earth on top of the pits
was heaving the entire time, since many had been buried alive. For an entire
week after this, blood burst from the pits like a fountain," Reysa said.
Several weeks later the older women and the children, about 4,000 altogether,
were also massacred in a single day. The last remaining Jews, 400 young women,
were killed on Christmas Day, 1941. All of the murders were carried out by
Lithuanian policemen.
These accounts do not provide any
simple explanation for such gratuitous yet systematic and relentless violence.
Sometimes it seems as if the Jews' countrymen were prepared to murder them
wholesale simply out of greed for their possessions. But that hardly explains
such dark evil, just as attempts to portray the Holocaust as a bureaucratic
undertaking planned and executed by detached civil servants and automaton-like
killers are inadequate.
"The Unknown Black Book"
reveals the sheer barbarity on the individual level -- the tortures and rapes,
the looting and destruction, and, not least, the glee and humor, as well as the
hatred and contempt, expressed by the killers. It makes for very disturbing
reading. But these accounts from those who saw what happened convey what we
cannot learn from official documents about the nature of this vast criminal
enterprise, in which hundreds of thousands were transformed into monsters --
mostly returning home after the war as "ordinary" men -- and millions
of others became helpless, dehumanized, mutilated and finally forgotten
victims.
This is a repeat scenario in our
house: It's around 8:30 p.m., my 3-year-old daughter is finally settled in bed,
and just as I'm tip-toeing out of the room, she rummages in the covers, bolts
upright and asks the dreaded question: "Where's George?"
While my husband and I hunt down her
beloved stuffed monkey, my daughter begins to sob, and my narrow window of
evening downtime evaporates.
For working parents who've been gone
all day, it's difficult to know where a cherished item was last seen. (Most
recently, we found George on a chair in the darkened living room, placed there
apparently to admire the Christmas tree.) Some parents will go to extreme
lengths to find their children's beloved animals, pillows and blankets -- from
digging through Dumpsters to bidding for similar ones on eBay.
Readers, what do you do about lost or
misplaced items? By hunting for them or replacing them, are we indulging our
kids, or saving our sanity?
The 1970s can conjure up some pretty
frightening memories -- lava lamps, pet rocks, John Denver songs, blue eye
shadow.
But these days, economists worry that
an even scarier relic of the disco era might be rearing its ugly head --
stagflation, a not-so-groovy term used by economists to describe an economy
plagued by recession, rampant inflation and high unemployment.
It's the worst of all worlds; a toxic
combination that vexed Federal Reserve policymakers more than 30 years ago and
now threatens to put a squeeze on Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke: Lower
interest rates risk higher inflation, higher rates a long recession.
"The stagflation scenario is more
than a likely possibility," said Emanuel Balarie, CEO of Jabez Capital
Management, a California firm that specializes in commodities and alternative
investments.
Additional interest-rate cuts will
only be a temporary solution, he said.
"The recent rise in unemployment
is just the tip of a much bigger economic iceberg," he said. "We are
heading toward a housing-led recession. On the inflation front, the record
commodity prices clearly point to an economic scenario where inflation will be
rampant."
The word "stagflation" -- a
combination of the words "stagnant" and "inflation" -- was
coined by economists during the 1970s. Ultimately, former Fed Chief Paul
Volcker performed shock therapy on the economy, jacking up short-term interest
rates to 21 percent to squelch an inflation rate that peaked at 13.5 percent in
1981.
While no one is predicting the
American consumer will have to endure a similar economic disaster, central
bankers are increasingly worried the economy might be headed into deep trouble.
The stock market is off to its worst
start since 2000 as the housing slump and turmoil in the credit markets
continue to weigh on the economy. Home sales have fallen to the lowest in 12
years, the jobless rate jumped to a two-year high of 5 percent in December and
government data last week showed manufacturing slowing in December to its
weakest level since April 2003.
At the same time, prices are going up,
thanks to the latest surge in oil prices.
In November, the core rate of
inflation increased 0.3 percent, bringing the year-over-year inflation rate to
2.3 percent -- outside the Fed's desired "comfort zone" of 1 percent
to 2 percent, said Rich Yamarone, chief economist at Argus Research.
But that number doesn't tell the whole
picture. Yamarone said many companies in consumer products, food and air travel
have been announcing price increases because of a combination of higher costs
and continuing high demand for their products.
For example, Yum! Brands, which owns
the KFC and Taco Bell restaurant chains, recently detailed significant
increases in costs that included price hikes of 16 percent to 20 percent for chicken
and 10 percent to 14 percent for cheese.
"Nothing influences consumer
inflation expectations like the price of food, particularly milk,"
Yamarone said. "Keep in mind that retail food prices have risen 4.8
percent over the last year, the largest increase in 17 years."
Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC
Financial Services Group, described the economy as "a cat on a hot tin
roof that has already used up eight of its nine lives."
"One more fall from the hot roof
and this economy cat is not likely to land on its feet once again," he
said.
That puts the Fed between the
"proverbial rock and a hard place," said Bob Doll, vice chairman and
director of the BlackRock investment management firm. "If they lower rates
too much, they may crease excess liquidity, which could lead to higher
inflation. Not lowering rates enough, however, puts central bankers at risk of
not being responsive to recessionary threats."
Most economists expect Fed
policymakers to cut the short-term rate they control to 4 percent at their Jan.
28-29 meeting. It would be the fourth consecutive quarter-point cut in less
than six months.
Goldman Sachs last week said it
expects the economy to drop into recession this year, forcing the Fed to cut
its benchmark lending rate to 2.5 percent by the third quarter of this year.
The possibility of a stagflation
threat to the economy is being hotly debated. Former Fed Chief Alan Greenspan
first raised the possibility last month.
"I am most concerned about
it," Greenspan said in a recent television interview. "Over the past
20 years, we have had a most remarkable period. Vast geopolitical shifts,
including the end of the Cold War, have contributed to a remarkable period of
disinflation. But that period is now coming to an end."
Charles Plosser, head of the
Philadelphia Federal Reserve, has also touched on the subject of stagflation.
"Although I am expecting slow
economic growth for several quarters, we should not rely on slow growth to
reduce inflation," he warned in a speech. "Indeed, the 1970s should
be a sufficient reminder that slow growth and falling inflation do not
necessarily go hand in hand."
Relaxing at his 40,000-square-foot
mansion, Palazzo di Amore, Jeff Greene reflects on a stellar 12-month run. He
snatched the estate out of receivership for $35 million in a bidding war. He
got married in a spectacular wedding here with boxer Mike Tyson as his best
man. And he is up more than half a billion dollars on a bet that the housing
market would crater.
He may have lost a friend in the
process: John Paulson, a hedge-fund manager who devised what proved to be a
wildly profitable strategy for betting against risky mortgages.
[Jeff Greene]
It was the spring of 2006, and Mr.
Paulson, seeking investors for a new fund, gave Mr. Greene a peek at his plan.
Mr. Greene didn't wait for the fund to open. He beat his friend to the punch by
doing the same complex mortgage-market trade on his own.
"He never told me: 'Don't do
it,'" Mr. Greene says. Mr. Paulson won't discuss the matter.
If Mr. Paulson is the pensive, low-key
mastermind of the lucrative bearish bet, 53-year-old Mr. Greene is the
strategy's most flamboyant exemplar. A Los Angeles real-estate investor who
made and lost a bundle 15 years ago, bounced back, bought himself three
airplanes and a yacht, and entertains celebrities in his multiple homes, Mr.
Greene has hired a P.R. firm to raise his profile and help him move into new
business spheres.
"Jeff lives on the edge. He made
a fortune, lost a fortune and made it back," says Fred Sands, a Los
Angeles real-estate developer who got to know him through late-night parties
Mr. Greene threw at his Malibu and Hollywood Hills homes. The latter pad is
known for its pillow-lined penthouse den, the Moroccan room. His soirees
attracted an eclectic crowd, from Paris Hilton to Mr. Tyson.
For the artwork in Mr. Greene's new
Beverly Hills mansion, money is one motif. A dark metal rendering of a dollar
bill hangs over the bar.
Eroticism is another. In the east wing
are two huge erotic paintings that Mr. Greene waited to hang until after his
September wedding there.
Mr. Greene grew up middle class in
Worcester, Mass. After a 21⁄2-year run through Johns Hopkins University, he
saved up $100,000 in three years managing telemarketing centers, which he used
to make his first property investment: a three-family house in the Boston area.
He lived in it while getting a Harvard M.B.A., acquiring 17 more homes while at
the business school.
Moving to California, he dabbled in
politics, trying unsuccessfully to get nominated as a Republican candidate for
Congress. He bought and developed low-slung apartment buildings in the Los
Angeles area, using loads of borrowed money. "My early windfall was a
result of the excesses of the S&L era," Mr. Greene says. He says he
had pushed his net worth to $35 million before the savings-and-loan crisis all
but wiped him out in the early 1990s.
"I went through a very tough
time. I didn't know how I would get out of it," he says. But by the late
1990s, as the California economy recovered, he was on his way to an even bigger
fortune, eventually including 7,000 apartments.
http://web.mac.com/lousheehan
Louis J Sheehan Esquire
He bought three jets, most recently a
Gulfstream. Though he paid just $2 million for an older model, "I
certainly could afford" a $50 million one, he says. He adds, in a
telephone interview from his 145-foot yacht: "I tend to be pretty
conservative in the way I spend money."
The September wedding at his estate
was Mr. Greene's first, and he pulled out all the stops. Guests sat beside a
long reflecting pool, wandered marbled halls snacking on hors d'oeuvres, dined
around the fountain in the motor court and boogied on a revolving dance floor
in the 24-car garage. In late December, the party moved to Mr. Greene's yacht
off the Caribbean island of St. Barts.
Sitting in the mansion's study during
an interview, Mr. Greene marvels at a fireplace framed by lions that he says
were carved by Peruvian woodworkers. Outside, the Pacific shimmers in the
distance as contractors work on a pool and a 15,000-square-foot recreation
center, to have a screening room and two bowling lanes.
A vineyard covers six of the estate's
27 acres. His wine will bear a label using the name that he and his 32-year-old
bride, Mei Sze Chan, chose for their sprawling nest. "Palazzo di
Amore," Mr. Greene says -- "it's a bit cheesy, but that's what it
means to us."
Yet two years ago, an undercurrent of
concern about the economy had begun to trouble him. Recalling the pain of
losing his first fortune, he consulted a range of smart people in search of a
way to hedge his bets. One was Mr. Paulson, whom he'd met decades earlier in
New York's Hamptons, the same playground of the affluent where he later met Ms.
Chan.
Mr. Paulson was convinced the market
for risky "subprime" home loans would implode. He outlined a
sophisticated securities trade he was crafting for a new hedge fund. It
involved derivatives -- contracts whose value shifts with some other asset's
value -- and would need an investment bank's participation. The bank would have
to be convinced that a mere individual, as opposed to an institution, qualified
to be a counterparty in such a transaction. Mr. Greene says he asked Mr.
Paulson, "Can I do this trade myself?" and was told, "You'll
never get approved."
Banks did turn Mr. Greene down at
first. But after he produced enough paperwork, Merrill Lynch & Co. and J.P.
Morgan Chase & Co. agreed. He was the first individual either bank had
approved for this type of trade, involving what's called an asset-backed
credit-default swap, say people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Greene dived into the riskiest
type of the trade by betting on derivatives backed by a single pool of subprime
mortgages. He says he analyzed lots of mortgage bundles before placing his
bets. But, belying the financial sophistication he aims to project, he adds:
"A lot of this stuff is anyone's guess."
Mr. Greene says his positions rose
only a little until the spring of 2007, when troubles at a lender rattled the
market. In recent months, he has cashed out some positions, locking in $72
million in profit, according to financial records. As of early this month, his
positions at Merrill Lynch and J.P. Morgan were up about $466 million combined.
Because the market for the riskiest derivatives is thin, Mr. Greene says, he is
waiting for better pricing before he sells more.
His hedge-fund friend, Mr. Paulson,
didn't want other investors duplicating his trades. "When I mentioned to
him that I had already done some of this on my own, he kind of was surprised
and seemed to be upset," Mr. Greene says, adding that Mr. Paulson didn't
allow him into his new fund.
Mr. Greene says he wishes he could
have invested in the fund as well as doing his own trades. He also holds out
hope for their friendship. Mr. Paulson, he says, "did send me a nice card
on my wedding."
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When local high school graduates seek
to fur ther their education at Harrisburg Area Community College, more than
half are not ready to perform at the college level.
Testifying before the State Board of
Education last week, HACC President Edna V. Baehre said 55.4 percent of
entering freshman require remedial instruction in reading. More than half of
the new HACC students also need remedial help in math and a third require
assistance with their writing skills.
Despite an Education Week report last
week that ranked Pennsylvania 10th in quality of education, this dismal picture
is repeated around the state. Joan L. Benso, president and CEO of Pennsylvania
Partnerships for Children, noted at the hearing that 20 percent more chil dren
gradu ated in 2006 in 461 of the state's 501 school dis tricts than scored
"profi cient" in statewide tests.
What more evidence is required to make
the case that educational fraud is being perpetrated on a huge number of
students, parents and taxpayers in the commonwealth?
And this is not a new phenomenon.
Overcrowded prisons and companies increasingly seeking better educated
employees from abroad are the stark real-world consequences of educational
failure. That Pennsylvania is perceived to be in the top 10 states in education
only suggests an even more abysmal state of affairs in 40 other states.
The federal No Child Left Behind
program, which has been both widely praised and criticized, represented a
recognition of the problem, and sought to bring accountability to the
classroom. But a more effective program would make students accountable for
their educational effort and accomplishments, or lack thereof.
Toward that end, the state board is
expected to adopt recommendations from the Governor's Commission on College and
Career Success that would require high school students, in order to receive a
diploma, to achieve proficiency on at least six of nine end-of-course
examinations. These Graduation Competency Assessments would be given in
English, math, science and social studies.
Schools would have the option of
administering the GCAs, require passage of the Pennsylvania System of School
Assessment (PSSA) test in 11th grade or the 12th grade re-test, or administer a
locally determined test comparable to the GCAs, subject to state approval.
This approach offers a critical
difference from proposals for a single, all-encompassing graduation test that
we have criticized. Under GCAs, students would have to prove proficiency in
material they've just been taught. Remedial instruction for students who failed
would be mandated. And there would be ample opportunities to retake the test.
Students who passed each GCA would be
awarded Certificates of Proficiency in that subject, recognition that is
important in conveying to students the significance of learning the material
and doing well.
There is a danger of too much testing.
But the GCAs can be used to replace teacher-composed final exams, and one hopes
that they would eventually supplant the PSSA tests required by No Child Left
Behind.
The experience in other states
suggests that GCAs, which are similar to New York's long-standing Regents
exams, could prove to be a turning point in education in Pennsylvania. Yet at
least one vital piece of the education puzzle remains to be addressed.
Pennsylvania needs to swallow hard and
put up the dollars necessary to ensure that every school district has the
resources necessary to achieve educational success. Ultimately, that translates
into greater economic success for Pennsylvania and its citizens.
And far fewer people crowding our
prisons.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD)
is a serious mental illness characterized by pervasive instability in moods,
interpersonal relationships, self-image, and behavior. This instability often
disrupts family and work life, long-term planning, and the individual's sense
of identity. Originally thought to be at the "borderline" of
psychosis, people with BPD suffer from emotion regulation. While less well
known than schizophrenia or bipolar disorder (manic-depressive illness), BPD is
more common, affecting 2 percent of adults, mostly young women. There is a high
rate of self-injury without suicide intent, as well as a significant rate of
suicide attempts and completed suicide in severe cases. Patients often need
extensive mental health services, and account for 20 percent of psychiatric
hospitalizations. Yet, with help, many improve over time and are eventually
able to lead productive lives.
While a person with depression or
bipolar disorder typically endures the same mood for weeks, a person with BPD
may experience intense bouts of anger, depression and anxiety that may last
only hours, or at most a day. These may be associated with episodes of
impulsive aggression, self-injury, and drug or alcohol abuse. Distortions in
cognition and sense of self can lead to frequent changes in long-term goals,
career plans, jobs, friendships, gender identity, and values. Sometimes people
with BPD view themselves as fundamentally bad, or unworthy. They may feel
unfairly misunderstood or mistreated, bored, empty, and have little idea who
they are. Such symptoms are most acute when people with BPD feel isolated and
lacking in social support, and may result in frantic efforts to avoid being
alone.
People with BPD often have highly
unstable patterns of social relationships. While they can develop intense but
stormy attachments, their attitudes toward family, friends, and loved ones may
suddenly shift from idealization (great admiration and love) to devaluation
(intense anger and dislike). Thus, they may form an immediate attachment and
idealize the other person, but when a slight separation or conflict occurs,
they switch unexpectedly to the other extreme and angrily accuse the other
person of not caring for them at all.
Most people can tolerate ambivalence
where they experience two contradictory states at one time. People with BPD,
however, shift back and forth to a good or a bad state. If they are in a bad
state, for example, they have no awareness of the good state.
Even with family members, individuals
with BPD are highly sensitive to rejection, reacting with anger and distress to
mild separations. Even a vacation, a business trip, or a sudden change in plans
can spur negative thoughts. These fears of abandonment seem to be related to
difficulties feeling emotionally connected to important persons when they are
physically absent, leaving the individual with BPD feeling lost and perhaps
worthless. Suicide threats and attempts may occur along with anger at perceived
abandonment and disappointments.
People with BPD exhibit other
impulsive behaviors, such as excessive spending, binge eating and risky sex.
BPD often occurs with other psychiatric problems, particularly bipolar
disorder, depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse, and other personality
disorders.
Although the cause of BPD is unknown,
both environmental and genetic factors are thought to play a role in
predisposing patients to BPD symptoms and traits. Studies show that many, but
not all individuals with BPD report a history of abuse, neglect, or separation
as young children. Forty to 71 percent of BPD patients report having been
sexually abused, usually by a non-caregiver. Researchers believe that BPD
results from a combination of individual vulnerability to environmental stress,
neglect or abuse as young children, and a series of events that trigger the
onset of the disorder as young adults. Adults with BPD are also considerably
more likely to be the victim of violence, including rape and other crimes. This
may result from both harmful environments as well as impulsivity and poor
judgment in choosing partners and lifestyles.
Neuroscience is revealing brain
mechanisms underlying the impulsivity, mood instability, aggression, anger, and
negative emotion seen in BPD. Studies suggest that people predisposed to impulsive
aggression have impaired regulation of the neural circuits that modulate
emotion. The brain's amygdala, a small almond-shaped structure , is an
important component of the circuit that regulates negative emotion. In response
to signals from other brain centers indicating a perceived threat, it marshals
fear and arousal. This might be more pronounced under the influence of drugs
like alcohol or stress. Areas in the front of the brain (pre-frontal area) act
to dampen the activity of this circuit. Recent brain imaging studies show that
individual differences in the ability to activate regions of the prefrontal
cerebral cortex thought to be involved in inhibitory activity predict the
ability to suppress negative emotion.
Serotonin, norepinephrine and acetylcholine
are among the chemical messengers in these circuits that play a role in the
regulation of emotions, including sadness, anger, anxiety, and irritability.
Drugs that enhance brain serotonin function may improve emotional symptoms in
BPD. Likewise, mood-stabilizing drugs that are known to enhance the activity of
GABA, the brain's major inhibitory neurotransmitter, may help people who
experience BPD-like mood swings. Such brain-based vulnerabilities can be
managed with help from behavioral interventions and medications, much like
people manage susceptibility to diabetes or high blood pressure.
Treatments for BPD have improved.
Group and individual psychotherapy are at least partially effective for many
patients. A new psychosocial treatment termed dialectical behavior therapy
(DBT) has been developed specifically to treat BPD, and this technique has
looked promising in treatment studies. Pharmacological treatments are often
prescribed based on specific target symptoms shown by the individual patient. Antidepressant
drugs and mood stabilizers may be helpful for depressed and, or, labile mood.
Antipsychotic drugs may also be used when there are distortions in thinking.
Scientists longing to sneak a peek at
the molecular machinery of living cells came one step closer to that goal in
March with the creation of lenses that break the limits of current light
microscopy.
Electron microscopes can already
capture the realm of the supersmall, but the sample preparation and imaging
conditions make it impossible to observe live cells. Optical microscopes are
great for viewing living samples, but their resolution is limited by the
properties of light. Now two teams of researchers have devised unconventional
lenses that could capture the nanoworld without killing it.
One group, led by Xiang Zhang of the
University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
created a “hyperlens” that bends light in a way no ordinary material can.
“Natural materials prevent some of the waves from coming through to the
camera,” Zhang says. “You lose certain kinds of waves, called evanescent waves,
which don’t travel far. That blurs the image.” But the layered structure of his
half-cylinder-shaped hyperlens preserves these evanescent waves, allowing
incredibly tiny objects to be resolved.
The second team, led by Igor
Smolyaninov at the University of Maryland, created a “superlens” with concentric
rings of acrylic on a gold film surface. The lens can be used to see objects on
the scale of small viruses. “If we’re successful in this work,” Smolyaninov
says, “we will hopefully be able to visualize what is going on inside cells.”
When the dinosaurs died out some 65
million years ago, many perished in the exact same iconic pose: neck, spine,
and tail curved backward, mouth open, limbs contracted. The reason for this
characteristic dino death pose has been unclear. Conventional wisdom held that
the dead dinos’ pose was struck when the muscles contracted under rigor mortis
or because the dinos’ tendons and ligaments had dried up, suggesting that their
bodies had been exposed to the sun for a long time. But if so, why hadn’t the
bones been scattered by scavengers?
Now the answer is coming from the
corpses of some modern-day birds and mammals, which look very similar when they
have died under certain specific conditions. The connection was never made
before because paleontologists rarely see dead parrots. But veterinarians do.
And luckily, Cynthia Marshall Faux is both—with doctorates in veterinary
medicine as well as geology (with a specialty in vertebrate paleontology).
It was clear to Faux that the
dinosaurs’ pose was a sign of opisthotonos, a condition that results from an
injury affecting the cerebellum, which regulates fine muscle movement. While
working at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, Faux collaborated
with Kevin Padian, a professor of integrative biology and curator of the Museum
of Paleontology at the University of California at Berkeley, to make her
argument: Brain injury during death, not later rigor mortis, explains the
typical look of dino fossils. “Paleontologists are familiar with dead things,”
says Faux, who is a vet in Idaho. “But I know about dying things. I see animals
die all the time. I see the process, not just the result.”
Adding to the intrigue is that
opisthotonos is usually seen in warm-blooded animals like birds and mammals but
not reptiles. Faux’s paper on opisthotonos, published in March, rethinks
dinosaurs not just as having died for reasons other than meteor impacts and
volcanic eruptions but also advances the argument that these creatures may have
had hot blood pumping through their veins.
Darwinian natural selection is at work
among the communities living in the Tibetan mountains, according to Case
Western Reserve University anthropologist Cynthia Beall. She reported at the
American Association of Physical Anthropologists meeting in March that women
who carry more oxygen in their blood have more than twice as many surviving
children as women who carry less oxygen. “We determined that the strength of
natural selection at altitude was even stronger than the strength of natural
selection by falciparum malaria, and that is the classic example,” Beall said.
Women who carry at least one copy of a
gene variant, or allele, that codes for high oxygen saturation had 125 percent
more surviving children than those who carry two copies of a low-saturation
allele. By contrast, women who carry a sickle-cell allele, which protects
against malaria, have only about 50 percent more surviving children in
malaria-infested regions than women lacking the variant.
Beall’s team hasn’t yet identified the
gene that provides such protection, but that’s next on her agenda. In the
meantime, she thinks the reason the selective difference at altitude is so
large is that the altitude is constant, affecting people every day. Malaria, on
the other hand, ebbs and flows over time, so the physiological benefits
associated with the sickle-cell allele may be tempered.
The mass of the new-found
"X" particle which scientists have been discovering in cosmic ray
research may not have a fixed value, says Dr. Seth H. Neddermeyer of the
California Institute of Technology.
Dr. Neddermeyer is a colleague of Dr.
Carl Anderson and worked with him when the latter made the discovery of the
positron for which he received the Nobel Prize award. The team of Anderson and
Neddermeyer, too, made the initial discoveries of the "X" particle,
whose mass appears to be intermediate between that of the electron and the
proton.
"There are . . . reasons for
believing that the mass (of the X particle) may not be unique and that many
masses, ranging from a few times the electron mass up to very large values, may
exist," says Dr. Neddermeyer's report, in part.
By theory, explains Dr. Neddermeyer,
photons of radiant energy create pairs of particles—positive and negative in
electrical sign—in their rush through the atmosphere on their way to Earth. The
energy and mass possessed by these new particles, which are the offspring of
dying photons, are variable, postulates Dr. Neddermeyer. Thus many different
masses might be observed, depending on the energy possessed by the original
photon that creates them.
The point is that particles can have
two kinds of mass; the so-called rest mass and a mass due to motion.
Theoretically, at least, a particle moving with the speed of light should have
an infinitely large mass.
The second kind of mass, which varies
with the speed of the particle, was observed in the present experiments.
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Tusks scattered on the frozen shore of
Siberia opposite Alaska may mean that Soviet scientists will some day add more
complete specimens of the extinct hairy mammoth to the two bodies already
found, Tass, Soviet news agency, reported.
Detailed information on the body, the
second one to be found, reached Moscow. It revealed that this hairy mammoth, as
it existed thousands of years ago, was in the neighborhood of 18 feet long, had
a trunk more than 9 feet long and hair more than 3 inches long.
Like the first specimen found, the
second body, which was uncovered last October, was partially damaged by wild
animals. The head, one leg, and a part of the trunk have been partly eaten
away. Otherwise, the body is intact, preserved through the ages in the frozen
earth of the north, as effective an icebox as man has devised.
The tusks of the specimen found have
not yet been located, but they may be under its body, which has not yet been
removed from the pebbly ground. Next spring, when the sea in this area is clear
of ice, soundings of the coastal zone will be taken to see if a ship can
approach the shore to take on board the find.
UFO investigators flock to
Stephenville, Texas!
A team of six investigators from the
Mutual UFO Network will be interviewing citizens of Stephenville, Texas who say
they spotted an Unidentified Flying Object at sunset on January 8th.
The Mutual UFO Network is a
non-governmental group interested in documenting UFO's. State director Ken
Cherry says the network has received calls from 50 citizens who say they
witnessed the UFO and that the number and credibility of the people is
exceptional.
The rural Texas town has attracted
world wide attention after the sightings. The Local Newspaper, the
"Stephenville Empire-Tribune" has received calls from as far away as
Finland and Japan as people remain fascinated about the reports of a giant
bright object in the sky that witnesses say was a mile long.
It remains the talk of the town and
the Stephenville High School Science Club is now selling T-shirts to cash in on
the craze.
Stephenville prides itself on being
the dairy capital of Texas and the shirts that sell for ten dollars have a
picture of a Holstein cow being beamed up to a flying saucer.
More than 30 residents of
Stephenville, Texas, claim to have seen a UFO, described as a mile-wide, silent
object with bright lights, flying low and fast. And now it's actual front-page
news. So what was it?
"It was very intense, bright
lights," said local newspaper reporter Angela Joyner.
"The lights were like going like
this," said Constable Leroy Gateman making hand gestures to describe what
he saw when he spotted the UFO.
Rick Sorrells says he saw it while he
was hunting deer in the woods.
"You look at the trees, and it
was right here," Sorrells told ABC News correspondent Mike Von Fremd as he
showed him the location in the woods where he spotted the UFO.
Steve Allen, a 50-year-old pilot, was
at a campfire with friends and says the object was a mile long and half a mile
wide. "I don't know if it was a biblical experience or somebody from a
different universe or whatever but it was definitely not from around these
parts," Allen said.
Allen drew a sketch of the object,
which he said traveled at amazing speed without making a sound. While drawing,
Allen told Von Fremd that he saw "an arch shape converted in a vertical
shape, and then it split and made two of them, and then these turned into just
fire and it was gone."
A spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing
in Fort Worth says no aircraft from his base was in the area, and says the
objects may have been an illusion caused by two commercial airplanes. But those
who saw the lights don't buy that explanation.
"It's an unidentified flying
object," insisted a former Air Force technician.
"It was so fast I couldn't track
it with my binoculars," said Gateman.
Constable Leroy Gateman describes what
he saw in the sky.
Some in Stephenville are a bit
embarrassed about all the attention. "It's crazy," said one teenage
girl in town.
"A lot of folks aren't used to
this kind of thing. They are not UFO nuts or anything like that around
here," said City Councilman Mark Murphy.
Like it or not, all eyes are now
trained on the sky over Stephenville to see whether any mysterious flying
objects make a return.
Cue the Twilight Zone theme ... Dozens
of people say they saw a UFO hovering over their rural community near
Stephenville, Texas. The Stephenville Empire-Tribune says at least 40 people
have reported sightings of the object, which reportedly appeared in the sky
just after 6 p.m. on Jan. 8.
Lee Roy Gaitan, a local police
officer, tells the newspaper: I was outside with my eight-year-old son, Ryan,
when I saw lights. It was like nothing I've ever seen before. It was dark
already. At first it was two red burning glows that went away and then came
back on. I went inside to tell my wife. When I came back out I saw something
like lights you'd see in a bar. My little boy and I counted and we came up with
nine flashes and they were real spread out. But I couldn't see them attached to
anything, just the lights. So I went to my pickup and got my binoculars to see
if I could see a plane or something. Even with the binoculars there was no
outline. It started moving towards Stephenville and moving so fast I had
trouble following it with my binoculars. It covered a big area. It sounds crazy
but we really saw what we saw.
The paper has more eyewitness
accounts, including this one from pilot Steve Allen: The ship wasn't really
visible and was totally silent, but the lights spanned about a mile long and a
half mile wide. The lights went from corner to corner. It was directly above
Highway 67 traveling towards Stephenville at a high rate of speed - about 3,000
mph is what I would estimate.
Chuck Mueller, a helicopter pilot who
served in Iraq, says he saw unusual lights on the horizon a few days after the
UFO sightings were reported near Stephenville.
Mueller tells KXAS-TV that he was
flying a medical helicopter around dusk when "we saw the lights come on,
one little orange light, and then another one and another one in sequence
across the sky." He was shocked at first, but then concluded that the
lights, which appeared to be more than 30 miles northeast of the original
sightings, were coming from flares that were dropped over the Brownwood
Military Operations Area.
There's just one problem with that
theory. The NBC station says the military didn't have any planes in the air at
the time of the original sightings.
A spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing
at the Joint Reserve Base Naval Air Station tells the Associated Press that
he's convinced there's a logical explanation for the lights. "I'm 90
percent sure this was an airliner," Maj. Karl Lewis tells the wire
service. "With the sun's angle, it can play tricks on you."
The sightings are big news in rural
Texas. The top item on the Stephenville Empire-Tribune's website tells readers
where to report a UFO sighting and, below that, the paper notes that a local
businessman is offering a $5,000 reward for "video that would confirm a
UFO sighting in Selden on Jan. 8."
They're also big news around the
world. "The reported sightings have become a catalyst on blogs and in chat
rooms, triggering scientific and philosophical debates, religious inquiries,
conspiracy charges and bad Texas jokes," the Star-Telegram reports.
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