My Life and Times

Melanie Conner for The New York Times

Just a fraction of the expected run has occurred at Bonneville Dam.

May 11, 2005
Weak Salmon Run Shuts the Northwest's Fisheries
By FELICITY BARRINGER

WASHINGTON, May 10 - Tens of thousands of adult salmon that were expected to swim up the Columbia River this spring are missing, and their mysterious absence has led state and tribal officials to shut down the commercial fisheries in the river, the Northwest's muscular thoroughfare, for the first time in five years.

The unexpectedly low early run of chinook salmon, containing some of the first of 11 endangered fish species to return to the Columbia and Snake River systems each year, has defied usually reliable predictions and shut fisheries that had expected a plentiful harvest.

The collapse in the numbers is so bad that Idaho, Oregon and Washington have ended commercial fishing, and last week the four Indian tribes with treaty rights to harvest the salmon did the same. Though tribal fishermen can still sell a limited catch to other tribe members, their subsistence fish harvest has been sharply curtailed.

At last month's annual "first salmon" ceremony, held near the Columbia dam at The Dalles, Indians from the nearby Celilo village, were short of fish. They were forced to rely on some fish donated by coastal fishermen; some came from the frozen remains of last year's catch, said a spokesman for the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission.

Experts say it is too soon to tell exactly why this first run is low - or late. Possible explanations include an unusually large collection of hungry seals and sea lions below Bonneville Dam, a cyclical warming trend in the northern Pacific and a disruption in the food chain somewhere along the chinook's migratory route through the ocean.

Most environmentalists and some tribal officials, however, are convinced that federal dams, the major engines of the Northwest's electricity grid, are at the root of the problem. The slow-moving, sometimes overheated reservoirs behind the dams disorient fish bred for fast, cold currents, and dam machinery can be lethal, particularly to outbound juvenile fish.

"We need to figure out what happened," said Charles Hudson of the intertribal commission, which represents the four tribes with fishing rights.

"But there is no question," Mr. Hudson added in a phone interview, "that year in and year out, the hydro system is the biggest killer of fish."

The drop-off comes as a federal district judge in Portland is poised to rule on whether a Bush administration plan to maintain the dams is compatible with the government's obligations under the Endangered Species Act. The possibility of breaching the dams to help the endangered fish had previously been suggested as a last resort.

Four federal dams on the lower Columbia provide an average of 2,350 megawatts of electricity a year, enough to power two cities the size of Seattle. Upstream on the Snake River, another four dams provide nearly as much power.

About 20 months ago, President Bush stood above one of these, the Ice Harbor dam, and said, "The good news is that salmon runs are up," adding, "We can have good, clean hydroelectric power and salmon restoration going on at the same time."

More than a year later, his administration disclosed last November that, while it intended to spend $600 million a year on salmon recovery, building structures or paying for barges to help the fish swim around the dams, the dams would now be considered an immutable part of the landscape. There would be no question of breaching them.

This year, fish were supposed to arrive in ample numbers. The consensus of fisheries experts was that 254,000 spring chinook would pass Bonneville Dam, the first of the eight federal dams along the lower Columbia and lower Snake Rivers. With three weeks left in the run, only 52,000 fish have passed the first dam.

Late last month, it seemed that the peak of the run had passed; about 4,150 fish passed Bonneville Dam on April 25, and then the numbers began dropping. Late last week, there was a brief resurgence, with more than 6,000 fish counted on Thursday. But by Monday the number had dropped to less than 400.

There are many possible reasons for this, environmentalists and federal officials agree. But environmentalists said that if the Bush administration could credit its salmon recovery effort for four years' worth of well-stocked runs, it could not then just blame the oceans when the numbers were bad.

Bonneville Power officials and the administrator of the Northwest regional office of the National Marine Fisheries Service said the salmon run might be late because the river was slow to warm.

"There are two theories," Bob Lohn, the regional administrator, said. "One is that something devastating has happened to the run. Two is that the run is very late."

John Skidmore, a program analyst for Bonneville Power, said, "In any natural world, you're going to have variabilities." He added, "That is not to say that we're not concerned that the returns are off, but it's not a complete anomaly."

But what adds to experts' worries about this year's Columbia River spring chinook run is its variance from expectations.

Most of these salmon are the offspring of adults that went upstream in 2001, a year with a magnificent run of nearly 400,000 fish.

At a minimum, this run could have been expected to be better than average, and not a return to the low runs and closed fisheries from the late 1970's to the late 1990's. Last year's count of early-returning fish from the brood, called jacks, provided much of the basis for the forecast of 254,000 fish.

It is highly possible, Mr. Lohn said, that "something happened to these fish in the ocean."

"That something could include an unexpected collapse of some part of the food chain," he said, or that "there was an unexpected by-catch of these fish" while they were still under the high seas.

For Clifford Shippentower, a member of the Umatilla tribe and a wholesaler who has been fishing the lower Columbia for 30 years, this year's run is an unwelcome reminder of the quarter-century of commercial fishery closings that continued until 2000.

In those years, Mr. Shippentower could fish only for himself and other tribe members. He had anticipated a much better season this year.

"We kept waiting for the fish to show up, and it never did," he said in a telephone interview.

The sports fishing industry alone lost an anticipated $10 million in revenues, an industry spokesman said. The chinook salmon, a prized delicacy, will be hard to find in the region's markets.

Beyond the commercial loss of both hatchery and wild fish, which together makes up the annual runs, this spring's unpleasant surprise is bad news for the effort to bring back wild salmon.

Jim Martin, the retired head of the Oregon fisheries department, said 2001's generous contributions to the long-term effort to bring back wild salmon were lost in one generation.

Or as Buzz Ramsey, the Northwest regional sales manager for Luhr Jensen, a major fishing tackle company, said: "A lot of people had declared the salmon crisis over. Last year's disappointment and this year's disappointing run shows we're really not over it."

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Peter Foley/European Pressphoto Agency

The TriBeCa Film Festival, which recently ended its two-week run, sold 135,000 tickets to 700 screenings

May 12, 2005
New York: 'Little' Films Grow Big
By DAVID CARR

When the Cannes Film Festival opened yesterday, the first of what could be a long stream of distribution deals was announced: "Transamerica," a comedic road movie starring Felicity Huffman of "Desperate Housewives," will be coming to a screen near you soon. The film is a New York project from beginning to end, written, directed and partly shot in a city that has carved out its own place in the film industry - a place that only occasionally intersects with what Hollywood likes to call "the movie business."

Culturally vibrant, if economically still fragile, New York has quietly been emerging as the world's primary clearinghouse for a fast-expanding pool of very-low-budget movies. A ragtag posse of former college film series promoters, ex-gofers at major studios and chronically underfinanced filmmakers - their way paved by the low costs and relative ease of digital technology - has coalesced here into a commercial brokerage and cinematic salon devoted largely to the "little" film.

Long a force in the independent film world, the industry in New York suffered a bit of a slump in the 90's as Hollywood studios trimmed Manhattan staff and all but stopped holding big premiere parties in the city. And while the two men who embodied New York filmmaking over the last decade, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the co-founders of Miramax Films, are parting ways with the company they built after a drawn-out battle with the Walt Disney Company, even they are playing a role in the city's new film game. Even as they round up financing for a new company to be based in Manhattan, they are buying the North American distribution rights for "Transamerica," directed by Duncan Tucker and produced by Linda Moran, René Bastian and Sebastian Dungan, New Yorkers all, on a budget of about $1 million. "New York used to be seen as this kind of colonial outpost of L.A.," said Mark Urman, head of theatrical distribution for New York-based ThinkFilm, which earlier this year won attention for its "Murderball," an unlikely documentary about quadriplegic rugby players, by screening it at the New Directors/New Films Festival sponsored by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art. He expects the picture to compete against Hollywood fare like "Bewitched" and "Fantastic Four" this summer.

Now, Mr. Urman said, filmmakers, many of them based in New York, are increasingly inclined to gamble by shooting their pictures without waiting for a green light from a Hollywood studio, hoping companies like his will find viewers for them.

While Hollywood concentrates on selling blockbusters around the globe - and has crashed the party with well-financed art house divisions like Universal's Focus Features and Sony Pictures Classics, both based here, New York companies like ThinkFilm and Killer Films have emerged as central players in a more guerrillalike industry, reaching far beyond traditional independent production and finance. The latest generation of New York players are creating a system of their own to get movies seen. They win recognition for hundreds of pictures a year via film festival screens and a Rube Goldberg patchwork of local sites, both commercial and nonprofit, garnering just enough exposure to push the movies into the marketplace, including the increasingly lucrative DVD market.

"Transamerica" opened last month at the TriBeCa Film Festival, which cast its own light on the robustness and growing power of the New York film industry. In its fourth year, the festival sold 135,000 tickets to 700 screenings even as the popcorn index soared: Regal Cinemas, in TriBeCa, peddled more than 5,000 bags a week during the festival, versus its usual 800.

For the first time in its short history, several pictures that opened at TriBeCa, including a Showtime documentary, "After Innocence," and the Dutch drama "Simon," were picked up for national distribution. Conceived as a civic gesture for a neighborhood down on its luck after the events of Sept. 11, Robert De Niro's brainchild had taken its place in a booming local commercial film culture.

"When we announced what we were going to do, who knew how successful or powerful it was going to be?" Mr. De Niro said.

Hollywood studios - which accounted for about $7.4 billion in worldwide film revenue - released about 138 pictures last year, according to Exhibitor Relations Company, which tracks box office revenues. In all, more than 500 films are released in domestic theaters in a typical year, many of them by about a dozen Manhattan companies like Think and Killer.

Several more players are poised to join the fray, including the Weinsteins' still-unnamed new company and two Time Warner units, New Line and HBO, which have combined to form another independent film distributor in New York. At the end of last month, 2929 Entertainment, a digital entertainment company based here, signed a six-picture deal with Steven Soderbergh, the director of "Traffic" and "Erin Brockovich," for six high-definition films that will be simultaneously released in theaters, on DVD and on television.

"Ten years ago, the driving force behind the movies we show was Miramax," said Graham Leggat, who helps program screenings at Lincoln Center. "Now there are a number of other distributors." The growing echelon of New York distributors appears to be matched by an expansion in the ranks of film being shot here. Last year, 202 movies were filmed at least in part in New York city. And the enactment of a combined city-state tax break of 15 percent has already yielded almost $300 million in new business, according to the Mayor's Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting.

The New York distribution companies are also fed by a torrent of new films from around the world. This year, more than 2,600 feature-length pictures were submitted to the Sundance Film Festival, in Park City, Utah, up 29 percent from a year earlier, providing a rough measure of the growth in the pool of films made outside of the studio system.

As those pictures scramble to be seen, New York - with its confluence of ethnic communities, film schools, enthusiasts and media outlets - has forged a cultural ecosystem, processing the pictures and pushing many of them toward commercial release. The New York Times, by some accounts, plays a part in the process: Under longstanding practice, every full-length feature that plays on a New York screen for at least a week is reviewed in the paper.

If the film business, especially as it is practiced in New York, remains a notoriously chancy affair - Dan Talbot, longtime head of New Yorker Films, describes it as "a casino" - that has not doused an optimism that was palpable only weeks ago in TriBeCa.

During the festival, fans lined up around the block at Stuyvesant High School to see "The Great New Wonderful," a film about the aftermath of 9/11, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and directed by a Brooklyn native, Danny Leiner. The young crowd buzzed with the sort of anticipation that usually accompanies the opening of a new downtown club.

"Ninety percent of the industry is in L.A.," said Mr. Leiner, who now lives there. "But the 10 percent who are here are among the most creative people making movies."

A peculiar hallmark of New York's cinematic counterculture is the role that the city's intense, sophisticated audience has played in pushing once-fragile films like "Open Water" and "Garden State" into prominence. Often, small movies that break out have taken root on a single screen at the Angelika Film Center, Film Forum or Lincoln Center, where an enthusiastic reception has opened the door to a wider audience in other cities and on DVD. That audience seems to renew itself each generation, with fans of newer styles and genres (like Asian horror or Dogme, the Danish-based film movement) joining the aging cinéastes who devour sophisticated European fare. And the tribe has grown through the Web, which is alive with blogs and enthusiast sites like indiewire.com that create viral marketing and lead fans elsewhere to order up DVD's of lesser-known films.

"If you want to integrate a film into the culture, this is the place you have to start," said Michael Barker, who with his partner Tom Bernard established Sony Pictures Classics, a unit of the giant Japanese entertainment company, as one of the most active studio specialty divisions.

If the current blossoming of New York filmmaking, some of it shot with digital equipment that does not require the time or expense of film, has put an unusually democratic face on the local film culture, some players caution that to make a movie worth seeing still requires sweat and magic. "The fact is, most of these movies deal in narrative, which should be something that works well in digital form," said James Schamus, co-president of Focus Features. "The fact remains that you can compose a poem with a pencil and a piece of paper, but not everyone can do it."

And for many in this reinvented industry, the big dollars that represent a measure of success remain elusive. "Nobody is making any real money," said the New York director Eugene Jarecki, whose documentary, "Why We Fight," won the American Documentary Grand Jury prize at Sundance this year and will be distributed by Sony Pictures Classics. Besides, he said, "it is less than six degrees of separation between all of us, so we tend to depend on each other as opposed to seeing each other as competitors."

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J. Paul Getty Museum/Artists Rights Society

"Torse de l'Été," by Aristide Maillol, donated to the Getty Museum by the estate of Ray Stark

May 11, 2005
A Producer Who Loved Both Art and Ribaldry
By SHARON WAXMAN

LOS ANGELES, May 10 - From his sprawling perch in Holmby Hills, the Hollywood producer Ray Stark amassed a collection of paintings and sculpture that was as notorious as it was illustrious, though perhaps no more notorious than the producer himself, whose estate bequeathed 28 of the sculptures to the J. Paul Getty Trust last month.

Take the six-foot piece by the 20th-century Italian sculptor Marino Marini. It might not have equaled, artistically speaking, some of Stark's other masterpieces, like the eight-foot-tall "Standing Woman I," by Alberto Giacometti, or the bronzes by Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, which will all be on permanent display outdoors at the J. Paul Getty Museum as early as next year.

But as a Hollywood legend, the Marini was hard to surpass.

As several of Stark's friends tell it, the 1949 bronze of a naked man with his arms outstretched bestride a horse was missing an original detail: the man's erect penis.

When Michael Ovitz and Ron Meyer, then talent agents, visited Venice in the 1980's, they saw an identical sculpture at the Guggenheim Museum there, but with the penis intact. They had a bronze cast of it made and sent it to Stark as a gift, with a photograph of themselves beside the Guggenheim sculpture. The frame was engraved with the message that they had found his "lost" manhood.

Stark kept the photo proudly displayed in his screening room until he died, at 88, in January 2004.

Art collectors in Hollywood (and elsewhere) often have pretensions to respectability. This never seemed to be the case with Stark, the phenomenally successful producing force behind classic films like "Funny Girl," "The Way We Were," "The Sunshine Boys," "The Goodbye Girl" and many others. ("Funny Girl" was based on the life Fanny Brice, the mother of Stark's wife, Fran.) He remained the power behind the throne at Columbia Pictures from the 1960's through the 80's.

With the riches gleaned from those hit films and others, Stark filled his Holmby Hills mansion and a ranch in Santa Ynez with paintings by Impressionists, including Monet, and postwar modernists, including Diebenkorn, Lichtenstein and de Kooning.

The sculptures, however, were considered Stark's greatest passion. They included works by Henry Moore, Ellsworth Kelly, Alexander Calder, Aristide Maillol and others, which were scattered across the rolling greens outside the Stark homes.

"It was part of the ambience of his house," recalled David Geffen, the DreamWorks principal and an art collector himself. "He was a serious collector. And Ray loved his sculpture collection even more than his paintings."

The art became part of Stark's legendary aura, influencing a generation of movie insiders to begin acquiring art. He gave frequent parties at the Holmby Hills mansion (once owned by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall) where luminaries like the Reagans, Kirk Douglas and Cary Grant, and power brokers like Mr. Ovitz and Mr. Geffen, roamed among the statues.

"To me, he was a tastemaker," said Barbara Guggenheim, an art consultant who worked with Stark in the last decade of his life. "He influenced so many people who are collecting in Hollywood today because he had the taste. His home was beautiful, he understood art, he had an eye for it, and people followed it. If Ray got a Maillol, other people would, too."

But his interaction with the art was anything but high-minded, those who knew him say. Some recalled that Stark would flirt with comely female visitors by taking them on a stroll past one of the reclining nudes in the garden, favorably comparing the guest's buttocks with that of the sculpture. "I'm sure he used that line," said Alan Greisman, the producing partner of the director Rob Reiner and a friend of Stark's. "I don't know if anyone ever complained, but he was so incorrigible. Today he'd get accused of sexual harassment."

Bert Fields, a major Hollywood lawyer working for James Caan, once got on Stark's bad side, threatening to hold up production on "Funny Lady," a sequel to "Funny Girl," because the Mr. Caan's contract was not completed.

Stark was furious, Mr. Fields recalled, and after the film wrapped, the producer sent Mr. Caan one of his Maillol sculptures with the note, "Please tell Mr. Fields to shove this ..." (Mr. Fields had the note framed.)

For security, Stark had placed a police car, a gift from the television producer Aaron Spelling from the set of one of his shows, in the driveway. Other than that, his former employees said, there were no guards patrolling the property to protect the millions of dollars of artwork.

When healthy, Stark would spend many hours walking through his sculpture garden, his friends and former employees said. In the years after he had a stroke, he would sit on his patio and gaze at his treasures. "He used to take a lot of comfort in that," said Jeff Sagansky, an entertainment executive and friend.

But Stark was never an art snob, his friends said. Once Mr. Kelly was with him at the Santa Ynez ranch to install a sculpture, when a bird began leaving droppings all over the piece. Mr. Kelly was appalled, said Mr. Greisman, who was present. Stark found it hilarious.

Another friend and former employee, who asked not to be identified because he had signed a confidentiality agreement, recalled tooling through Paris with Stark in a Bentley, looking for artwork on a day when the galleries happened to be closed. At one gallery the owner recognized Stark from former shopping sprees, and scrambled to open his doors.

Stark vigorously shook his head from the driver's seat, the former employee said, and merely shouted, "You got any Bonnards?"

Many of Stark's friends were surprised to learn that he had left them paintings and sculptures in his will. Mr. Greisman received a nude sketch by Picasso. Mr. Geffen was bequeathed a four-foot-long Henry Moore sculpture of a reclining woman, which had been inside Stark's mansion.

However well known these anecdotes are inside Hollywood, visitors to the Getty Museum who see the sculptures should not expect to find the bawdier tales of Stark's collecting recounted at the museum.

"I'm interested," said William Griswold, the Getty's acting director. "We're interested in the story of Fran and Ray Stark. But those might not be in the brochure."

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Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities/National Geographic Society

Teams of artists and scientists, using computer scans to reconstruct the face of King Tut, say he had buck teeth and a long skull.

May 11, 2005
Tut Was Not Such a Handsome Golden Youth, After All
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Artists and scientists drawing on a detailed examination of King Tut's mummy have reconstructed the face of the young ruler as he might have looked in life: an unusually elongated skull, a narrow face, pronounced lips and possibly a receding chin.

Pictures of Tutankhamen's reconstructed face and head were released yesterday by Dr. Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo. The new photos presented an apparently more realistic depiction of Tut than the stylized image of him on his golden burial mask.

"The shape of the face and skull," Dr. Hawass said in a statement, "are remarkably similar to a famous image of Tutankhamen as a child, where he is shown as the sun god at dawn rising from a lotus blossom."

The reconstructions were based on the most thorough examination yet of Tut's mummy, including 1,700 three-dimensional images taken in January with computed tomography, or CT scans. The pictures of the skull, bones and soft tissues, more revealing than ordinary X-rays, were the latest of the Tut mummy's encounters with curious scientists and their modern technology since its discovery in 1922.

Tutankhamen died at 19, too soon to have given much thought to the hereafter. But he must have shared his royal predecessors' belief in an afterlife befitting rulers of ancient Egypt, an eternity with all of life's pleasures enjoyed in the company of the gods. Still, his has been an afterlife he could never have imagined.

The discovery of Tut's tomb in the Valley of the Kings at Luxor was one of the archaeological sensations of the 20th century. The treasures buried with him have drawn throngs to exhibitions, making him the most celebrated of pharaohs. His mummy was X-rayed twice, more than three decades ago, and the results heightened speculation about his untimely death: whether he died of natural causes or was murdered.

Now three independent teams of artists and scholars, one French, one American and one Egyptian, have used the CT images to reconstruct Tut's face, which Dr. Hawass said was the best preserved part of the mummy. The French and Egyptian teams were told the subject was Tutankhamen; the American team was working blind.

The teams essentially agreed on the proportions of the skull, the basic shape of the face and the size and setting of the eyes. They differed on the shape of the nose and ears, which have not held up well. The American and French versions showed a weak chin, while the Egyptians gave Tut a stronger one.

Dr. Hawass said the Egyptian team's version "looks the most Egyptian."

Before the artists began their work, Egyptian and international experts in anatomy, pathology and radiology, led by Dr. Madiha Khattab, dean of medicine at Cairo University, spent two months analyzing the CT images.

They concluded, for example, that Tut's elongated skull was a normal anthropological variation, not a result of disease or congenital abnormality. They noted his thin face and pronounced overbite - buck teeth. Egyptologists said overbites ran in his family, like the Hapsburg lip of more recent royal history.

Tut also had large lips, a receding chin and a small cleft in the roof of his mouth. The examiners said the cleft palette did not appear to have affected his external expression in any way.

All in all, the science team said, Tut appeared to have been in good health until he died. Judging from the bones, he was well-fed and there were no signs of malnutrition or disease in childhood. His teeth, except for an impacted wisdom tooth, were in excellent condition. He was slightly built and probably stood 5½ feet tall.

So why did Tut die so young, around 1325 B.C.?

An X-ray in 1968 revealed a hole at the base of Tut's cranium. Some Egyptologists suspected he was murdered, possibly by his successor, Ay.

On a recent visit to the University of Pennsylvania, however, Dr. Hawass said the scientists who analyzed the CT images found no apparent evidence of foul play. They said the damage to the cranium was apparently caused when the mummy's discoverers pried the burial mask from the head.

"No one hit Tut on the back of the head," Dr. Hawass said, though he conceded that he could have been poisoned. But to establish that would require other lines of analysis. He also speculated that the broken leg that Tut is known to have suffered days before he died could have become infected and contributed to his death.

The application of CT imaging to mummy research is becoming widespread. Egypt is scanning all the royal mummies in the Cairo Museum. Last week Stanford performed CT scans on the mummy of an Egyptian child. Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif., recently conducted similar research on seven mummies on loan from the British Museum.

Not coincidentally, the re-examination of the Tut mummy and the release of the images of the reconstructed head coincided with promotions of a new exhibition, "Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs." It opens June 16 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and will later move to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Chicago and Philadelphia.

The show was organized by the Egyptian antiquities council and the National Geographic Society, which will feature the Tut reconstruction in the June issue of its magazine.

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Jeffrey Barbee for The New York Times

After her husband died, Fanny Mbewe was forced to have "cleansing" sex with an in-law

May 11, 2005
AIDS Now Compels Africa to Challenge Widows' 'Cleansing'
By SHARON LaFRANIERE

MCHINJI, Malawi - In the hours after James Mbewe was laid to rest three years ago, in an unmarked grave not far from here, his 23-year-old wife, Fanny, neither mourned him nor accepted visits from sympathizers. Instead, she hid in his sister's hut, hoping that the rest of her in-laws would not find her.

But they hunted her down, she said, and insisted that if she refused to exorcise her dead husband's spirit, she would be blamed every time a villager died. So she put her two small children to bed and then forced herself to have sex with James's cousin.

"I cried, remembering my husband," she said. "When he was finished, I went outside and washed myself because I was very afraid. I was so worried I would contract AIDS and die and leave my children to suffer."

Here and in a number of nearby nations including Zambia and Kenya, a husband's funeral has long concluded with a final ritual: sex between the widow and one of her husband's relatives, to break the bond with his spirit and, it is said, save her and the rest of the village from insanity or disease. Widows have long tolerated it, and traditional leaders have endorsed it, as an unchallenged tradition of rural African life.

Now AIDS is changing that. Political and tribal leaders are starting to speak out publicly against so-called sexual cleansing, condemning it as one reason H.I.V. has spread to 25 million sub-Saharan Africans, killing 2.3 million last year alone. They are being prodded by leaders of the region's fledging women's rights movement, who contend that lack of control over their sex lives is a major reason 6 in 10 of those infected in sub-Saharan Africa are women.

But change is coming slowly, village by village, hut by hut. In a region where belief in witchcraft is widespread and many women are taught from childhood not to challenge tribal leaders or the prerogatives of men, the fear of flouting tradition often outweighs even the fear of AIDS.

"It is very difficult to end something that was done for so long," said Monica Nsofu, a nurse and AIDS organizer in the Monze district in southern Zambia, about 200 miles south of the capital, Lusaka. "We learned this when we were born. People ask, Why should we change?"

In Zambia, where one out of five adults is now infected with the virus, the National AIDS Council reported in 2000 that this practice was very common. Since then, President Levy Mwanawasa has declared that forcing new widows into sex or marriage with their husband's relatives should be discouraged, and the nation's tribal chiefs have decided not to enforce either tradition, their spokesman said.

Still, a recent survey by Women and Law in Southern Africa found that in at least one-third of the country's provinces, sexual "cleansing" of widows persists, said Joyce MacMillan, who heads the organization's Zambian chapter. In some areas, the practice extends to men.

Some Defy the Risk

Even some Zambian volunteers who work to curb the spread of AIDS are reluctant to disavow the tradition. Paulina Bubala, a leader of a group of H.I.V.-positive residents near Monze, counsels schoolchildren on the dangers of AIDS. But in an interview, she said she was ambivalent about whether new widows should purify themselves by having sex with male relatives.

Her husband died of what appeared to be AIDS-related symptoms in 1996. Soon after the funeral, both Ms. Bubala and her husband's second wife covered themselves in mud for three days. Then they each bathed, stripped naked with their dead husband's nephew and rubbed their bodies against his.

Weeks later, she said, the village headman told them this cleansing ritual would not suffice. Even the stools they sat on would be considered unclean, he warned, unless they had sex with the nephew.

"We felt humiliated," Ms. Bubala said, "but there was nothing we could do to resist, because we wanted to be clean in the land of the headman."

The nephew died last year. Ms. Bubala said the cause was hunger, not AIDS. Her husband's second wife now suffers symptoms of AIDS and rarely leaves her hut. Ms. Bubala herself discovered she was infected in 2000.

But even the risk of disease does not dent Ms. Bubala's belief in the need for the ritual's protective powers. "There is no way we are going to stop this practice," she said, "because we have seen a lot of men and women who have gone mad" after spouses died.

Ms. Nsofu, the nurse and AIDS organizer, argues that it is less important to convince women like Ms. Bubala than the headmen and tribal leaders who are the custodians of tradition and gatekeepers to change.

"We are telling them, 'If you continue this practice, you won't have any people left in your village,' " she said. She cites people, like herself, who have refused to be cleansed and yet seem perfectly sane. Sixteen years after her husband died, she argues, "I am still me." Ms. Nsofu said she suggested to tribal leaders that sexual cleansing most likely sprang not from fears about the vengeance of spirits, but from the lust of men who coveted their relatives' wives. She proposes substituting other rituals to protect against dead spirits, like chanting and jumping back and forth over the grave or over a cow.

Headman Is a Firm Believer

Like their counterparts in Zambia, Malawi's health authorities have spoken out against forcing widows into sex or marriage. But in the village of Ndanga, about 90 minutes from the nation's largest city, Blantyre, many remain unconvinced.

Evance Joseph Fundi, Ndanga's 40-year-old headman, is courteous, quiet-spoken and a firm believer in upholding the tradition. While some widows sleep with male relatives, he said, others ask him to summon one of the several appointed village cleansers. In the native language of Chewa, those men are known as fisis or hyenas because they are supposed to operate in stealth and at night.

Mr. Fundi said one of them died recently, probably of AIDS. Still, he said with a charming smile, "We can not abandon this because it has been for generations."

Since 1953, Amos Machika Schisoni has served as the principal village cleanser. He is uncertain of his age and it is not easily guessed at. His hair is grizzled but his arms are sinewy and his legs muscled. His hut of mud bricks, set about 50 yards from a graveyard, is even more isolated than most in a village of far-flung huts separated by towering weeds and linked by dirt paths.

What Tradition Dictates

He and the headman like to joke about the sexual demands placed upon a cleanser like Mr. Schisoni, who already has three wives. He said tradition dictates that he sleep with the widow, then with each of his own wives, and then again with the widow, all in one night. Mr. Schisoni said that the previous headman chose him for his sexual prowess after he had impregnated three wives in quick succession.

Now, Mr. Schisoni, said he continues his role out of duty more than pleasure. Uncleansed widows suffer swollen limbs and are not free to remarry, he said. "If we don't do it, the widow will develop the swelling syndrome, get diarrhea and die and her children will get sick and die," he said, sitting under an awning of drying tobacco leaves. "The women who do this do not die."

His wives support his work, he said, because they like the income: a chicken for each cleansing session. He insisted that he cannot wear a condom because "this will provoke some other unknown spirit." He is equally adamant in refusing an H.I.V. test. "I have never done it and I don't intend to do it," he said.

To protect himself, he said, he avoids widows who are clearly quite sick . Told that even widows who look perfectly healthy can transmit the virus, Mr. Schisoni shook his head. "I don't believe this," he said. At the traditional family council after James Mbewe was killed in a truck accident in August 2002, Fanny Mbewe's mother and brothers objected to a cleanser, saying the risk of AIDS was too great. But Ms. Mbewe's in-laws insisted, she said. If a villager so much as dreamed of her husband, they told her, the family would be blamed for allowing his spirit to haunt their community on the Malawi-Zambia border.

Her husband's cousin, to whom she refers only as Loimbani, showed up at her hut at 9 o'clock at night after the burial.

"I was hiding my private parts," she said in an interview in the office of Women's Voice, a Malawian human rights group. "You want to have a liking for a man to have sex, not to have someone force you. But I had no choice, knowing the whole village was against me."

Loimbani, she said, was blasé. "He said: 'Why are you running away? You know this is our culture. If I want, I could even make you my second wife."

He did not. He left her only with the fear that she will die of the virus and that her children, now 8 and 10, will become orphans. She said she is too fearful to take an H.I.V. test.

"I wish such things would change," she said.

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James Estrin/The New York Times

Many different brands of fortune cookies come from Wonton Food's Long Island City factory

May 11, 2005

Who Needs Giacomo? Bet on the Fortune Cookie
By JENNIFER 8. LEE

Powerball lottery officials suspected fraud: how could 110 players in the March 30 drawing get five of the six numbers right? That made them all second-prize winners, and considering the number of tickets sold in the 29 states where the game is played, there should have been only four or five.

But from state after state they kept coming in, the one-in-three-million combination of 22, 28, 32, 33, 39.

It took some time before they had their answer: the players got their numbers inside fortune cookies, and all the cookies came from the same factory in Long Island City, Queens.

Chuck Strutt, executive director of the Multi-State Lottery Association, which runs Powerball, said on Monday that the panic began at 11:30 p.m. March 30 when he got a call from a worried staff member.

The second-place winners were due $100,000 to $500,000 each, depending on how much they had bet, so paying all 110 meant almost $19 million in unexpected payouts, Mr. Strutt said. (The lottery keeps a $25 million reserve for odd situations.)

Of course, it could have been worse. The 110 had picked the wrong sixth number - 40, not 42 - and would have been first-place winners if they did.

"We didn't sleep a lot that night," Mr. Strutt said. "Is there someone trying to cheat the system?"

He added: "We had to look at everything to do with humans: television shows, pattern plays, lottery columns."

Earlier that month, an ABC television show, "Lost," included a sequence of winning lottery numbers. The combination didn't match the Powerball numbers, though hundreds of people had played it: 4, 8, 15, 16, 23 and 42. Numbers on a Powerball ticket in a recent episode of a soap opera, "The Young and the Restless," didn't match, either. Nor did the winning numbers form a pattern on the lottery grid, like a cross or a diagonal. Then the winners started arriving at lottery offices.

"Our first winner came in and said it was a fortune cookie," said Rebecca Paul, chief executive of the Tennessee Lottery. "The second winner came in and said it was a fortune cookie. The third winner came in and said it was a fortune cookie."

Investigators visited dozens of Chinese restaurants, takeouts and buffets. Then they called fortune cookie distributors and learned that many different brands of fortune cookies come from the same Long Island City factory, which is owned by Wonton Food and churns out four million a day.

"That's ours," said Derrick Wong, of Wonton Food, when shown a picture of a winner's cookie slip. "That's very nice, 110 people won the lottery from the numbers."

The same number combinations go out in thousands of cookies a day. The workers put numbers in a bowl and pick them. "We are not going to do the bowl anymore; we are going to have a computer," Mr. Wong said. "It's more efficient."


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Ruby Washington/The New York Times

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg won the endorsement of the New York State Court Officers Association yesterday in his bid for re-election

May 11, 2005
Bloomberg Says Fire Chief Must Support Emergency Plan or Leave
By MIKE McINTIRE

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg made clear yesterday that he would not tolerate continued disagreement over his new emergency response protocol, saying that the fire chief who publicly criticized it needs to support the new guidelines - or leave.

In careful but pointed remarks, the mayor said he was not angry with Chief Peter E. Hayden, who testified on Monday that he thought the protocol was flawed. But, the mayor said, he expected everyone in his administration to back the new procedures.

"My job is not to be angry; my job is to make sure that everybody works together," Mr. Bloomberg said. "There are always going to be differences of opinion. But everybody, in the end, if they want to work for the city, is going to get together and work together and follow the decisions that the mayor was elected to make. I expect that to be the case here."

Later, in response to another question about Chief Hayden, Mr. Bloomberg added: "Look, we are going to have everybody working together to protect the people of the City of New York. And anybody that doesn't feel that they can do that doesn't have to - but they just can't work here."

The not-so-veiled threat reflected what Mr. Bloomberg's aides say is his determination to enforce his decision on the protocol, which was made after lengthy deliberations involving the heads of many city agencies, including the Fire Department. Chief Hayden made his disagreement with the decision publicly known first in a newspaper interview, and then in this week's testimony, after he was subpoenaed to appear before the City Council. The chief said he believes that the new policy gives the police too much control at some emergency scenes.

Yesterday, the chief and the fire commissioner, Nicholas Scoppetta, presided over a promotions ceremony for firefighters, where they were asked by reporters about Chief Hayden's future. Mr. Scoppetta said he had received no pressure from City Hall to get rid of Chief Hayden, the city's highest-ranking fire officer, who serves at the pleasure of the mayor until June of next year, when his probationary period ends.

"No, absolutely not. We have not had that conversation, and I don't feel any pressure to do that," he said. "I think that Pete has made his position clear, both on what the objections were, and now that the document is final, we're going to make it work."

If the chief were forced out, he could either retire or accept a demotion in civil service rank to assistant chief, the position he held before being named chief last year. Chief Hayden said he had "no intention of leaving."

"Certainly, I serve at the pleasure of the mayor, but I think that I put forth a valid argument, and I hope he takes that into consideration moving forward," he said. "We will certainly work within the department to comply" with the new protocol, he added.

"We'll follow the document as it's written, and we will make sure that everybody follows it in the field," Chief Hayden said. "If there are inconsistencies or conflicts in the document that necessitate being addressed as we move forward, we'll bring that to the attention of the Office of Emergency Management."

The chief's main objection was the mayor's decision to place the Police Department in immediate command of hazardous materials emergencies until it is determined if terrorism or criminal activity is involved. Doing so, he argued, "makes no sense" because firefighters are expected to conduct rescue operations at such emergencies, yet would be subjugated to the police, whose investigative mission may conflict with the fire crews' role.

Yesterday, taking questions after an economic development announcement at Kennedy Airport, Mr. Bloomberg said he had decided that police and fire commanders would jointly supervise all emergency scenes except those involving hazardous materials, "based on F.B.I. and C.I.A. intelligence that the most likely terrorist attack would be a haz-mat attack on us."

"I've heard everybody's views, and you can't have a solution that is going to satisfy everybody," the mayor said, adding later: "We've made the decision. And now everybody is going to get on board and make that decision work."

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May 10, 2005

Fire Chief Challenges New York Emergency Plan
By MIKE McINTIRE and MICHELLE O'DONNELL

The chief of the New York City Fire Department directly criticized the Bloomberg administration's decision to give the police initial control at hazardous materials emergencies, telling a packed City Council chamber yesterday that it "makes no sense" and risks endangering firefighters and the public.

In startlingly frank language, Chief Peter E. Hayden, the city's highest ranking fire officer, said he believed Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had signed off on a deeply flawed emergency response protocol based on bad advice from subordinates. He strongly suggested that the protocol represented a power grab by the Police Department.

And in testimony that seemed likely to rub old wounds raw, he revisited the morning of Sept. 11, saying that practices by both the Police and Fire Departments had put lives at risk.

That day, he said, police helicopters observed that one of the trade center towers was near collapse, "but police commanders became so focused on their own tasks that they neglected to perform the critical task of information sharing."

Chief Hayden said the city had not learned enough from its mistakes. "Instead of seeking to control each other, agencies having major roles at terrorist events must learn how to work together to command these incidents," he said.

"There is a human behavior element here, where people don't want to share information because information is viewed as power," he said. "We see it in every level of government. The C.I.A. does not tell the F.B.I. The F.B.I. does not tell the N.Y.P.D. The N.Y.P.D. does not tell the F.D.N.Y. This is human behavior."

The chief delivered his assessment from the same witness table where, moments earlier, the police, fire and emergency management commissioners struggled to give a unified defense of the new protocol, which dictates that immediate police oversight of suspected terrorist events is the best way to protect lives. Chief Hayden attacked that argument, saying the Fire Department was better equipped to deal with life-threatening situations.

"The agency that is responsible for saving lives at a terrorist incident and for the rest of the city is not equally responsible for command," he said. "This does not make sense."

The mayor approved the new protocol last month, and the City Council cannot alter it. But the hearing provided the first public airing of the raging dispute over the new guidelines and raised anew questions of whether the city was adequately prepared to handle future terrorist attacks. It also laid bare the frustrations and rivalries that continue to bedevil relations between the Police and Fire Departments.

Firefighters filling the gallery broke into applause when Chief Hayden finished testifying, while the police officers present looked on quietly.

The spectacle of the fire chief sitting alone, pointedly disagreeing with the mayor, was not lost on the politicians present. Council Speaker Gifford Miller, a Democratic candidate for mayor, engaged in a long and ultimately inconclusive debate with the commissioners about the wisdom of their protocol.

Mr. Miller focused on the most disputed element of the protocol, a guideline that puts the police in charge at hazardous materials scenes until criminal or terrorist involvement can be ruled out. The police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, said the provision was necessary because of the seriousness of the incidents it addressed.

"We know that Al Qaeda wants to come here; this is the one place they want to come to again, New York," he said. "They've attacked here twice, and if they're able to do it a third time, it's a major, major victory for them. They're looking to do it in a spectacular way. We have to be on our guard. This is, I believe, a lesson from 9/11, and that's why the mayor decided to go forward with it."

Even with the police firmly in command, firefighters would still make all "life-safety" decisions affecting rescue operations, said Mr. Kelly and Joseph Bruno, the emergency management commissioner, although the wording of the protocol appears to say that fire officials would answer to police commanders in such situations.

Why did the protocol place the police in command of those situations, Mr. Miller asked, if the Fire Department would not be answerable to them on matters of life-safety? In a testy exchange, the Council speaker suggested that Mr. Kelly's explanation was absurd, since in effect it endorsed putting the police in charge because doing so made the least sense.

"Now come on, I didn't say that," Mr. Kelly protested, "I didn't say that."

Speaking to reporters afterward, Mr. Kelly, obviously annoyed, said council members might have resisted accepting what he had to say because "it's fun to ask these questions on television - give everybody face time."

Nicholas Scoppetta, the fire commissioner, who was mostly silent while much of the questioning focused on Mr. Kelly and Mr. Bruno, made it clear that his department had lost a behind-the-scenes dispute.

"I've been told publicly and privately that this is the final document and we're going to go forward with it," he said. "The only responsible thing now for the Fire Department to do is to do everything in its power to make sure that it works and works well, because the stakes are very, very high."

None of the three commissioners stayed to hear Chief Hayden, who quickly dissected what he said were flaws in the protocol. He said he agreed with council members who suggested that the protocol would theoretically place a low-level patrol officer in charge of senior fire officials at an emergency scene, and he said the protocol was so poorly conceived that the commissioners "couldn't even answer the questions straight" when asked about it.

"You heard testimony this morning from the commissioners here, and it's very clear to me and I think to many people in this audience, they are very confused," he said. "And if they're confused, then I'm confused, and my firefighters are confused, and the police officers in the street are going to be confused. And there will be a compromise of safety."

After the hearing, Chief Hayden told reporters that he hoped his decision to disagree publicly with the administration would not damage his relationship with the mayor, and that he felt Mr. Bloomberg "had been ill advised" when he approved the plan.

Asked about the fire chief's remarks, the mayor's office issued a brief statement defending the protocol: "Giving the Police Department the ability to investigate a situation to determine whether it is an act of terrorism is the responsible thing to do in the post-9/11 world. The mayor is confident that regardless of who is in charge of a given incident, every city agency will work together to provide the highest possible protection to the people of New York."

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J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times

Dr. Robert Boyd tends to discount the "nature versus nurture" debate.

May 10, 2005

How Culture Pushed Us to the Top of the Food Chain
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

Specialties in the social sciences are proliferating at a record pace, and the job title of Dr. Robert Boyd illustrates that point perfectly.

Dr. Boyd is a theoretical biological anthropologist: he uses mathematics and deduction to develop ideas about how Homo sapiens became earth's dominant species.

Over a 30-year career, Dr. Boyd, 57, of the University of California, Los Angeles, has made it his task to show how contemporary human behavior is rooted in the cultures that humans developed as they lived the evolutionary process.

In the recent book "Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution," Dr. Boyd and his co-author, an environmental scientist, explained why culture was "essential to human adaptation, as much a part of human biology as bipedal locomotion."

Q. Your book is called "Not by Genes Alone." Why that title?

A. We wanted to call it "The Nature of Culture," but our publishers, wouldn't have it. They didn't want us stuck on the social science shelves at the bookstore, where books generally don't do well.

The book is a synthesis of current thinking on the role culture plays in human evolution. My co-author, Peter Richerson, and I believe that when discussing the traits that have helped humans become such a successful species, we should avoid that old nature-versus-nurture debate.

That's the view that behavior is either learned or genetic. Instead, we need to be talking about genes and culture, and how they interact with each other.

Most people think that culture is free from the shackles of biology because it is learned. That's wrong. Learned behavior is shaped by psychological mechanisms that have evolved, just like any other trait. Culture is special in that it is transmitted from individual to individual and evolves through the generations.

Q. Among social scientists, the conventional wisdom has it that you've filled in an important piece of the evolutionary puzzle. What makes your theory new?

A. Unlike the conventional nature-nurture view, we explain why culture is adaptive, and why it causes people to behave so differently from other animals. We say that while in the long run all organisms adapt by genes, only humans can accumulate knowledge over long periods of time and transfer it so that the next generation can improve on it. It's this trick that has allowed people to be as successful as we are.

We have the widest range of any mammal. We occupy every inch of the globe basically except Antarctica. We were able to do it because different human populations can acquire from the previous generation the special tools and ways you need to live in such a wide variety of places.

There's no way that genes can teach an Inuit how to make a kayak, but others in the community can. Humans are animals who evolved in the tropics, but who now hunt for seals in the Arctic. We've been able to do that because we have culture.

Q. Don't animals have culture?

A. Not in the sense that they have traditions that change as they are transmitted. O.K., chimpanzees in one forest in Africa use short sticks to fish for ants. In another, they use longer ones. Yes, this seems to be socially transmitted. But what doesn't happen is an accumulation of knowledge. What they don't get is something that gets better and better through time.

In human cultures, things change with each generation. Populations create things that are useful in their survival and these things evolve and get better so that people can flourish. No single individual could have created something as complex and functional as the kayak.

Q. There are biologists who think that a lot of our behavior is hard-wired into our genes. Do you?

A. I don't think anything is hard-wired. Even the number of fingers on your hands isn't hard-wired. Even the genes that get expressed as your limbs develop depending on environmental circumstances. The thalidomide babies of the 1950's know that rather directly.

Q. There was a time when anthropologists went off to New Guinea and observed how the local people lived. You work in Los Angeles, where you produce theories and mathematical models. Should Margaret Mead be rolling in her grave?

A. I've done field work. But what Margaret Mead did was cultural anthropology. I'm a biological anthropologist. We look at bones, other animals, evolution. One of the things I've tried to do is bring the two subdisciplines closer.

As for all that mathematics, I use it because it gives a social scientist a kind of mental prosthesis. It lets you make certain your deductions are cogent. Unfortunately, mathematics also forces you to simplify things in a way that verbal reasoning doesn't.

So you always have to work, back and forth, between mathematics and verbal reasoning in order to have good explanations. At the end of the day, we often send graduate students out to the field to test what we've hypothesized with math models.

Q. Why is so much of social science moving toward the use of mathematical models rather than field observations?

A. In fact, I see the opposite happening. In economics, the most mathematical of the social sciences, there's a big trend toward field observations used in combination with mathematics. Ernst Fehr from the University of Zurich runs all these interesting experiments with bicycle messengers to determine whether or not people will work longer with higher wages. He found that when you paid them more they worked less.

Q. As a scholar of evolution are you surprised that Darwin remains so controversial?

A. I'm dismayed. I teach evolution in a basic undergraduate course at U.C.L.A. If you're a psychology major, you have to take it. The religious students try to argue with me! I've had a Muslim tell me that evolution wasn't in his religious texts so it couldn't be true. I had a young Christian woman in tears at the end of the term: "You convinced me. And now what am I going to do?"

She lived in a small town where evangelical religion played a big role. To doubt Genesis was almost like holding immoral beliefs. I felt strange because I'd made her life a lot more difficult by convincing her of what I considered to be true. But there was no help for it.

Q. A new version of creationism, "intelligent design," is being pushed by the anti-Darwinists. It says more or less that the world is too complicated to be an accident. Do your students cite it?

A. Not just my students. "Intelligent design" seems to be creationism stripped of its explicitly Christian biblical background, and so it has wider appeal. My wife has a relative: he's Jewish, and he is attracted to it. Every once in a while, he says, "You don't really believe that that natural selection gives rise to something as complicated as an eye?"

And then I have to give him this whole speech on how it works. He's never convinced. And he's a medical doctor!

Q. The anti-Darwinists of an earlier era had a motto: "I'm no monkey." In some ways, doesn't your theory of cultural transmission have the same message?

A. Well, obviously, we're not monkeys. But that doesn't mean that we didn't evolve. I live in Los Angeles, negotiate the freeways, go the supermarket and the beach; baboons don't do that. The real question is, How do we explain that we are different without giving up the truth: that we evolved from something like a monkey and that culture helped make our success possible.

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Dia Hamid/AFP ? Getty Images

Bodies wrapped in blankets waited to be identified after a suicide bombing in Tikrit, Iraq

May 11, 2005

At Least 79 Are Killed in New Round of Attacks in Iraq
By JOHN F. BURNS

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 11 - Insurgents struck in northern and central Iraq today in a series of bloody bombing attacks that killed at least 79 people in three cities, and wounded at least 120 others, according to figures provided by police and hospital officials. The attacks appeared to signify an intensification of attempts by Sunni Arab militants to disrupt Iraq's newly formed Shiite majority government.

In the deadliest single episode, at least 36 people were killed and 80 were wounded when a car bomber detonated his vehicle in the main street of Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam Hussein, about 110 miles north of Baghdad. Survivors said the bomber, whom they took for an Iraqi, drove up to a point on the main street where casual workers from some of the poorest district in the Shiite heartland of southern Iraq had gathered looking for jobs and asked them to watch his car, which then exploded.

In the town of Hawija, near Kirkuk, about 150 miles north of Baghdad, a suicide bomber wearing an explosives belt slipped past security guards protecting a recruitment center for Iraq's new American-trained army and police and blew himself up, a police official said. At least 32 people were killed and 34 wounded, according to hospital officials.

Four other attacks were carried out in Baghdad, where the new government of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari, a Shiite who heads an Iranian-backed religious party, is in its first week in office.

The government's swearing-in last Thursday was a watershed in Iraq's history, giving power to the Shiite majority after generations of rule by the Sunni Arab minority were ended with the toppling of Mr. Hussein in 2003.

American officials had hoped that the advent of an elected government, with a mandate from nearly nine millions Iraqis who voted in January elections, would persuade wavering elements in Sunni-led resistance to break with the insurgency and join in the American-sponsored effort to establish a parliamentary democracy. But those hopes have been rudely shattered by an eruption of violence that has carried the insurgency to levels rarely seen in the 25 months since American troops seized Baghdad.

The attacks today also included suicide bombings aimed at a police station in the southern Baghdad suburb of Doura, another suicide car bomb attack on a police patrol in the Yarmouk district of the capital, and an ambush of an Iraqi Army patrol in the Jamiyah district of western Baghdad, with at least nine killed and an unknown number of wounded. A mortar round also hit the Oil Ministry in Baghdad, but officials there said there were no casualties.

The latest attacks brought the number of Iraqi soldiers, police officers and recruits who have been killed in the new wave of attacks to more than 250. Still, American commanders say that volunteers for enlistment in the Iraqi forces continue to far outnumber the places available in training courses that are expected to push the Iraqi security forces, now numbering about 165,000, to about 300,000 by the end of next year.

At least 150 civilians have also been killed in the two weeks of bloodshed, bringing the toll to more than 400 killed, and making it one of the most violent passages in the 25 months of the war.

American officials have said the upsurge reflects a growing desperation among the insurgents as the country's transition to majority rule moves ahead. But American military commanders have also acknowledged that the insurgents, despite losing thousands of killed in the past year, have managed to increase the number of attacks across the country in May to an average of 70, up from 30 to 40 a day in April, a tempo higher than the insurgents managed for much of last year.

The attack in Tikrit today appeared to have been deliberately aimed at Shiites, a trend in the war that has suggested that some of the Sunni Arab insurgent groups seek to trigger a sectarian conflict between the Sunni minority and the Shiite majority.

Survivors of the car bombing said that about 6:30 a.m. a man driving a white car pulled to the curb at a spot on Tikrit's main street where Shiite migrant workers gather each day hoping for $5-a-day manual jobs, on farms and construction sites. He got out of his car and told them that he would return shortly to recruit some of them for work.

Ali Attiyah, a 23-year-old migrant who was taken to Tikrit's main hospital with leg wounds, said that the man spoke Arabic with an Iraqi accent. "He promised that he'd be back soon, but just after he walked away, the car exploded," Mr. Attiyah said.

A police officer who was across the road, outside the police headquarters for Saladin Province, gave a similar account. "I think he targeted them because most of them are Shiites who come here from the south," he said. "I believe he was trying to ignite a sectarian war."

The explosion left a scene that has become numbingly familiar to Iraqis: bodies strewn across the road, many of them dismembered, with pools of blood amid burning vehicles and shattered shopfronts. The al-Noor restaurant, a popular gathering place that is about 50 yards from the blast, was heavily damaged.

"There were dead and wounded people everywhere," a waiter, Khalil Salman, said. "We ran forward to try and help the wounded, but the policemen on the other side of the road fired in the air to drive us back."

Other witnesses said American troops based at a former palace of Mr. Hussein's only half a mile from the blast arrived quickly on the scene to restore order.

Although Tikrit is an overwhelmingly Sunni Arab city, and a stronghold of support for Mr. Hussein's ousted government, it has been a magnet for Shiite migrant workers for many years, drawn from cities like Kut, Diwaniya and Nasiriya in the south to seek jobs in what, in Mr. Hussein's heyday, was a center of palace-building and other construction projects that were part of the many favors bestowed on Tikritis by the city's favorite son.

Many of those killed today belonged to a rotating pool of casual workers who settle in worker's hostels in the city for a few weeks at a time, then travel hundreds of miles south to see their families before returning north again.

John F. Burns reported from Baghdad for this article and Khalid al-Ansary from Tikrit.

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Doug Mills/The New York Times

Senate workers evacuated their office building as word spread of the errant plane

May 11, 2005

Plane Prompts Brief Evacuation of White House and Capitol
By DAVID STOUT

WASHINGTON, May 11 - A small plane flew into restricted airspace over the nation's capital today, causing a scare that prompted evacuation of the Capitol building, the White House, the Supreme Court and other government sites.

The midday episode lasted barely a quarter-hour, and the errant pilot was quickly shooed away by two F-16 jet fighters that scrambled from nearby Andrews Air Force Base after the small plane was detected shortly before noon. But for those brief minutes there was a palpable sense of fear here as people recalled the terror of the day in 2001 when a hijacked airliner flew into the Pentagon, killing 189 people.

The single-engine Cessna that set off today's widespread alarm was first detected 15 miles away, just on the edge of the restricted airspace, as it headed toward the Capitol and the White House, the chief White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, said at a briefing soon after the incident.

Mr. McClellan said the pilot did not respond to repeated attempts to communicate with him. The craft, tracked by jet fighters, ultimately came within three miles of the White House before veering west and away from the restricted area, Mr. McClellan said.

President Bush was bicycling in Maryland at the time. But Vice President Dick Cheney, who was at the White House, was quickly escorted to a "secure location," as were First Lady Laura Bush and Nancy Reagan, who was visiting, Mr. McClellan said.

Several Congressional hearings were suspended as people streamed out of the Capitol Building, with Congressional leaders being hustled into armored vehicles. Scores of people were simultaneously evacuated at the White House, at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, under clear blue skies as the Secret Service briefly went on its highest-alert status. (The Pentagon, across the Potomac River in Arlington, Va., was not evacuated.)

After veering away from the White House, the Cessna was escorted by military aircraft to an airport in nearby Frederick, Md., where it put down. Two men were taken into custody at the airport, the Capitol police chief, Terry Gainer, said at a news briefing. Chief Gainer said preliminary information indicated that the men had taken the plane without permission from an airport in Lancaster County, Pa. But that was contradicted by comments to reporters made by people in Pennsylvania who said they knew the pilots.

An online database of the Federal Aviation Administration lists the plane bearing the registration number of the aircraft shown on television as a Cessna 150 registered to the Vintage Aero Club in Smoketown, in southeastern Pennsylvania. That model aircraft typically carries only one or two people, including the pilot.

The Associated Press described the club as a group of people who fly from the Smoketown Airport, in Lancaster County. The news agency reported that a former club member, John E. Henderson, had said that the plane was to be flown to a North Carolina airshow by Jim Sheaffer of Lititz, Pa., and a student pilot, Troy Martin of Akron, Pa.

Mr. Martin's wife, Jill, said the two men left late this morning for Lumberton, The A.P. said.

"Troy was discussing with me last night after they made their flight plans all about the no-fly zones and how they were going to avoid them," she said in an interview with the news agency. "He said they were going to fly between two different restricted areas."

As the plane sat on a runway in Frederick, it was dwarfed by a military helicopter that landed a short distance away from it. Later, television pictures showed the Cessna being towed away and a man in shorts being led to a police cruiser in handcuffs.

Secret Service officials and other law enforcement officers were questioning the pilot, who had not yet been identified and whose motives were not immediately known, Mr. McClellan said.

One tantalizing question is how close the Cessna may have come to being shot down. Mr. McClellan said there were "protocols in place" to fire at it, if necessary, "but I'm not sure it ever came to that point." Asked who had the authority to order that the plane be shot down, Mr. McClellan declined to be specific, except to say that President Bush was aware of the episode as it unfolded.

Pilots accidentally enter restricted airspace over Washington from time to time, generally without this level of response. But since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the prospect of an errant plane being shot down is not far-fetched. If, as Mr. McClellan said, the Cessna was within three miles of the White House today, it could easily have been within a minute or so's flying time of the mansion.

Today's incident, unsettling as it was, lasted just 15 minutes - from 11:59 a.m., when the aircraft was picked up on Federal Aviation Administration radar, until the "all clear" was sounded at 12:14 p.m.

Last June, an airplane carrying Gov. Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky was detected inside the restricted space, prompting alarms that caused the evacuation of government buildings. That plane had been authorized to fly over the city, so the governor could attend the funeral of Ronald Reagan, but because of a communications breakdown not all the appropriate officials had been notified.

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