For Program On: Tuesday, August 30, 2005 at 4:00 PM

Peter Donalds gets an insider’s view of the Iraq constitution negotiations after four. He'll talk with a constitutional expert who recently returned from Baghdad to advise the Iraqi Kurdish delegation. Guest: Karol Soltan, associate professor of government and politics, University of Maryland. Constitutional expert and consultant to Iraqi Kurdish leaders.

In the mid-1990s, long before oil prices topped $60 a barrel, U.S. companies sought access to Kazakhstan, a Central Asian nation that the U.S. State Department says will be among the world's top 10 producers of crude by 2015.

First, they had to win approval from Jim Giffen, a New York investment banker who became an official in Kazakhstan's government and held sway over its energy deals.

"You couldn't go to a Kazakh minister, particularly if you were an American company, without going through Giffen," says Ed Chow, who managed external affairs at Chevron Overseas Petroleum Ltd., a unit of San Ramon, California-based Chevron Corp.

Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company, avoided Giffen by arriving in the country before he amassed power, says Chow, 55, who's now an oil and gas consultant in Leesburg, Virginia. Others couldn't.

Now, federal prosecutors say Giffen, 64, cemented his power by bribing Kazakh leaders with $84 million that Amoco Corp., Mobil Oil Co., Phillips Petroleum Co. and Texaco Inc. paid to win access to Kazakh fields. In January, Giffen goes on trial in federal district court in New York in one of the largest overseas criminal bribery cases ever.


…Giffen lavished gifts on the Kazakhs, prosecutors say: [President] Nazarbayev got two snowmobiles, an $80,000 Donzi speedboat and his daughter's tuition at George Washington University in Washington, then $22,625 a year.

“Black-and-white photographs of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Samuel Cooleridge, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Henry Miller, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway looked down on the approximately 350 attendees who wrote down their thoughts once they climbed a large black staircase that led into an open-air tent. Chandeliers and mounted wild-game heads decorated the booze-ridden ceremony.”

"Editor: Just rode up Lenado, past Hunter launch site. Rent-a-cops everywhere, some peering into hills with binoculars—looking for invaders? Twice, I got stopped on my bike and told, 'Don't loiter, keep moving, don't take any pictures.' The guy who made his reputation opposing authority exits the planet completely surrounded by authority. Who'd have thunk it?"

“[Jimmy Ibbotson] made the wire services when he opened fire with his shotgun on what he termed a 'paparazzi,' who wanted to park on his property."

But the cries for help appear to have other causes, too. The quest to get into a top college has grown so cutthroat for many that more students are emerging from it emotionally damaged. "Kids are burning out sooner and sooner," says Leigh Martin Lowe, director of college counseling at Roland Park Country School in Baltimore. "They're not being allowed to enjoy their teenage years, and many of them end up in college and they don't have the energy or stamina to really turn it on." At MIT, Jones, the admissions dean, gives preference to students who are "self-driven" (read: not being pushed by their parents), based on her belief that self-motivated students are better able to cope with failures. "Our culture has become insane — we're making people sick," Jones says.

[T]he Democratic Party is a vehicle of reaction, not out of error or lack of wit, but because it is a machine largely controlled by the super-rich, who are perfectly capable of understanding their own interests.

For all his spirited retorts to hucksters like David Brooks, [Thomas] Frank [author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?] flinches from acknowledging the core of cold truth in their legends and demagogic stereotypes. In the recent Presidential election, the Democrats picked the wealthiest individual since George Washington ever to run for the White House as their candidate, outgunned the Republicans 59 to 41 per cent among donors with assets over $10 million, outspent Bush in every swing state of the Union, and hit an all-time financial record for a senatorial campaign: $17 million in a failed attempt to get Daschle back on the Hill.

Moreover, there is little that is new in this: since the nineties virtually all of the richest electoral districts in the country have been Democratic bastions, Clinton’s cash-mountain easily topped Dole’s in 1996, and the Democrats have regularly received larger individual donations than Republicans, whose strength has been among smaller donors. In this situation, workers who vote Republican may be less deluded than Frank seems to believe. Putting it in sociological language, since there is so little to choose ‘instrumentally’ between the two parties, each of them dedicated to capital unbound, why not at least get the satisfaction of voting ‘expressively’ for the one which seems to speak for their values, if not their interests?

[U]niversities have permitted in the last 40 years and all the media sat on its hands on this, the growth of a bureaucratic master class of administrators. More and more deans who are making fortunes and also the salaries at the Ivy League are astronomical. People are making $200,000 and families are bankrupting themselves to pay for these bills. There should be a national outrage...

SETON HALL DROPS
FELON’S NAME
FROM BUILDING

Liz Willen
Bloomberg News


SOUTH ORANGE -- Seton Hall University, a Catholic institution named for a saint, removed the name of Dennis Kozlowski, convicted felon and former chief executive of Tyco International Ltd., from a building on campus.

The name was removed today at Kozlowski's request, Seton Hall spokesman Thomas White said in a telephone interview.

The building has been renamed Jubilee Hall.

Seton Hall, a school of 10,000 students in South Orange, has had at least three buildings named for convicted felons. Kozlowski, a 1968 Seton Hall graduate, faces as many as 30 years in prison after being convicted of larceny for looting Tyco of more than $150 million and defrauding shareholders. His name also came off a rotunda in the library, White said.

Poor Bob Schrieffer. A brilliant research scientist, the pride of Tallahassee, Fla., snatched from the laboratory before his time. One of America's foremost theoretical physicists, a man of boundless mathematical curiosity and imagination, gone.

All because of a galling, tragic collision on a Central California freeway 11 months ago.

If Schrieffer, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1972, sounds like the victim here, the confusion is understandable. Some newspaper accounts, riding a narrative arc built around the incident's baffling incongruity, have in effect portrayed the 74-year-old verifiable genius as the party for whom we should be grieving.

Somewhere down in the last few paragraphs, if at all, we catch the barest glimpse of the other party, the only person in this story who, as a direct result of the events of that September day, won't be returning to any labs, scientific or otherwise.




When Schrieffer, the pride of Florida State University's National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, crashed his new Mercedes-Benz sports car into a Toyota van last Sept. 24 near Santa Maria, it killed 57-year-old Renato "Rey" Catolos of Ridgecrest and injured seven others.

Schrieffer, who taught at UC Santa Barbara for 12 years and directed its Institute for Theoretical Physics in the 1980s, was zipping down the coastal highway at an estimated speed of 110 mph when he barreled into the van, prosecutors say. He fabricated a story blaming another, nonexistent vehicle. Then he owned up to it himself.

Amparo Mangapit, a 77-year-old passenger in the same van, died a month later,but Schrieffer was not charged in that death. A third passenger was partially paralyzed and remains in a skilled-nursing facility.




Schrieffer pleaded no contest to vehicular manslaughter on July 25 and probation officials recommended an eight-month sentence in the Santa Barbara County Jail. But at his Aug. 8 sentencing hearing, Superior Court Judge James Herman said Schrieffer might deserve "a taste of state prison."

Now he's the smartest inmate at Wasco State Prison -- or will be, if Herman decides to keep him there after his three-month pre-sentencing evaluation period concludes. Sentencing has been rescheduled for Nov. 7.

Colleagues on both coasts are shocked and puzzled. This is an aberration, they say with unanimous incredulity. They never saw this coming, despite Schrieffer's having piled up nine speeding tickets since 1993, including 18 bad-driver points in the 18 months prior to the accident, prompting the state of Florida to yank his license.




Back in Ridgecrest, Estelita Catolos is too gentle a soul to rage at the injustice of the wreck -- or the injustice of its postmortems. She just misses her husband.

"He was a hardworking man and a good provider," she says, "When we first came to the United States (from the Philippines) in 1971 he worked three jobs. He was a very hard worker who cared about his family very much."

For a time, Catolos did commercial janitorial work early in the morning, cleaned apartments in the late evening and, in between, went to his regular job with the U.S. Navy. He retired in the early 1990s after 20 years of military service and got a job as a warehouse manager, most recently for General Dynamics.

He liked Ridgecrest. Thought it was a good place to raise kids.

He drove his wife into Los Angeles on regular buying trips for her Ridgecrest store, Lita's Fashions -- which over the course of her 16 years in business evolved into an Asian market with no "fashions" to speak of. At night he often cleaned the store for her.

It was the classic tale of a father who busted his backside so his children wouldn't have to.

"He believed in education," said his oldest daughter, Agnes Ysselstein, a registered nurse who lives in the Bay Area. "He made sure his three kids all went to college. ... He was one of 10 children, and he sent a lot of his brothers and sisters to college too."

Catolos and his wife -- two days shy of their 33rd anniversary -- were traveling with friends that day almost a year ago. They had visited friends in the town of Guadalupe and were on their way to the Chumash Casino in Santa Ynez, northwest of Santa Barbara, when Schrieffer intervened.




Inexplicable behavior, agonizing results.

Each man was passionate about his perceived purpose in life. Each gave all he could muster, exercised all of his gifts. In both cases the results were admirable.

Nobel Prizes and international acclaim have a way of skewing things, though. Genius attracts headlines. Accompanied by a fall from grace as precipitous as Schrieffer's, the story can only move in one direction on the page -- up.

But for one humble, grieving Ridgecrest family, the wrong man got top billing -- no matter how many honorary doctorates line the walls of John Robert Schrieffer's empty office.

[GW] proposes to hire a pair of classy developers (Boston Properties and KSI) and a world-class architecture firm (Cesar Pelli & Associates) to design and build a $250 million, mixed-use development with offices facing Washington Circle, high-end apartments in the back and plenty of ground-level retail all around. [There will be] about 450,000 square feet [of office space], compared with 250,000 for residential and 80,000 for retail. With office rents at least 25 percent above apartment rents, that balance makes sense for the university, as landowner, and Boston Properties, as the project manager and office developer.

[The] university argues that with its Pennsylvania Avenue address and its proximity to the Foggy Bottom Metro stop, Square 54 is simply too valuable as a site for high-end commercial development to be used for its own purposes.

I didn't more than glance over the original report in The Bookseller. It said that the Bloomsbury bestseller Rock Me Gently - Judith Kelly's memoir of a traumatic childhood in a Catholic orphanage - was being rewritten after "similarities" were spotted with Antonia White's 1933 novel Frost in May. Then a couple of weeks later Hilary Mantel, a novelist with whom I'm friendly, got in touch to say that she, too, had been gently rocked by Rock Me Gently.

“Judith… has read very widely and has a remarkable memory, and during the decade in which she was working on her own book, some of her wide-ranging reading emerged in her own prose without her realising it. There is no question of infringement of copyright," she wrote (that last steely, lawyerish phrase being the letter's real payload), "but Judith is naturally very upset that this has happened and is rewriting those passages for the next edition of the book."

South African poet Melanie Grobler has relinquished the Eugýne Marais literature prize and offered to pay back the prize money after it emerged that she had presented an unacknowledged translation of a poem by Canadian author Anne Michaels as her own work.

Although her poem Stad (Die Waterbreker, 2004) reads as an almost direct translation of Michaels's There Is No City That Does Not Dream (Skin Divers, 1999), without any reference to Michaels, Grobler denies allegations of plagiarism.

She told the Suid-Afrikaanse Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns, who gave her the prestigious award, that the resemblance was due to "pure negligence" and the "absorption that takes place naturally when one is an avid reader".

Marilyn Biederman, director of rights and contracts at McClelland & Stewart publishers in Toronto, on Thursday said she was not prepared to comment without more information.

"We represent Michaels both in Canada and where she is published abroad. At the moment we are looking at what course to take. We understand that the SA author had rescinded her prize, which also has bearing on how we will deal with the matter."

Loftus Marais, a young poet studying at Stellenbosch University, blew the whistle on Grobler on the website litnet.co.za, creating heated debate over Grobler.

Grobler initially refused to give up the prize, but later said in a statement she would take full responsibility for the harm she had caused by failing to credit Michaels, whom she said was one of her favourite poets.

Chief executive of the academy Jacques van de Elst said an investigation into the matter would no longer be necessary, although a report would be compiled about the incident.

It was also decided against passing on this year's prize to another poet.

In letters to the award's chief sponsors, Absa bank and Rapport newspaper, Van de Elst expressed disappointment at the turn of events and said Grobler had offered to pay back her prize money of R11 000.

"It is the first time in the academy's history that such a thing has happened. We firmly believe the poet had no cruel intentions. Besides a literature commission that assumes original work is presented, it is very difficult in an ocean of literature to identify alleged cribbing from a remote literature such as the Canadian," he wrote to both Absa sponsorships director Angela Bruwer and Rapport editor Tim du Plessis.

He also requested that this year's prize money be saved for next year's winner.

Van de Elst said the academy's council would discuss the matter at a September 23 meeting and would probably decide to scrap the author's name from their awards list of over a hundred years.

The volume of poetry containing the contentious poem is still for sale in book shops, but Tafelberg Publishers has since August 3 placed an embargo on any more stock going to retailers.

Bragg appears to be guilty of three counts of editorial deceit in hiring an unpaid, undisclosed, and unauthorized helper — essentially subcontracting his work to others without his bosses' consent. [He visited] Apalachicola for a couple of hours solely to claim the dateline and foster the illusion that [he’d] seen the story [himself].

The Apalachicola text reveals how Bragg infused the piece with its fraudulent sense of immediacy. He repeatedly invokes the word "here" to imply an intimacy with his subjects and the environs, even though he didn't do any of the interviews with the oystermen.

More and more, life here feels temporary. …
As in any society, there are layers here. …
A man has to get very drunk not to think about the future here. …
While environmentalists call the bay pristine, people who have lived here the longest say change has long since come. …
The people have a toughness in them here. …

Obviously, the journalistic profession should better codify 1) exactly how much work a stringer must do before earning a byline credit and 2) how many minutes a reporter need occupy the city limits of his dateline in order to claim it. But the lack of a hard-and-fast standard doesn't mean I don't know journalistic scamming when I see it. Reconstituting a "you are there" story from somebody else's notes and conducting a touch-and-go landing to claim the dateline violates not only Times policy, but any sober person's elemental sense of intellectual honesty.

Every reporter makes mistakes, but Bragg's gargantuan goofs defy explanation—often making you wonder if he even visited the scene of his own story. Take this hilarious extended correction for Bragg's June 1, 1998, story about a small Alabama newspaper's crusade against corruption, in which he appears to have gotten more facts wrong than right:

'An article on June 1 about a small-town Alabama publishing couple who exposed corruption by a county sheriff misstated the sentence received by the sheriff, Roger Davis of Marengo County, for extortion. It was 27 months in prison, not 27 years, and is to be served concurrently with another 27-month sentence, for soliciting a bribe and failure to pay state income taxes.

The article also misstated the age of the editor and publisher, Goodloe Sutton of the weekly Democrat-Reporter in Linden. He is 59, not in his late 40's.

In addition, the article referred imprecisely to the timing of a Democrat-Reporter article about Sheriff Davis's use of county money for an all-terrain vehicle for his daughter. That article was published after the sheriff had repaid the money, not before.

The Times article also misstated the process by which the sheriff took money from the county mental health center. He had the center write a check to him for each mental patient who was transported by sheriff's deputies; he was not cashing checks that had been intended for the center.

The article also misstated the circulation of The Democrat-Reporter. It is 7,125, not 6,000.'

Or this Page One March 14, 2002, Bragg story about a town that allegedly banned Satan:

'A front-page article on March 14 reported on a proclamation by the mayor of Inglis, Fla., population 1,400, banning Satan from the town. The mayor, Carolyn Risher, had prayers encased in posts at the entrances to the town. The article said that while the proclamation was signed by the town clerk and stamped with the official seal, other town officials had said the mayor was speaking only for herself.

The article should have added that those officials, members of Inglis's town commission, took that position in late January after the American Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue the city. The commission ordered the mayor to reimburse the town for the cost of issuing the proclamation and had the posts removed from public property. Officials of the civil liberties union in Florida brought the later developments to The Times's attention in a letter to the editor published on Thursday.'

Such errors cry out for public pillory — or at the very least careful policing by editors. Instead, Bragg continued to live his enchanted life at the Times.

“What’s in a name?” Shakespere asked.

Make that “Shakespeare.” Miami artist Maria Alquilar, much maligned for 11 misspellings that popped up in the educational mural she designed for the Livermore public library last year, spent today under the hot sun correcting her mistakes.

In addition to fixing the bard’s name, she changed “Eistein” to “Einstein,” “Gaugan” to “Gauguin” and more.

But Alquilar, who at first claimed artistic license and said she wasn’t going to return to fix the faux pas because people were being too mean about it, was giving no media interviews as she worked under a broad-brimmed straw hat and blue tent. She sliced and diced the tiles with power tools, protected from the public by a barrier.

She wagged her finger at a television cameraman and threatened to throw a rock at a print photographer.

“No pictures of me!” she yelled. “If I’m in it, I’m going to sue you.”

Apparently, Alquilar wanted to return quietly to do the edits, for which city officials are paying her $6,000 plus travel expenses. That’s on top of the $40,000 she received for creating the 16-foot circular mosaic, made up of 175 historical names and cultural words.

But after she arrived Sunday, word spread, and today she had a consistent audience for her work, which she expected to complete today or Wednesday.

Assistant City Manager Jim Piper assured reporters that city officials were spell-checking Alquilar’s replacement tiles.

“We certainly believe they are spelled correctly,” he said.

Livermore officials selected Alquilar in 2000 to create a mosaic at the entrance to Livermore’s new library, which opened in May 2004. Icons representing science, art, literature and history surround a tree of life in the center.

Library patrons were of varied opinions about whether a name by any other spelling smelled as sweet.

A woman named Betty, who wouldn’t give her last name for fear of reprisal from her stickler school-teacher chums, said she didn’t mind the imperfect art.

“I feel sorry for her out in the heat,” she said. “It was kind of fun to have something unique. I thought it was very nice.”

But Jarod Vash, 17, who was borrowing videos with his girlfriend and her family, said he thought the misspellings were embarrassing.

“When the story first broke, I thought, ‘Oh, Livermore, the town that misspells stuff,’ ” he said. “The only thing we’ve got in Livermore, and it’s misspelled.”

But he added, “Everybody makes mistakes.”

“Not this bad,” said his girlfriend’s 13-year-old brother, Eric Smyth.