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The Times published its first
issue on Sept. 18, 1851. The
Roman numerals CLVI denote
the 156th year of publication.
Volume number increases on
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Nxxx,2008-06-25,A,001,Bs-BK,E3
Late Edition
Today, mainly sunny and warm,
high 84. Tonight, patchy clouds late,
low 68. Tomorrow, variable clouds
and scattered thundershowers,
high 88. Weather map, Page B8.
VOL. CLVII . . No. 54,352
FLORIDA BUYING
BIG SUGAR TRACT
FOR EVERGLADES
APPROVAL IS NEAR
FOR BILL TO HELP
U.S. HOMEOWNERS
WILL AID RESTORATION
REVAMPING HOME LOANS
Environmentalists Are
Pleased, but Details
Remain Unsettled
Rescue and Refinancing
in Far-Reaching Plan
— Prices Decline
By DAMIEN CAVE
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
LOXAHATCHEE, Fla. — The
dream of a restored Everglades,
with water flowing from Lake
Okeechobee to Florida Bay,
moved a giant step closer to reality on Tuesday when the nation’s
largest
sugarcane
producer
agreed to sell all of its assets to
the state and go out of business.
Under the proposed deal, Florida will pay $1.75 billion for United States Sugar, which would
have six years to continue farming before turning over 187,000
acres north of Everglades National Park, along with two sugar
refineries, 200 miles of railroad
and other assets.
It would be Florida’s biggest
land acquisition ever, and the
magnitude and location of the
purchase left environmentalists
and state officials giddy.
Even before Gov. Charlie Crist
arrived to make the announcement against a backdrop of water, grass and birds here, dozens
of advocates gathered in small
groups, gasping with awe, as if at
a wedding for a couple they never thought would fall in love. After years of battling with United
States Sugar over water and pollution, many of them said that the
prospect of a partnership came
as a shock.
“It’s so exciting,” said Margaret McPherson, vice president of
the Everglades Foundation. “I’m
going to do cartwheels.”
The details of the deal, which is
scheduled to be completed over
Continued on Page A19
WASHINGTON — With sinking home values continuing to
drag down the economy, Congress is poised to approve a huge
package of housing legislation,
including a refinancing program
aimed at rescuing hundreds of
thousands of homeowners in danger of foreclosure and the most
sweeping government overhaul
of mortgage financing since the
New Deal.
Lawmakers moved with increasing urgency on Tuesday after a closely watched housing index showed prices nationally had
declined in April by more than 15
percent from a year earlier. Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the
majority leader, threatened to
keep the Senate in session
through the Fourth of July holiday to finish the housing measure, if needed. The House has already approved similar legislation.
The centerpiece of the Senate
package is a rescue-refinancing
plan aimed at stemming the tide
of more than 8,000 new foreclosures a day that lenders are filing
across the country. The plan
would allow distressed borrowers and their lenders to stem
losses by allowing qualified owners to refinance into more affordable, 30-year fixed-rate loans
with a federal guarantee.
The legislation would also provide benefits for first-time buyers, who would receive a refundable tax credit of up to $8,000, or
10 percent of the value of a home,
on purchases of unoccupied
housing.
As part of a regulatory overhaul of Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac, the mortgage finance giants, the bill would permanently
increase to $625,000, from
$417,000, the limit on loans they
can purchase from lenders in expensive housing markets, making it easier for borrowers to obtain mortgages at discounted
Continued on Page A18
VINCENT LAFORET FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Let There Be Light and Falling Water, in the Name of Art
A test at the Brooklyn Bridge of part of Olafur Eliasson’s installation of four waterfalls, opening Thursday on the city’s waterfront.
City Questions 9/11 Workers’ Claims of Illness Report Assails
Political Hiring
Review Suggests Many
In Justice Dept.
Are Not as Sick as
By ANTHONY DePALMA
The first detailed review of the
medical records of nearly 10,000
ground zero workers who are suing New York City and its contractors suggests that many are
not as sick as their lawyers have
claimed, attorneys for the city
say.
The city’s review, based on
medical records submitted in federal court by the workers and
their lawyers, found that as many
as 30 percent of the workers reported nothing more than common symptoms like runny nose
or cough. Their records, accord-
Body Type
Lawsuits Say
ing to the review, did not indicate
that doctors had ever diagnosed
a specific disease.
In fact, more than 300 workers
admitted in court documents that
they were not ill at all.
Lawyers for the city, who conducted the review in response to
a court order to sort out the seriousness of the claims, also found
Top Engineers
Shun Military;
Concern Grows
The text of the narrative, or body
of the article. The Times’s body
type style is known as Imperial.
By PHILIP TAUBMAN
Special
Feature
There is almost always an article
of special interest that begins on
Page 1 — in addition to the main
news of the day. It might be a
human interest story, a report
on a new trend, an in-depth look
at a topic or just an article on
something amusing or unusual.
Byline
The writer or writers of an article.
Refers
Previews of selected articles that
appear elsewhere in The Times
and online.
$1.25
NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25, 2008
© 2008 The New York Times
JOHAN SPANNER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Qamile Stema, 88, left, a woman in Barganesh, Albania, who
took an oath of virginity to live, and be treated, like a man.
Old Custom Fades in Albania:
Woman as Man of the Family
By DAN BILEFSKY
KRUJE, Albania — Pashe Keqi
recalled the day nearly 60 years
ago when she decided to become
a man. She chopped off her long
black curls, traded in her dress
for her father’s baggy trousers,
armed herself with a hunting rifle
and vowed to forsake marriage,
children and sex.
For centuries, in the closed-off
and conservative society of rural
northern Albania, swapping genders was considered a practical
solution for a family with a shortage of men. Her father was killed
in a blood feud, and there was no
male heir. By custom, Ms. Keqi,
now 78, took a vow of lifetime virginity. She lived as a man, the
new patriarch, with all the swagger and trappings of male authority — including the obligation to
avenge her father’s death.
She says she would not do it today, now that sexual equality and
modernity have come even to Albania, with Internet dating and
MTV invading after the fall of the
Berlin Wall. Girls here do not
want to be boys anymore. With
only Ms. Keqi and some 40 others
remaining, the sworn virgin is
dying off.
“Back then, it was better to be
a man because before a woman
and an animal were considered
Continued on Page A12
When Paul G. Kaminski completed his graduate work in 1971
with degrees from M.I.T. and
Stanford, he started building advanced airplanes for the Air
Force. By the time he stopped
several decades later, he had
played a pivotal role in producing
a flock of new weapons, including
radar-evading stealth aircraft.
If Mr. Kaminski were coming
out of school today, chances are
he would be going to work for the
likes of Microsoft or Google.
Over the last decade, even as
spending on new military
projects has reached its highest
level since the Reagan years, the
Pentagon has increasingly been
losing the people most skilled at
managing them. That brain
drain, military experts like Mr.
Kaminski say, is a big factor in a
breakdown in engineering management that has made huge cost
overruns and long delays the
maddening norm.
Mr. Kaminski’s generation of
engineers, which was responsible
for many of the most successful
military projects of the 1970s and
’80s, is aging, and fewer of the nation’s top young engineers, software developers and mathematicians are replacing them. Instead, they are joining high-tech
companies and other civilian
firms that provide not just better
pay than the military or its contractors, but also greater cachet
— what one former defense inContinued on Page A20
that many records were contradictory or incomplete, making it
difficult to determine when an ailment began or how long it persisted. The documents included
few records before Sept. 11, 2001.
The city, which faces a huge financial liability in the lawsuit,
has ample reason to play down
the claims of firefighters, police
officers, construction workers
and others who say they became
ill because they were not given
proper breathing equipment during the nine-month rescue and
recovery operation at ground
zero.
The workers’ lawyers have
sharply criticized the city’s review, calling it skewed and largely inaccurate. They have consistently claimed — but have never
released a detailed analysis of the
claim — that the workers suffer
from a broad range of medical
problems, mostly respiratory or
gastrointestinal sicknesses, but
also more serious conditions like
cancer, chronic pulmonary disease and sarcoidosis, a lung-scarring disease.
The city’s findings have no immediate impact on the litigation
because the court is not ready to
rule on the severity of illnesses or
make connections between diseases and exposure to ground
zero dust. But the review is important despite its obvious limitaContinued on Page B4
EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
Global Outcry Grows, but Mugabe Remains Defiant
President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe held a rally ahead of Friday’s runoff election. Page A6.
Iraq Blast Kills 4 Americans
The Coolest Spin on Summer
High gasoline
prices are
sending growing numbers
of Americans
over the border to fill their
tanks in Mexico, where
prices are significantly lower thanks to
government subsidies. PAGE A14
An explosion in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad killed 11 people, including 2 American soldiers and a State Department employee. PAGE A8
Propping Up Health Costs
The White House in 2007 refused to accept the E.P.A.’s conclusion that greenhouse gases were pollutants that must
be controlled, officials said. PAGE A15
Medicare pays $110 for a walker that
Wal-Mart sells for $60, and medical
equipment makers would like to keep it
that way. Economic Scene. PAGE C1
OBITUARIES A21
CLASSIFIED ADS C12
COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE MARKETPLACE C9
Dateline
The place where the reporting
for an article was done. If there is
no dateline, the article was either
written in New York or where it
was written has no relation to
the content of the story. It is
called the dateline because it
used to include the date the
article was reported.
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A signpost that an article
continues (“jumps”) to another
page. Sections of The Times
are designated by letters.
Some of these are:
A: Main news
B: Metro
The name of the photographer
or news agency that supplied
the picture.
‘Gas Tourists’ in Mexico
E.P.A. Finding Was Rebuffed
A quick summary of the article’s
content. The larger the headline,
the more important the news.
Credit Line
DINING F1-8
BUSINESS DAY C1-9
The Illinois attorney general is
suing Countrywide Financial and
its chief executive, claiming that
the company defrauded borrowers with defective loans. Page C1.
Headline
D: Sports (in New York edition)
INTERNATIONAL A6-12
The Army overlooked the spotty history
of an arms dealer when it awarded a
large contract, officials said. PAGE A12
Mortgage Lender Faces Suit
The most important news of
the day. It is always in the upper
right corner of the front page.
C: Business Day
NATIONAL A14-20
Army Criticized on Arms Deal
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON — Justice Department officials illegally used
“political or ideological” factors
in elite recruiting programs in recent years, tapping law school
graduates with Federalist Society
membership or other conservative credentials over more qualified candidates with liberalsounding résumés, an internal report found Tuesday.
The report, prepared by the
Justice Department’s own inspector general and its ethics office, portrays a clumsy effort by
senior
Justice
Department
screeners to weed out candidates
for career positions whom they
considered “leftists,” using Internet search engines to look for incriminating information or evidence of possible liberal bias.
One rejected candidate from
Harvard Law School worked for
Planned Parenthood. Another
wrote opinion pieces critical of
the USA Patriot Act and the
nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr.
to the Supreme Court. A third applicant worked for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and posted an
Continued on Page A20
Lead
Article
Serious cocktail enthusiasts usually
sneer at
blender
drinks, but
more and
more bartenders are
taking them
seriously.
PAGE F1
A tasting panel
tackles 25 root
beers.
nytimes.com/dining
METRO B1-7
SPORTSWEDNESDAY D1-6
G.O.P. Names Bruno Successor
Confused Loyalties on Soccer
Dean G. Skelos, a Long Island Republican known for his aggressive style, was
chosen to succeed Joseph L. Bruno as
State Senate majority leader. PAGE B1
Germany plays Turkey in a European
Championship semifinal game that is intriguing in part because Turks make up
Germany’s largest minority. PAGE D1
ARTS E1-8
EDITORIAL, OP-ED A22-23
Strong Sales
For Coldplay
Thomas L. Friedman PAGE A23
Maureen Dowd PAGE A23
Coldplay’s new album, “Viva la
Vida or Death and
All His Friends,”
has sold well in its
first week, bucking an industry
trend. PAGE E1
More Inside The Times.
PAGES A2-3 ➤
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INSIDE: Pages A2 –3 Summary of major articles inside the paper. Page A4 Summary of major features available at nytimes.com. Also, Corrections (to articles that appeared recently in the paper).
A Guide to Page 1
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08-1124 Copyright © 2008 The New York Times