An American Inmate

1 in 100 U.S. Adults Behind Bars, New Study Says

By ADAM LIPTAK Published: February 28, 2008

For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.

Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

The report, from the Pew Center on the States, also found that only one in 355 white women between the ages of 35 and 39 is behind bars, but that one in 100 black women is.

The report’s methodology differed from that used by the Justice Department, which calculates the incarceration rate by using the total population rather than the adult population as the denominator. Using the department’s methodology, about one in 130 Americans is behind bars.

Either way, said Susan Urahn, the center’s managing director, “we aren’t really getting the return in public safety from this level of incarceration.”

“We tend to be a country in which incarceration is an easy response to crime,” Ms. Urahn continued. “Being tough on crime is an easy position to take, particularly if you have the money. And we did have the money in the ’80s and ’90s.”

Now, with fewer resources available to the states, the report said, “prison costs are blowing a hole in state budgets.” On average, states spend almost 7 percent on their budgets on corrections, trailing only healthcare, education and transportation.

In 2007, according to the National Association of State Budgeting Officers, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127 increase once adjusted for inflation. With money from bond issues and from the federal government included, total state spending on corrections last year was $49 billion. By 2011, the report said, states are on track to spend an additional $25 billion.

It cost an average of $23,876 to imprison someone in 2005, the most recent year for which data is available. But state spending varies widely, from $45,000 a year for each inmate in Rhode Island to just $13,000 in Louisiana.

The cost of medical care is growing by 10 percent annually, the report said, a rate that will accelerate as the prison population ages.

About one in nine state government employees works in corrections, and some states are finding it hard to fill those jobs. California spent more than $500 million on overtime alone in 2006.

The number of prisoners in California dropped by 4,000 last year, making Texas’s prison system the nation’s largest, at about 172,000 inmates. But the Texas legislature approved broad changes to the state’s corrections system, including expansions of drug treatment programs and drug courts and revisions to parole practices.

“Our violent offenders, we lock them up for a very long time — rapists, murderers, child molestors,” said John Whitmire, a Democratic state senator from Houston and the chairman of the state senate’s criminal justice committee. “The problem was that we weren’t smart about nonviolent offenders. The legislature finally caught up with the public.”

He gave an example.

“We have 5,500 D.W.I offenders in prison,” he said, including people caught driving under the influence who had not been in an accident. “They’re in the general population. As serious as drinking and driving is, we should segregate them and give them treatment.”

The Pew report recommended diverting nonviolent offenders away from prison and using punishments short of reincarceration for minor or technical violations of probation or parole. It also urged states to consider earlier release of some prisoners.

Before the recent changes in Texas, Mr. Whitmire said, “we were recycling nonviolent offenders.”

Investing, or Not -- cf. InClass Presentations

Keep It Simple, Says Yale’s Top Investor

By GERALDINE FABRIKANT Published: February 17, 2008

IT has been a time to worry even the savviest investors. The credit markets have been in a crisis, the domestic stock market has been shaky and overseas markets haven’t been much better.

What should an individual investor do?

Don’t try anything fancy. Stick to a simple diversified portfolio, keep your costs down and rebalance periodically to keep your asset allocations in line with your long-term goals. That is the advice of David F. Swensen, who has run the Yale endowment since 1988, relying on a complex strategy that includes investments in hedge funds and other esoteric vehicles. The endowment earned 28 percent in its last fiscal year, which ended June 30, beating all other endowments. It finished the year with $22.5 billion.

For most people, he recommends a very basic approach: use index funds, exchange-traded funds and other low-cost instruments, and stick to your long-term asset allocation — even when the markets are in tumult.

Don’t be distracted by market forecasts, he said. “You have to diversify against the collective ignorance,” he said. “I think nobody is in a position to react to these big macro-issues. Where is the dollar going to be or what is G.D.P. growth going to be in China? For every smart person on one side of the question, there is another smart person on the other side.”

For most individual investors, he said, copying the strategies of institutions like Yale is virtually impossible: big investors have access to fund managers and arcane strategies that are beyond the reach of most people.

“The only people who should get involved are sophisticated individuals who have significant resources and a highly qualified investment staff,” Mr. Swensen said.

“Most people do not have the resources and time to pick market-beating managers” of hedge funds, private equity funds or funds of funds, he said. And he said that the techniques used by hedge funds often result in higher taxes than those of index funds.

So he advocates another approach, which he outlined in the book “Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment” (Free Press, 2005). He proposes a portfolio of 30 percent domestic stocks, 15 percent foreign stocks, and 5 percent emerging-market stocks, as well as 20 percent in real estate and 15 percent each in Treasury bonds and Treasury inflation-protected securities, or TIPS.

The real estate investment can be made through real estate index funds. Though the real estate market has declined and your portfolio is below its target allocation to it, he said, don’t try to time the market. Go ahead and rebalance because no one really knows where the market’s bottom is.

Diversification will buffer a portfolio from declines in specific asset classes. For example, he said: “If the dollar declines dramatically, you have foreign and emerging-market equities. And a declining dollar may well be associated with inflation, but a diversified portfolio would include TIPS,” to provide a hedge. “That means if any of these scenarios play out, an investor has sizable chunks of his portfolio that protect against them,” Mr. Swensen said.

When possible, he said, rebalancing should be done in a tax-sheltered account, like an I.R.A. or a 401(k), to avoid tax liabilities. “When you are putting fresh money to work,” he said, “you put it in an asset class where you are underweight and take money out of a class that is overweight.”

He says it is fruitless for individual investors to pick stocks. “There is no way that an individual can go out there and compete with all these highly qualified and compensated professionals,” Mr. Swensen said.

HE criticized the approach of Jim Cramer, the CNBC host, who encourages investors to trade stocks in strategies that Mr. Swensen says cost heavily in commissions and taxes.

“There is nothing that Cramer says that can help people make intelligent decisions,” Mr. Swensen said. “He takes something that is very serious and turns it into a game. If you want to have fun, go to Disney World.”

Brian Steel, a spokesman for CNBC, responding on behalf of Mr. Cramer, said Mr. Cramer “had a long history of success as a trader and fund manager.” He added that Mr. Cramer is a proponent of long-term investing and thorough research.

Mr. Swensen says investors should forget market timing entirely. Once an individual sets up a program, it should be rebalanced quarterly or semiannually, he said, “but it should be disciplined.”

When the markets decline, try not to pay attention, he said. “Let yourself off the hook,” he said. “If you pursue the sensible long-term policy, look at it over a 5- to 10-year period. Don’t look at five months.”

On America Intelligence

Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: February 14, 2008

A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?”

Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.”

Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture.

Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge. She is well aware that some may tag her a crank. “I expect to get bashed,” said Ms. Jacoby, 62, either as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and values, or as a secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to disparage religion.

Ms. Jacoby, however, is quick to point out that her indictment is not limited by age or ideology. Yes, she knows that eggheads, nerds, bookworms, longhairs, pointy heads, highbrows and know-it-alls have been mocked and dismissed throughout American history. And liberal and conservative writers, from Richard Hofstadter to Allan Bloom, have regularly analyzed the phenomenon and offered advice.

But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way.

Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.

She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map.

Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.

Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”

Ms. Jacoby doesn’t expect to revolutionize the nation’s educational system or cause millions of Americans to switch off “American Idol” and pick up Schopenhauer. But she would like to start a conversation about why the United States seems particularly vulnerable to such a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism. After all, “the empire of infotainment doesn’t stop at the American border,” she said, yet students in many other countries consistently outperform American students in science, math and reading on comparative tests.

In part, she lays the blame on a failing educational system. “Although people are going to school more and more years, there’s no evidence that they know more,” she said.

Ms. Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism’s antipathy toward science, as she grieves over surveys that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism to be taught along with evolution.

Ms. Jacoby doesn’t leave liberals out of her analysis, mentioning the New Left’s attacks on universities in the 1960s, the decision to consign African-American and women’s studies to an “academic ghetto” instead of integrating them into the core curriculum, ponderous musings on rock music and pop culture courses on everything from sitcoms to fat that trivialize college-level learning.

Avoiding the liberal or conservative label in this particular argument, she prefers to call herself a “cultural conservationist.”

For all her scholarly interests, though, Ms. Jacoby said she recognized just how hard it is to tune out the 24/7 entertainment culture. A few years ago she participated in the annual campaign to turn off the television for a week. “I was stunned at how difficult it was for me,” she said.

The surprise at her own dependency on electronic and visual media made her realize just how pervasive the culture of distraction is and how susceptible everyone is — even curmudgeons.

Bill Gates Speech

This is an extract from Bill Gates' speech at the Davos conference. We mentioned it in class today when reading the NYT article "Anxiety crashes the party at Davos".

The Jean Sarkozy Situation, according to the NYTImes

A Father, a Son and a Political Imbroglio in France

By ELAINE SCIOLINO Published: February 12, 2008

PARIS — He is a lieutenant so loyal that President Nicolas Sarkozy personally rewarded him with the party’s nomination for mayor of the affluent Paris suburb that Mr. Sarkozy himself long governed.

Nicolas Sarkozy meeting Monday with local dignitaries in Camopi, French Guiana, where he declined to discuss the political dispute in France.

But now, David Martinon, the president’s spokesman, has abruptly withdrawn from the race. And it was the president’s own son Jean who forced him out.

“The conditions are no longer in place for me to lead the municipal campaign in Neuilly,” Mr. Martinon told reporters on Monday. “I am pulling out.”

Adding to the intrigue, Mr. Martinon said that he submitted his resignation as spokesman — but that Mr. Sarkozy refused to accept it.

With Mr. Sarkozy’s poll ratings in free fall, the fiasco in the suburb, Neuilly-sur-Seine, is the freshest sign of turmoil in his presidency.

His hyperactive style, long regarded as a welcome change from the torpor of the last days of the presidency of Jacques Chirac, is increasingly seen as movement without a goal. “It’s the law of the boomerang — the harder and farther you throw it, the faster and more violently it comes back,” Le Monde wrote in its editorial on Monday afternoon.

On Monday, Mr. Sarkozy’s popularity plunged to a new low of 39 percent, according to the latest Ipsos-Le Point survey, a drop of 10 points in the last month and 19 points since December.

In a separate poll by IFOP last week, 31 percent of the French said that Mr. Sarkozy’s image had “deteriorated” since his marriage to model-turned-singer-turned-first-lady Carla Bruni on Feb. 2; only 4 percent said the marriage had improved his image.

Mr. Sarkozy is considered toxic enough that some candidates of the Union for a Popular Movement, the party he long headed, seem to be distancing themselves from him ahead of the municipal elections next month.

Some candidates, including former Prime Minister Alain Juppé, who is running for re-election as mayor of Bordeaux, are campaigning without the party logo.

Mr. Sarkozy, who was mayor of Neuilly from 1983 to 2003, has promoted many of his own ministers and aides as candidates in the municipal elections as a way to project the power of his presidency and his party.

But he enraged many loyalists of his party when he handpicked Mr. Martinon, who is known to have been close to Mr. Sarkozy’s second ex-wife, Cécilia, as the candidate for the mayoral race in France’s richest town. With neither political experience nor a residence in Neuilly, Mr. Martinon, 36, was greeted during his first visit there last year with boos and chants of “Martinon, no, no!”

When a secret poll suggested that Mr. Martinon would lose a race that should have been an easy victory, Jean Sarkozy, the president’s 21-year-old son from his first marriage, and two local allies from the party announced Sunday that they were setting up a breakaway campaign.

It is highly unlikely that the young Mr. Sarkozy would have acted without his father’s blessing. President Sarkozy was conveniently on a trip to French Guiana on Monday, and when asked about the political imbroglio, replied: “No, no, no comment for the moment. Take advantage of Guiana!”

The Martinon affair is not the only familial soap opera involving Mr. Sarkozy these days.

Last week, he took legal action against the Web site of the left-leaning weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, accusing it of “falsification, use of false documents and possession of stolen goods.”

The Web site reported that eight days before his marriage to Ms. Bruni, Mr. Sarkozy sent a text message to his former wife Cécilia asking her to return home. “If you come back, I will cancel everything,” the message supposedly said.

Mr. Sarkozy’s lawyer said he believed that it was the first time that a serving president had lodged such a complaint against a news media outlet.

The legal action against the Web site has opened Mr. Sarkozy to even more media criticism, as the Nouvel Observateur reporter, Airy Routier, said he stood by his story. “For me, it is set in concrete, I have my sources,” he told Canal+ television on Saturday.

Jean-François Copé, the head of the party’s bloc in the National Assembly, appealed Sunday for a “cease-fire” between the press and the president. But the recent events have given new political ammunition to political opponents and angered members of Mr. Sarkozy’s party.

“There’s plenty to laugh about — a presidential spokesman designated by Nicolas Sarkozy, a plot, a family intrigue,” said the Socialist Party leader François Hollande.

François Bayrou, the centrist who came in third place in last year’s presidential election, on Sunday called the Martinon affair a new illustration of the “monarchical” style of Mr. Sarkozy, with its “perpetual contest of servility” involving with those in and out of favor. “It is pathetic for France,” he added. “It makes you want to cry.”

Georges Tron, a member of Mr. Sarkozy’s party and deputy mayor of the Paris suburb of Draveil, on Monday criticized the nomination of Mr. Martinon as pure political “parachuting” that “shocked” him. Only months into Mr. Sarkozy’s presidency, Mr. Tron added, “We are in a political context where the loss of bearings is evident.”

How Mr. Martinon will continue to function as Mr. Sarkozy’s spokesman is unclear.

He is so devoted that he postponed his wedding last year to accommodate Mr. Sarkozy’s schedule, and he stayed in his job even after Mr. Sarkozy called him an “imbecile” during an interview on American television.

A cartoon on Le Monde’s front page showed Mr. Sarkozy holding the train of Mr. Martinon’s cloak and carrying his son Jean on his shoulders as Jean throws daggers into Mr. Martinon’s back.

“Ça va? It’s good like this, Papa?” Jean asks.

“I taught him everything!” the smiling president says.

More So-Gé & Kerviel News

Theory Gains That Trader Had a Helper

By NICOLA CLARK and KATRIN BENNHOLD

Published: February 11, 2008

PARIS — The police investigating the trading scandal at Société Générale were moving on Sunday toward a theory that its rogue trader, whom the bank blames for losing it nearly $7.2 billion, might not have acted alone, as he and the bank have claimed.

The police have been sifting through nearly 2,000 pages of instant message traffic that the trader, Jérôme Kerviel, had sent. The police believe that he may have been trying to protect a friend who appears to have helped him cover his tracks — until one final, forged e-mail message made to look as if it had come from Deutsche Bank brought the case to light last month.

The instant message exchange adds to doubts about Société Générale’s explanation that Mr. Kerviel had engaged in the furtive trades alone, although lawyers say it does not necessarily weaken the bank’s assertion that there was no systemic fraud.

“There is a difference between a situation where two or more separate, isolated individuals cooperate with Kerviel and a situation where you have participation of his superiors, as he alleges,” said Christopher Mesnooh, an international business lawyer based in Paris.

Investigators suspect that Moussa Bakir, a 32-year-old broker at the futures brokerage Newedge, a subsidiary of Société Générale, sent Mr. Kerviel a forged e-mail message from Deutsche Bank, purporting to confirm a sizable trade in German DAX index futures that did not exist.

Late on the afternoon of Jan. 18, the day Société Générale says it uncovered roughly $74 billion worth of fictitious trades by Mr. Kerviel, Mr. Bakir indicated in a message exchange over the Reuters terminal system that he would send Mr. Kerviel documentation for an unspecified transaction.

“I’m sending you the conf,” Mr. Bakir wrote, using the shorthand for the confirmation of a trade.

Their messages — along with evidence that suggests they continued many of their conversations on cellphones — suggest that Mr. Bakir had an intimate knowledge of Mr. Kerviel’s surreptitious trading.

“They appear to have had a very close friendship,” the person said, adding that in many of their electronic messages there were also signals that they should continue their conversation on their cellphones.

Mobile phones are generally banned from bank trading rooms for security reasons.

One person with knowledge of the investigation said the police were trying to verify if the trade confirmation Mr. Bakir sent on Jan. 18 was the forged one Mr. Kerviel gave his supervisors to cover up an earlier mistake that had raised the suspicions of the bank’s compliance department.

Mr. Kerviel, this person said, had reported a large DAX futures trade that morning with a small German lender, Baader Bank, which would have required Baader to make a margin payment to Société Générale that would have exceeded Baader’s credit limit.

When questioned about the trade, Mr. Kerviel said he had made a mistake, and that the counterparty was actually Deutsche Bank. Mr. Kerviel was asked to provide proof that the trade with Deutsche Bank was genuine, this person said.

Later that afternoon, Mr. Kerviel presented compliance officers with the Deutsche Bank e-mail message. But when Société Générale double-checked, Deutsche Bank would not acknowledge the trade.

“We think this is the forged document from Deutsche Bank,” the person said of the confirmation referred to in Mr. Bakir’s message to Mr. Kerviel.

Mr. Bakir, who was arrested last week, was released on Saturday after 48 hours of questioning by French financial police, but he faces further questioning in the case.

A person with knowledge of the investigation said that, unlike Mr. Kerviel, Mr. Bakir had been less cooperative with police investigators.

Lawyers said his release suggested that he was considered a second-tier player compared with Mr. Kerviel.

One top Société Générale executive has told investigators that Mr. Kerviel rarely used his office e-mail account, sending no more than 60 messages over the last 12 months. But the transcripts showed that he actively used instant messaging.

The transcript suggests that Mr. Kerviel was aware of the gravity of his actions.

As early as October, when Mr. Kerviel’s trades were still profitable, their exchanges reflected signs of nervousness, according to excerpts, first published on the Web site of the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur on Saturday and confirmed by two people with knowledge of the investigation.

Christophe Reille, a spokesman for Mr. Kerviel’s lawyers, declined to comment on the transcript and described Mr. Kerviel’s relationship with Mr. Bakir as only “a professional one.”

Isabelle Montagne, a spokeswoman for the Paris prosecutor, said Mr. Bakir would be summoned again by two judges, but that no dates had been set.

A spokesman for Mr. Kerviel’s lawyer, Elisabeth Meyer, said they would file an appeal this week to have Mr. Kerviel released. He was placed in detention Friday for up to 12 months as the investigation continues.

UC-Berkeley Stands Firm on the War Front

Berkeley Finds a New Way to Make War Politics Local

By JESSE McKINLEY Published: February 1, 2008

BERKELEY, Calif. — While the City Council here has little — read, no — sway over foreign policy and distant wars, local parking is a different matter. And so it was that a parking space directly in front of the recruiting station here for the Marine Corps was awarded on Tuesday night to an antiwar group in the hope of running the Marines out of town.

Having failed in recent years to impeach President Bush and stop the war in Afghanistan, members of the City Council approved a resolution that encourages people to nonviolently “impede, passively or actively,” the work of the recruiters.

To that end, the council awarded the group, Code Pink, exclusive use of the parking spot for four hours one afternoon each week, for the next six months, to stage its protests. “If you’re going to join the Marines, you’re going to join the Marines,” said Zanna Joi, an activist with Code Pink, which favors cotton-candy-colored garb and in-your-face tactics. “But you don’t have to join the Marines from our town.”

In taking on the Marines, the council also directed the city attorney to investigate legal means of ousting the recruiting station, calling the Marines “uninvited and unwelcome intruders” in this bastion of liberal politics, 1960s free speech and high-minded nonbinding resolutions.

Tom Bates, the city’s mayor and a former Army man himself, said the vote represented his constituents’ longstanding — and frequently vocal — distaste for current military activity.

“Berkeley has been opposed to the Iraq war since the beginning; it’s overwhelmingly unpopular in this community,” Mr. Bates said. “And people feel this is an opportunity to express their discontent.”

One of the nine council members, Gordon Wozniak, opposed the resolution and the parking spot.

“I believe in free speech, and I certainly respect the right of Code Pink to protest,” Mr. Wozniak said. “But I’m also concerned we treat all sides fairly, and I think the Marines recruiters are just doing their job. They’re not evil people.”

Mr. Wozniak, a retired nuclear scientist who opposes the war in Iraq, added that those advocating the parking spot were engaged in the same type of selective treatment that many war opponents object to.

“A lot of the same people who voted for this felt Bush bent the rules,” Mr. Wozniak said, referring to the president’s unfounded claims that Iraq had chemical, nuclear or biological weapons.

This is hardly the first attempt by Berkeley’s civic leaders, many of whom fondly remember the city’s antiwar heyday in the 1960s, to express their unhappiness with the whole concept of war. In 2006, the City Council and voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure calling for the impeachment of Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, citing “high crimes and misdemeanors” related to the war in Iraq and the fight against terrorism.

In 2001, the City Council also called for an end to the bombing of Afghanistan just weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, something that earned some council members anonymous death threats.

Despite the vote on Tuesday, Mr. Bates said it was not clear if the city could actually force the Marines to move out of town.

“They still have a year and a half on their lease,” he said.

That said, the resolution also calls for the city attorney to look into possible violations of the Berkeley municipal code regarding sexual discrimination by the Marines, and asks the city manager to write the Marine commandant and tell him that Semper Fi fans are “not welcome in our city.”

Maj. Wes Hayes of the Marine Corps Recruiting Command in Quantico, Va., said the corps had not immediately been aware of Berkeley’s actions, but added that they would have no effect on recruiting efforts.

“It’s business as usual,” Major Hayes said.

Inside the Berkeley office, a small storefront a block from the University of California campus, a pull-up bar sits near the window as does a pile of weights, part of the physical fitness test for any potential leathernecks. A poster on the wall reminds recruiters not “to fear the winds of adversity.”

After being open earlier in the day, the front door was locked and the window blinds drawn on Thursday afternoon, at least for a while, as Code Pink protesters chanted happily outside.

Brandon Rousseau, an information technology consultant who works across the street and has a cousin in the Marines, said both sides had a right to go about their business.

“Even if that were a Nazi recruiting station,” Mr. Rousseau said, “they have a right to do that in America.”

On Medication in Superstores

While France is struggling to put medication on display on the front shelves in the traditional drugstores, American are opening clinics within the walls of Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart Will Expand In-Store Medical Clinics

By MILT FREUDENHEIM
February 7, 2008

Moving to upgrade its walk-in medical clinic business, Wal-Mart is set to announce on Thursday plans for several hundred new clinics at its stores, using a standardized format and jointly branded with hospitals and medical groups.

The design of the Wal-Mart medical clinic is intended to look like a doctor’s office, complete with the usual medical hardware.

The first of the new Clinic at Wal-Mart walk-in centers, as they will be called, is to open in Little Rock, Ark., in April and be run by nurse practitioners employed by the St. Vincent Health System, a three-hospital group in central Arkansas.

Wal-Mart also says it plans to brand 200 of the new clinics with RediClinics, one of the Revolution Health companies of Steven Case, the AOL co-founder. Those are to be operated in partnership with various local health care providers. RediClinic, which already operates 13 clinics in Wal-Mart stores, plans to open one of the new units in Atlanta in April and another in Dallas next summer.

“We have learned that people are willing to receive their health care from the front of a store or the back of a drugstore,” said Dr. John Agwunobi, a medical doctor who is a Wal-Mart senior vice president. “But customers also have said they would rather it be delivered by a trusted name, a local health care practice, a trusted local provider of care.”

In all, Wal-Mart plans to have 400 store clinics by 2010, including current units that will be converted to the new brand as their leases come up for renewal. The company currently has 78 in-store clinics around the country, but has had uneven performance in some cases. Wal-Mart does not operate any clinics itself but is seeking local hospitals and medical practices as partners, said Deisha Galberth, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman.

Walk-in medical clinics are a growing industry, with numerous competitors that include big-box retailers, drugstores and even grocery chains around the country. Industry executives say 1,500 to 1,800 clinics will be open by the end of the year.

Propelled by the drugstore chains CVS and Walgreens, by far the biggest sponsors of the clinics to date, more than 700 clinics have opened in the last 15 months. But the business model is unproven so far.

Few, if any, clinics are profitable, according to industry analysts, and only a handful have broken even on daily operations. Most have been open a year or less, and executives say it takes up to three years for a clinic to become profitable enough to recover start-up costs.

Medical societies are inclined to be skeptical of the clinics. The American Academy of Pediatrics opposes them, saying they add to fragmentation in the health care system.

Dr. Edward Zissman, a pediatrician in central Florida, said he had qualms about hospitals that hook up with the clinics. “Putting their name on a product that I don’t think has the highest quality,” he said, “is going to cost them dearly with physicians.”

The American Academy of Family Physicians and the American Medical Association have set forth principles for clinics to observe, including sending patients’ medical record to their doctors and finding doctors for patients who do not already have them. Most states require varying degrees of physician supervision of the clinic nurses. Clinic operators say they are complying.

Many patients have said they like the convenience of the walk-in clinics’ weekend and evening hours, the short waiting times to see a nurse practitioner, and the posted price lists for a limited menu of care like tests and prescriptions for sore throats and ear infections and seasonal flu shots.

The typical customer is a mother with runny-nosed children in tow. About one in five customers pay cash. Wal-Mart says 55 percent of patients at its store clinics do not have health insurance, like 47 million other Americans.

Wal-Mart’s rebranding effort comes in the wake of one notable failure in its clinic business. Last month CheckUps, a clinic operator headed by Jack D. Tawil, a New York businessman, ran out of money and closed its operations in 23 Wal-Mart stores in four Southern states.

He was able to avoid making that payment by filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection in the United States, according to federal bankruptcy court records in New York.

Mr. Tawil said in a telephone interview that he had found new investors for CheckUps and hoped to reopen in the same Wal-Mart stores, starting next month. Wal-Mart has said that with or without CheckUps the clinics will reopen.

But even if they do reopen under CheckUps, at least some of the nurses will not be going back to work there, according to Nikki Leimer, owner of a nursing employment agency in Mandeville, La., that is suing CheckUps over money the agency says it is owed.

In the future, said Dr. Agwunobi, the Wal-Mart executive, “We are going to want to know that the local health care providers can keep their promises.”

About Chad, by Darfur Specialist Nick Kristof.

Nick Kristof is a African specialist who is very much concerned with the situation in Darfur. He is a recepient of the Pultizer Price for his 2006 article on Darfur. He is today reporting on Chad, which is Sudan's western borderstate.

Hanging Chad

By Nicholas D. Kristof February 4, 2008,

With the election campaign in full-swing, the spread of Darfur’s cancer into Chad hasn’t received much attention. But for the last couple of days, there has been full-scale warfare in the Chadian capital, N’djamena, and it’s a reflection of the international community’s passivity toward Darfur.

The fighting is by Chadian rebels, and so it sometimes comes across as a civil war. And in part, it is. But it’s also a proxy invasion of Chad by Sudan, for the rebel groups operate from a base in Darfur and are armed by Sudan. The Sudanese leadership wants to overthrow the Chadian government so that it will have a pawn next door, enabling it to cut off supply lines to Darfur rebels. Sudan’s timing was also affected by plans for a European force to arrive on the Chad/Darfur border in the coming days — it wanted to overthrow Chad’s government before that happened.

This is old hat for Sudan. During the long war with South Sudan, it sponsored a similar proxy force, the Lord’s Resistance Army, to invade northern Uganda. It’s a relatively cheap tactic, for only 2,000 Chadian rebels have a real chance of overthrowing the country’s government. President Deby of Chad is corrupt and undemocratic, but he’s incomparably better than the Sudanese genocidaires trying to depose him, and I hope the French forces in Chad will use their military planes to strafe the attackers and restore order.

If Chad’s government now collapses and the country falls apart, then the Darfur madness will be spread over a far larger canvas — one more symptom of the international community’s paralysis in dealing with genocide.