Jan 27, 2010

U.S. Keeps Foreign Ph.D.s

National Science Foundation (NSF) Logo, reprod...Image via Wikipedia

By DAVID WESSEL

Most foreigners who came to the U.S. to earn doctorate degrees in science and engineering stayed on after graduation—at least until the recession began—refuting predictions that post-9/11 restrictions on immigrants or expanding opportunities in China and India would send more of them home.

Newly released data revealed that 62% of foreigners holding temporary visas who earned Ph.D.s in science and engineering at U.S. universities in 2002 were still in the U.S. in 2007, the latest year for which figures are available. Of those who graduated in 1997, 60% were still in the U.S. in 2007, according to the data compiled by the U.S. Energy Department's Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education for the National Science Foundation.

Foreigners account for about 40% of all science and engineering Ph.D. holders working in the U.S., and a larger fraction in engineering, math and computer fields. "Our ability to continue to attract and keep foreign scientists and engineers is critical to…increase investment in science and technology," Oak Ridge analyst Michael Finn said.

"Data for all available cohorts indicate that 'stay rates' of foreign science and engineering doctorate recipients in 2007 are slightly higher than they have been in recent years," Mr. Finn said. His findings, which use tax data to track graduates, cover the years before the U.S. plunged into a recession that damped job prospects in many U.S. industries and universities.

Other analysts see signs that recent foreign grads are increasingly likely to return home, particularly in today's weak job market. "I have no doubt that the 2009 data will show a dramatic shift," said Vivek Wadwha, executive in residence at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering, who has been warning loudly about the threat that trend would pose to innovation in the U.S. In October 2008, Mr. Wadwha and others used Facebook to question 1,224 foreigners studying at U.S. institutions at all levels. More than half the Indians and 40% of the Chinese said they hoped to return home within five years.

Separate NSF surveys show the fraction of foreign Ph.D.s planning to stay in the U.S. dipped in the years following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack and then rebounded. Nearly 80% of those with temporary visas surveyed in 2007 said they planned to stay; more than half had definite plans to do so.

Joy Ying Zhang, the son of a primary-school teacher and a college professor, left China in 1999 for Detroit's Wayne State University, where he arrived with two suitcases and $2,000 in cash. He later transferred to Carnegie Mellon University, which awarded him a Ph.D. in computer science in 2008.

Four or five of his friends have returned to China, he said, and he has discussed doing so. But Mr. Zhang, now a research assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon's Silicon Valley campus, has decided stay. "I have spent 10 years here already," he said. "It took me some time to get used to American life. Now, it'd be hard to get used to China. It's called 'reverse culture shock.' "

In recruiting for Carnegie Mellon, he finds young Chinese less eager to come to the U.S. than those of his generation. "Life in China is getting better. There are research alternatives in China—like Microsoft China," he said. "They can get good mentoring and advice there, instead of coming to the U.S."

In 2007, foreign citizens accounted for 16,022 of the Ph.D.s awarded in science and engineering in the U.S., or 46% of the total, according to the Oak Ridge data. In contrast, the class of 1997 had 12,966 foreigners, or 30% of the total.

Graduates of Ph.D. programs in the physical sciences and computer science are more likely to remain in the U.S. than those in other fields, Mr. Finn said. Those programs are popular with Chinese and Indian students, who are more likely to remain in the U.S. than those from Taiwan, South Korea and Western Europe. Among 2002 graduates, 92% of the Chinese and 81% of the Indians were in the U.S. after five years; in contrast, 41% of South Koreans and 52% of Germans were.

Aranyak Mehta, 31, came from India nearly a decade ago to study algorithms at Georgia Institute of Technology and earned a Ph.D. in 2005. Today, he is a research scientist at Google—and planning, for now, to remain in the U.S. "There's always a trade-off—family, culture, and all that," he said. "One of the most important things with an academic background is the work that you do, and is it exciting?"

Using the LinkedIn online network, Mr. Wadhwa identified 1,203 skilled Indians and Chinese who had returned home. Three-quarters said visa issues weren't a factor. Rather, career opportunities, quality-of-life concerns and family ties were major factors. Some 70% of the Chinese and 61% of the Indians said opportunities for professional advancement were better at home.

The NSF recently said the number of foreign science and engineering students enrolled in graduate programs of all types hit 158,430 in April 2009, up 8% from the year before.

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Wangen Bei Olten Journal - A Swiss Treat for Muslim Diets Comes With an Aftertaste

Mosque of the Olten Turkish cultural associati...Image via Wikipedia

WANGEN BEI OLTEN, Switzerland — Bertram Decker’s second-floor office in Nestlé’s big food plant here looks out over the town’s only minaret, a wooden turret topped with a gilt star and crescent.

The minaret, atop a Turkish cultural association, is one of only four in all of Switzerland, and it has a special place in the country’s recent history. It touched off a local scrap that in November led more than 57 percent of Swiss voters to approve a call for a constitutional amendment to ban minarets.

Here in Wangen, 61 percent approved the measure, which is a little curious, since Mr. Decker’s factory produces, among other things, packages of feuilleté, or puff pastry, that adhere to Islam’s ritual halal requirements.

Last year, the factory’s assembly lines churned out 100 million packages of pastry, up from 80 million a decade ago. Though halal products represent at most 3 percent of the total, Mr. Decker said, “We see now that it’s growing.”

On a wall near the entrance, he points to a certificate from the Grand Mosque in Paris certifying the factory as halal, or free of impure products like alcohol or pork. “The original certification was for two years,” said Mr. Decker, 41, a German who was brought in 18 months ago to manage the plant, part of the Swiss multinational Nestlé. “We just got an extension until 2012.”

As incomes rise in the Islamic world and Muslims migrate increasingly to Europe and the United States, Wangen’s halal production is part of a thrust by Nestlé to carve a niche in the global market for halal products, including coffee, baked goods, breakfast cereals and baby food. Halal products now account for $5 billion of Nestlé’s global sales.

But while Switzerland benefits from factories like this one selling its products to Muslim customers in many countries, it appears the Swiss are adamantly opposed to the construction of more minarets like the one down the street.

In some ways, Wangen wears this contradiction on its sleeve. When the Turkish club decided in 2006 to erect the minaret atop its clubhouse, local residents took the association to court to prevent construction, arguing that the minaret violated building codes. The case went to Switzerland’s highest court, which approved construction, though not because the minaret was a form of religious expression. “The court ruled on conformity to the building codes,” said Beat Frey, 50, a regional court judge who is also Wangen’s part-time mayor. “Not on freedom of religion.”

The decision was seized upon by conservative parties, above all the Swiss People’s Party of Christoph Blocher, a right-wing industrialist-turned-politician, who demanded a referendum on the future construction of minarets. Of course, all politics is local, and not just in Massachusetts. The vote in tiny Wangen, population 4,950, many local people said, was not the expression of intolerance it might have seemed.

“There were many reasons, not above all the Muslims among us,” said Mr. Frey, who himself voted in favor of minarets. “Yes, there was fear of political Islam, but people also wanted to send a message to the federal government in Bern,” whose opposition to the amendment was viewed as interference in local affairs.

“There was also fear of the unknown,” he said, adding that about 18 percent of the town’s population is foreign, though the largest group among them are native Germans from nearby.

Down at the Turkish cultural association, Mustafa Karahan, 50, sometimes feels under siege. “The problem is, people don’t know us,” he said over coffee. “If they did, there wouldn’t have been the referendum.”

In 2006, when the club was considering construction of a minaret, members organized an open house, and more than 500 people came. “When we dedicated the minaret, the local Protestant pastor spoke and several government officials came,” said Mr. Karahan, a teacher who migrated to Switzerland in 1980 and works in a machine shop.

But the controversy over the minarets provoked a backlash. As the date for the vote approached, stones were thrown at the clubhouse windows and a bag of pork products was hung on the door. Parking for club members along the nearby railroad was suddenly made off limits by railway officials (and remains so).

“They played politics with us, particularly regarding the minaret, to gain votes,” Mr. Karahan said. “They have damaged Switzerland’s image.”

Mustafa Bakci, 27, a chemist with a Swiss pharmaceuticals company, said the club was open to all nationalities, not just Turks. “Libyans, Saudis — it’s open for everyone,” said Mr. Bakci, who was born in Switzerland. “From A to Z.”

Many foreigners work in the Nestlé plant and at the town’s other big employer, Coop, a Wal-Mart-like retailer. “My sister-in-law works for Nestlé,” Mr. Bakci said.

Walter Leisi, 64, remembers well when in 1962 his father, a baker from Basel, decided to build a factory in Wangen to produce his packaged puff pastry, which had been such a hit at home. “We had three nationalities back then,” he said, recalling the starting work force of about 70 people. “Swiss, Italians and Spaniards.”

In 1972 the factory passed into Nestlé’s hands, but the younger Mr. Leisi, who also voted against the minaret ban, managed it until last year. Now there are 400 employees, about two-thirds non-Swiss. “Many Swiss think it’s not necessary for them to work nights,” he said.

Signs on factory walls are in numerous languages, including Albanian, Serbian, Italian and Turkish. During the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Mr. Leisi said, “I had a bad feeling; would there be knifings here? Down there they were killing each other, yet here we never had a problem.”

Most of the factory’s halal products are exported to France, which has Europe’s largest Muslim population. To meet growing demand, the factory runs three eight-hour shifts a day, Mr. Decker said, sometimes Saturdays.

How does Mr. Leisi explain the resistance to minarets in a town that lives in part by selling food to Muslims?

“The problem is you had a certain category of extremist on one side, and another on the other side,” he said, shaking his head.

Gesturing over his shoulder toward the Turkish club, he added, “One of the reasons, of course, was that little minaret over there.”

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Books of The Times - Demick, Hassig, Oh and Myers on Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea

Kim Jong IlImage by Dunechaser via Flickr

Computers are rare in North Korea, and the Internet, for most of its citizens, is little more than a whispered rumor. It’s probable, in fact, that only one person surfs the Web in North Korea without someone monitoring every click: Kim Jong-il, that authoritarian regime’s supreme leader.

When he’s online, and not lurking on sites devoted to his obsessions (movies, fancy food, young women, nuclear weapons), Mr. Kim must sometimes see what his country looks like, to the rest of the world, in those haunting satellite photographs of the Far East at night.

You’ve probably seen them. The countries near North Korea — Japan, South Korea, China — are ablaze with splotches and pinpricks of light, with beaming civilization. But North Korea, a country nearly the size of England, home to some 23 million people, is a black hole, an ocean of dark. Barbara Demick, a foreign correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, begins her excellent new book, “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea,” by poring over these satellite images. She’s shocked by them, and moved. “North Korea is not an undeveloped country,” she observes. “It is a country that has fallen out of the developed world.”

Image by oceandesetoiles via Flickr

“Nothing to Envy” is one of three provocative new books about North Korea, from writers who are committed to parsing the slivers of light that escape this enigmatic and often baffling place. The others are “The Hidden People of North Korea,” by Ralph Hassig and Kongdan Oh, and “The Cleanest Race,” by B. R. Myers.

North Korea is not an easy country to observe. Few foreign journalists are allowed in, and then only with official minders and strictly limited itineraries. To get a sense of how ordinary citizens live, writers must rely primarily on the accounts of defectors.

If we have trouble seeing North Koreans plainly, they cannot see us at all. Telephone use is severely restricted. (Even the telephone book is a classified document marked “secret.”) Postal service is spotty. There is essentially no e-mail. Television and radios receive only approved channels. The country’s citizens are force-fed a steady, numbing diet of state propaganda devoted to sustaining the personality cult of Kim Jong-il and savaging all things American.

How are North Koreans taught to think about us? Well, here’s one indication. Children learn a ditty called “Shoot the Yankee Bastards” in music class. One verse goes:

Our enemies are the American bastards
Who are trying to take over our beautiful fatherland.
With guns that I make with my own hands
I will shoot them. BANG, BANG, BANG.

(The truly poignant words here are “with my own hands.”)

Ms. Demick’s book is a lovely work of narrative nonfiction, one that follows the lives of six ordinary North Koreans, including a female doctor, a pair of star-crossed lovers, a factory worker and an orphan. It’s a book that offers extensive evidence of the author’s deep knowledge of this country while keeping its sights firmly on individual stories and human details.

Immediate family of Kim Jong-il. Front left Ki...Image via Wikipedia

The people Ms. Demick observes lived, before their defections, in northeastern North Korea, far from the country’s tidy, Potemkin village-like capital, Pyongyang. The existences she describes sound brutal: there is often not enough food; citizens work long days that can be followed by hours of ideological training at night; spying on one’s neighbors is a national pastime; a nonpatriotic comment, especially an anti-Kim Jong-il wisecrack, can have you sent to a gulag for life, if not executed.

Ms. Demick writes especially well about the difficult lives of those who do manage to defect. Not only are they bewildered by life outside of North Korea, and have to be taught to do things like use an A.T.M., but they also live with deep shame and guilt, knowing that relatives left behind have probably been sent to prison as punishment for their escape.

Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh’s book, “The Hidden People of North Korea: Everyday Life in the Hermit Kingdom,” is wonkier than Ms. Demick’s and less reader-friendly, but it covers more ground. The authors are married (Ms. Oh’s parents were North Koreans who fled to South Korea); he is an independent consultant specializing in North Korean affairs, and she is on the research staff of the Institute for Defense Analysis in Alexandria, Va.

Their book is based on more than 200 interviews with defectors, and it paints a picture of a restless populace, increasingly dubious about the official propaganda. “It would be a gross exaggeration to say that the people support Kim Jong-il,” they write. “Rather, it does not occur to them to oppose him.” North Koreans are too busy trying to survive, and too preoccupied by the tensions of the supposed mighty conflict with America, to be able to think about much else.

Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh’s portrait of Mr. Kim’s hyper-sybaritic lifestyle is detailed and devastating. He may look like a man of the people, they write, with his tan slacks, zippered jackets and stout build that make him resemble Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden in “The Honeymooners.” But they chronicle his obsession with the latest electronics, the “pleasure teams” of girls he keeps handy, the Bordeaux wine he has flown in. While many of his people starve, they write, Mr. Kim “is such a connoisseur that, according to his former chef, every grain of rice destined for his dinner table is inspected for quality and shape.”

The authors are aware that Mr. Kim’s anti-American paranoia isn’t baseless. The leader of a different country in George W. Bush’s “axis of evil,” they note, was captured and later hanged.

Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh’s book concludes with pointed policy recommendations. They think it is nearly hopeless to negotiate with Mr. Kim and suspect that “nonproliferation agreements with the regime will simply encourage it to brandish new threats in the future.” Instead of fixating on Korea’s weapons, the authors suggest bypassing the regime and reaching out to North Korea’s people, who sorely need humanitarian aid and “a new way of thinking about their government and their society.”

Mr. Myers, the author of “The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves — and Why It Matters,” is a contributing editor to The Atlantic and famously the author of “A Reader’s Manifesto,” a controversial and humorless broadside against the literary writers (Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy among them) whom he finds pretentious or obscure. Mr. Myers directs the international studies department at Dongseo University in South Korea.

He is a crisp, pushy writer who is at his best when on the attack, and his often counterintuitive new book attempts a psychological profile of Kim Jong-il and his regime. Mr. Myers has pored through mountains of North Korean propaganda — from nightly news reports and newspapers to war movies, comics, wall posters and dictionaries — and he argues that the West is misreading the country’s core beliefs.

He explains that North Korea’s dominant worldview is “far removed” from the Communism, Confucianism and official “show-window” ideologies that Westerners analyze. Instead, he argues, this worldview “can be summarized in a single sentence: The Korean people are too pure-blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive in this evil world without a great parental leader.” His North Korea is guided by a “paranoid, race-based nationalism.”

Mr. Myers’s arguments are too wily and complex to be neatly summarized here, but he includes a fascinating analysis of Mr. Kim’s depiction as an essentially — and crucially — feminine military leader. His regime presents North Korea more as a motherland than a fatherland, Mr. Myers writes, and he cites official slogans about Mr. Kim like “We Cannot Live Away From His Breast.” The lack of a patriarchal authority figure, he says, “may also have helped the regime preserve stability by depriving people of a target to rebel against.”

Mr. Myers also cautions against the idea that the West can persuade North Korea to shed its nuclear weapons. Mr. Kim “cannot disarm and hope to stay in power,” he writes. At the same time, he notes, “blue jeans will not bring down this dictatorship.” Any signs of serious unrest, he observes, will encourage Mr. Kim to raise the level of the tension with the West, and possibly do something rash with his nuclear arsenal.

Kim Jong-il reportedly suffered a stroke in 2008 and has looked frail during his recent, and increasingly rare, public appearances. While the world speculates about his successor, almost certainly to be one of his sons, one of the lessons of these books is not to remove our eyes from the blinkered lives of the average North Korean.

“The Kim regime essentially holds its people hostage,” Mr. Hassig and Ms. Oh write, and they are dismayed to note that “the United States is much more interested in the hostage taker’s weapons of mass destruction than in the fate of his hostages.”

North Koreans sometimes joke, Ms. Demick writes in “Nothing to Envy,” that they live like “frogs in the well.” It’s a line that sends you back to study those satellite images, and to contemplate those who dwell under Mr. Kim’s inky moral darkness.

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The Radiation Boom - As Technology Surges, Radiation Safeguards Lag

Varian radiation therapy machineImage by IndyDina with Mr. Wonderful via Flickr

In New Jersey, 36 cancer patients at a veterans hospital in East Orange were overradiated — and 20 more received substandard treatment — by a medical team that lacked experience in using a machine that generated high-powered beams of radiation. The mistakes, which have not been publicly reported, continued for months because the hospital had no system in place to catch the errors.

In Louisiana, Landreaux A. Donaldson received 38 straight overdoses of radiation, each nearly twice the prescribed amount, while undergoing treatment for prostate cancer. He was treated with a machine so new that the hospital made a miscalculation even with training instructors still on site.

In Texas, George Garst now wears two external bags — one for urine and one for fecal matter — because of severe radiation injuries he suffered after a medical physicist who said he was overworked failed to detect a mistake. The overdose was never reported to the authorities because rules did not require it.

These mistakes and the failure of hospitals to quickly identify them offer a rare look into the vulnerability of patient safeguards at a time when increasingly complex, computer-controlled devices are fundamentally changing medical radiation, delivering higher doses in less time with greater precision than ever before.

Serious radiation injuries are still infrequent, and the new equipment is undeniably successful in diagnosing and fighting disease. But the technology introduces its own risks: it has created new avenues for error in software and operation, and those mistakes can be more difficult to detect. As a result, a single error that becomes embedded in a treatment plan can be repeated in multiple radiation sessions.

Clinac 2100 C accelerator in the polyclinique ...Image via Wikipedia

Many of these mistakes could have been caught had basic checking protocols been followed, accident reports show. But there is also a growing realization among those who work with this new technology that some safety procedures are outdated.

“Scientific societies haven’t been able to keep up with the rapid pace of technical improvements,” said Jeffrey F. Williamson, a professor of radiation oncology, who leads the medical physics division at the Massey Cancer Center at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

Hospitals, too, are lagging, sometimes failing to provide the necessary financial support to operate the sophisticated devices safely, according to accident reports and medical physicists, who set up and monitor radiological devices. And manufacturers sometimes sell machines before all the software bugs are identified and removed, records show.

At a 2007 conference on radiation safety, medical physicists went so far as to warn that radiation oncology “does indeed face a crisis.” The gap between advancing technology and outdated safety protocols leaves “physicists and radiation oncologists without a clear strategy for maintaining the quality and safety of treatment,” the group reported.

Endobronchial radiation therapy for non-small ...Image via Wikipedia

Government regulators have been slow to respond. Radiation accidents are chronically underreported, and a patchwork of laws to protect patients from harm are weak or unevenly applied, creating an environment where the new technology has outpaced its oversight, where hospitals that violate safety rules, injure patients and fail to report mistakes often face little or no punishment, The New York Times has found.

In this largely unregulated marketplace, manufacturers compete by offering the latest in technology, with only a cursory review by the government, and hospitals buy the equipment to lure patients and treat them more quickly. Radiation-generating machines are so ubiquitous that used ones are even sold on eBay.

“Vendors are selling to anyone,” said Eric E. Klein, a medical physicist and professor of radiation oncology at Washington University in St. Louis. “New technologies were coming into the clinics without people thinking through from Step 1 to Step 112 to make sure everything is going to be done right.”

A national testing service recently found unacceptable variations in doses delivered by a now common form of machine-generated radiation called Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy, or I.M.R.T. To help institutions achieve more consistency, an association of medical physicists issued new I.M.R.T. guidelines in November.

The problems also extend to equipment used to diagnose disease.

More than 300 patients in four hospitals — and possibly many more — were overradiated by powerful CT scans used to detect strokes, government health officials announced late last year. The overdoses were first discovered at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, a major Los Angeles hospital, where 260 patients received up to eight times as much radiation as intended.

Those errors continued for 18 months and were detected only after patients started losing their hair. The federal Food and Drug Administration is still struggling to understand and untangle the physics underlying the flawed protocols. The F.D.A. has issued a nationwide alert for hospitals to be especially careful when using CT scans on possible stroke victims.

Although the overdoses at Cedars-Sinai were displayed on computer screens, technicians administering the scans did not notice. In New York City, technologists who also did not watch their treatment computers contributed to two devastating radiation injuries documented in an article in The Times on Sunday.

The incidents not only highlight the peril of placing too much trust in computers, they also raise questions about the training and oversight of medical physicists and radiation therapists.

Despite the pivotal role medical physicists play in ensuring patient safety, at least 16 states and the District of Columbia do not require licensing or registration. “States can be either very tough or very lax,” said Dr. Paul E. Wallner, a director of the American Board of Radiology.

Eight states allow technologists to perform medical imaging other than mammographies with no credentials or educational requirements.

In those states, said Robert Pizzutiello, a medical physicist in New York who is part of a movement to license all medical physicists, “you could drive a truck in the morning and operate an X-ray in the afternoon.”

Turmoil at the V.A.

Frederick Stein, an Army veteran from New Jersey, was already suffering from a delayed diagnosis of laryngeal cancer when he began radiation treatments in late September 2006 at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in East Orange. Within weeks of starting radiotherapy, his sore throat worsened and a rash appeared along with other skin problems, according to Mr. Stein’s family.

Swallowing became more difficult, causing him to lose weight. His skin eruptions worsened. Mr. Stein’s pain became so severe, he needed an injection of morphine. More painkillers followed. The hospital stopped chemotherapy, figuring it was causing his problems. But his condition continued to deteriorate.

If Mr. Stein’s skin damage was a mystery to his doctors, two therapists — Alisha High and Lorraine Raymond — had already concluded that he was being overradiated. Ms. High was so concerned that in December 2006 she refused to administer the radiation, records show. The next day, Ms. Raymond expressed her concerns as well.

The protest did not go over well. Their supervisor, Kirk Krickmier, admonished them for questioning doctors and the physics department, and later that month, both therapists were fired by the agency that had placed them in the veterans’ hospital, Rosato Associates, according to a lawsuit Ms. High and Ms. Raymond filed against Rosato.

Mr. Stein died of cancer in 2008 at age 71, but not before the hospital admitted that he had been overradiated. His wife, Eileen Stein, said the botched radiation treatments had shortened his life. “Oh, it was just awful,” Ms. Stein said in an interview. “They cooked him something terrible. He suffered awful.”

Ms. High and Ms. Raymond declined to be interviewed for this article. Steven Menaker, a lawyer who represented Rosato Associates, said his client disputed their account of why they left the hospital. Mr. Krickmier declined to be interviewed about the case, which has been settled.

It turned out that Mr. Stein was not the only victim. Having learned of the therapists’ complaints on Dec. 20, 2006, hospital administrators tracked them down a month later and interviewed them, according to Veterans Affairs. A week later, the director of the East Orange facility, Kenneth H. Mizrach, ordered the radiotherapy unit to stop accepting new patients, pending a full investigation.

That investigation found that of 160 cases reviewed, 56 patients were treated incorrectly for cancer of the prostate, head and neck, lung, breast and two other malignancies. Thirty-six had been overradiated and 20 more subjected to “errors in technique,” the hospital said. Although the patients were informed, the findings had not been publicly revealed until The Times uncovered them.

According to a confidential report by the American College of Radiology, which had been brought in to study the situation, the hospital’s radiotherapy unit was out of control: medical personnel lacked the training and knowledge to safely administer I.M.R.T. treatments, quality control was virtually nonexistent, vital safety procedures were performed by unqualified employees, and patients had little or no follow-up.

“Discontinuation of I.M.R.T. treatment is STRONGLY recommended until additional training is obtained by all staff including the physicians,” the college said. The reviewers reminded the hospital that the new technology was “VERY labor intensive, and requires not just sophisticated hardware and software, but a lot more training.”

The college said medical personnel were “really pushing the envelope of tolerances” and that nonphysicians were apparently approving — in the physician’s name — certain steps in the treatment process.

Investigators found that without proper follow-up, there was no way for the hospital to know whether its cancer treatments were successful or whether there were complications. In addition, the college of radiology found no evidence of peer review, quality assurance meetings, outcome studies or mortality and morbidity (known as M&M) conferences, where doctors meet to review cases.

“Several charts reviewed indicated that treatment had been discontinued or at least interrupted by a patient’s worsening condition, or in a few cases death, but there was no M&M review of these issues,” the report said. A spokeswoman for the V.A. said most of the affected patients suffered no apparent harm.

The unit remains closed; it is expected to reopen soon with all new personnel and equipment. “It took a long time to get here — three years in the making,” Mr. Mizrach said. “Without question, this was a dark part of this medical center, but I would hate this to be a defining moment of what this institution is about.”

Checks and Errors

When inspectors from the Radiological Physics Center, a federally financed testing service, arrived at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla., in 2005, they uncovered something alarming: a miscalibrated machine that overradiated 77 brain cancer patients by 50 percent in 2004 and 2005.

A new linear accelerator had been set up incorrectly, and the hospital’s routine checks could not detect the error because they merely confirmed that the output had not changed from the first day.

“Errors of this magnitude are very rare,” said Geoffrey S. Ibbott, director of the physics center. But the center’s tests have shown that inaccuracies in the delivery of machine-generated radiation are not uncommon.

Dr. Ibbott’s group also reported in 2008 that among hospitals seeking admission into clinical trials, nearly 30 percent failed to accurately irradiate an object, called a phantom, that mimicked the human head and neck. The hospitals were all using I.M.R.T., which shapes and varies the intensity of radiation beams to more accurately attack the tumor, while sparing healthy tissue.

“This is a sobering statistic, especially considering that this is a sample of those institutions that felt confident enough in their I.M.R.T. planning and delivery process to apply for credentialing and presumably expected to pass,” said a task group investigating I.M.R.T. guidelines for the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.

The group’s report, published in November, said the failure rate “strongly suggests” that some clinics had not adequately performed the initial tests to make sure their equipment was set up correctly.

“Errors like the one at Moffitt, and other errors that we have detected at other facilities, would be much less likely to have occurred if, every time a new piece of radiation therapy equipment were installed, there was some sort of independent check of the type that we do,” Dr. Ibbott said in an interview last year. “If we had gone to Moffitt eight months earlier, perhaps none of those patients would have received the higher dose.”

Another set of tests from 2000 to 2008 found that 15 percent to 20 percent of hospitals using linear accelerators in clinical trials had at least one radiation beam outside the acceptable range.

“We haven’t been sufficiently outspoken about this, although we are now in the process of correcting that,” said Dr. Ibbott, whose group is based at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

Hospitals sometimes embrace new technologies before medical personnel can agree on how best to use them.

James Deye, a program director in radiation research at the National Cancer Institute, watched with concern as the popularity of I.M.R.T. exploded before there were national standards. Dr. Deye said he established minimum I.M.R.T. guidelines for institutions wishing to participate in cancer trials. “The community was going along merrily and happily without those guidelines,” he said.

Dr. Ibbott’s testing service can help clinics improve the performance of their linear accelerators if they are in clinical trials. Operators not in trials can pay to have their units tested by a sister group of the Physics Center. Even so, many do not.

“There are clearly places that don’t avail themselves of the service, even though it is well known and very affordable,” Dr. Ibbott said. “I guess they don’t want someone else checking them for some reason.”

In radiotherapy, eschewing an outside, independent review is a calculated gamble.

“If you radiate a person wrong, there’s no repeat — you can’t say, ‘Let’s forget about that one and do it correct next time,’ ” said George X. Ding, a medical physicist at the Vanderbilt Center for Radiation Oncology in Nashville. “It’s not like you do a measurement of a phantom and it went wrong and you can do it again.”

Steeper Learning Curve

Last fall, in the vast exhibition hall at McCormick Place in Chicago, dozens of companies from around the world displayed their latest radiological weapons in the war on cancer.

“That’s our newest linear accelerator,” said Hans-Jörg Freyer of Siemens Healthcare, standing in front of his company’s Artiste model, which combines imaging with therapy. Sophisticated, yet easy to use, it is capable of treating 80 patients a day, Mr. Freyer said.

Dee Mathieson, of the Swedish company Elekta, said imaging technology in their linear accelerator improved accuracy. “What has changed is the software that allows us to unleash some of these new techniques,” Ms. Mathieson said.

Over the last two decades, the industry has developed generations of machines, each designed to more precisely attack tumors, allowing doctors to administer higher doses of radiation with less risk to healthy tissue.

Linear accelerators once used radioactive beams crudely shaped as blocks or rectangles. Since tumors do not grow in straight lines, healthy tissue was sometimes irradiated along with the cancer. To minimize collateral damage, technicians manually inserted blocks and filters, a task later taken over by computers.

Computers eventually were able to produce three-dimensional images of tumors — a major advancement — and linear accelerators used software that contoured beams to conform to the shape of the tumor. The next step, I.M.R.T., allowed doctors to more precisely tailor the shape and intensity of the beams. The latest generation of machines, which were on display at McCormick Place, incorporates sophisticated imaging.

The F.D.A. waved these advancements through with little review on the grounds that they just extended existing technology. But there are dissenters. “It’s so much more than that,” said Dr. Deye, the National Cancer Institute official. “The issues surrounding advanced technologies are far-reaching.”

Even if the devices work as intended, hospitals face a steep learning curve.

In 2005, when Landreaux A. Donaldson underwent therapy for prostate cancer at Mary Bird Perkins Cancer Center in Baton Rouge, La., the linear accelerator was so new the vendor’s training instructors were still in the hospital, records show. The accelerator delivered radiation in a radically different way, emitting tiny beams of radiation from many points on a spiral encircling the patient.

In treating Mr. Donaldson, the hospital used the wrong type of CT treatment scan for the machine, prompting medical personnel to compensate by doing what is called “a work around” — a departure from established procedure. But because they were unfamiliar with the treatment planning software, they made a miscalculation that affected all 38 treatments, stretching over two months, according to state records and a lawsuit filed by Mr. Donaldson.

The next year, Mr. Donaldson began experiencing stomach ulcers, anemia and urethral stricture, which required surgery. He also underwent hyperbaric oxygen treatments, where pure pressurized oxygen is used to promote healing. Neither the hospital nor Mr. Donaldson would comment on the lawsuit, which has been settled.

As therapies become more complex, there is more to check — sometimes too much, say some medical physicists.

“When it exceeds certain levels of complexity, there is not enough time and not enough resources to check the behavior of a complicated device to every possible, conceivable kind of input,” said Dr. Williamson, the medical physicist from Virginia.

As the person most responsible for ensuring that an optimal radiation dose is delivered safely, the medical physicist must make sure that new machines are set up properly; that daily warm-up checks are carried out, along with more extensive monthly and annual evaluations; and that individual treatments are administered as prescribed.

Computers can provide only so much help. In the past, they checked the work of radiotherapists, but now therapists check the computers, said Howard I. Amols, chief of clinical physics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

The problem, Dr. Amols said, is that computers are better at checking humans than humans are at checking computers. “The responsibility on Day 1 to make everything right is much more important than it used to be,” he said. “We are still grappling with how we do that.”

Hospitals sometimes aggravate the problem, buying new technology without adding the employees needed to operate it safely, according to a report issued on a 2007 conference sponsored by two radiological associations and the National Cancer Institute.

And hospitals complain that manufacturers sometimes release new equipment with software that is poorly designed, contains glitches or lacks fail-safe features, records show.

Northwest Medical Physics Equipment in Everett, Wash., had to release seven software patches to fix its image-guided radiation treatments, according to a December 2007 warning letter from the F.D.A. Hospitals reported that the company’s flawed software caused several cancer patients to receive incorrect treatment, government records show.

In another case, an unnamed medical facility told federal officials in 2008 that Philips Healthcare made treatment planning software with an obscure, automatic default setting, causing a patient with tonsil cancer to be mistakenly irradiated 31 times in the optic nerve. “The default occurred without the knowledge of the physician or techs,” the facility said, according to F.D.A. records.

In a statement, Peter Reimer of Philips Healthcare said its software functioned as intended and that operator error caused the mistake.

Patchwork of Regulation

When George Garst was treated in 2004 for prostate cancer at Christus Spohn Hospital in Corpus Christi, Tex., his caregivers were subject to the following regulations:

The first half of his radiation treatment — external beam therapy — was overseen by the state radiological division operating under one set of rules. The second half of his treatment — radioactive seeds — was subject to a second set of rules established by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, except that the commission passed its responsibility on to the state, which must follow some, but not all, of the commission’s rules. In any case, the second rules differ from the first.

State radiology officials have no enforcement power to punish a clinic if it botched the first half of a procedure like Mr. Garst’s, but they can for the second half. If any radiation equipment failed to work properly, resulting in a serious injury, that must be reported to the federal Food and Drug Administration, the manufacturer and the state.

As it turned out, Mr. Garst was overdosed and seriously injured, destroying his ability to urinate and move his bowels normally. Before two external bags were attached to collect his waste, Mr. Garst’s urine leaked into his rectum because a fistula had developed. He had so many infections, his doctors had to keep trying new antibiotics to replace those that no longer worked.

“He was very, very sick from all this,” said Dr. Norbert C. Brehm, one the doctors who treated Mr. Garst after the accident. “He was not sleeping. He had a feeling of worthlessness, hopelessness, appetite disturbance, mood swings.”

And yet, until The Times began investigating Mr. Garst’s injuries, no one in government — not Texas, not the Nuclear Regulatory Commission — was even aware of his overdose or of his devastating injuries.

The state and the commission initially told The Times that they had no jurisdiction in the case since neither the first nor second treatment was by itself an overdose, even though in combination they were. Despite their mandate to protect patients from radiation mistakes, the state and federal government said in essence that Mr. Garst was someone else’s problem.

Had regulators investigated, they would have found reasons for concern.

The medical physicist later said he had been overworked, rarely taking a day off, and that he had complained to hospital officials about staffing issues. Mr. Garst’s radiation oncologist failed to prescribe a dosage for the implanted radioactive seeds, and the actual dose ended up being too high, according to a lawsuit filed by Mr. Garst. The physicist then failed to catch the mistake. The oncologist also implanted seeds too close to Mr. Garst’s rectum, the physicist delayed performing a post-implant analysis, and the oncologist failed to promptly report the overdose to the patient’s doctor.

Mr. Garst said he did not learn of his overdose until about a year later.

In response to inquiries by The Times, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the state had opened an investigation into Mr. Garst’s care. “They’re going to look at why the licensee didn’t report it — was there a deficiency in their procedures or training?” said James G. Luehman, a deputy director in the commission.

Last week, Texas reported that its investigation had found no violations of state radiation regulations. The hospital declined to comment on the case, which has been settled.

Mr. Garst said that medically, he was at a dead end. “They couldn’t really do anything for me because I’m so burned up,” he said.

Last year, health officials in eight states sent a letter to Congress asking for a more rational way to regulate radiation. “There is no national program charged with the protection of the public from all radiation sources,” the letter stated. “Federal agencies pressure the states, most of which have comprehensive radiation programs, to provide protection from certain sources of radiation while ignoring other sources.”

Kirksey Whatley, director of the Alabama Office of Radiation Control, said radioactive materials, which are overseen by the N.R.C., received most of the government’s attention, while the much more common machine-generated radiation was largely unregulated by the federal government.

Thirteen states, including California, do not require that errors involving linear accelerators be reported to state health officials. Texas requires that they be reported, but has no enforcement authority to punish anyone. New York rarely fines radiotherapy units for substandard care, while Florida frequently does.

Part of the problem is that hospitals may skimp on quality assurance because, depending on the state, it is voluntary, medical physicists say.

Jared W. Thompson, an Arkansas radiation official, said he mostly worried about diagnostic radiation. “There are no limits about what can be done, how it can be used, when it is considered unsafe,” Mr. Thompson said.

There are no guarantees, Mr. Whatley said, that radiological devices have been inspected and that its operators are properly trained and qualified. Depending on the state, he added, “you may get two to three times more of the radiation you need.”

Even when overdoses occur, some medical practitioners are reluctant to publicly disclose them. An N.R.C. advisory group underscored that point when in 2005 it recommended that the agency adopt the “industry standard” when responding to a radiation error, called a medical event, or M.E. “Keeping M.E. reports, or at least the licensee’s identity out of the public record, is probably the single most useful improvement N.R.C. could make in this regard,” the advisory committee urged.

The commission rejected that recommendation.

Responding to Mistakes

Under Ohio law, Akron General Hospital was obliged to file a detailed written report no later than 15 days after it overdosed Myra Jean Garman, 76, a breast cancer patient, with high-dose radioactive seeds.

Instead, Akron General waited five months, records show.

Just two months before Mrs. Garman’s accident, at the same hospital, another patient was overdosed with 111 radioactive seeds that were too powerful. When the Ohio Bureau of Radiation Protection inspected the facility, it found that the hospital’s radiation safety officer was not even aware of the accident. Nor did the hospital’s radiation safety committee discuss the overdose when it met for its regular meeting, state regulators said.

Mrs. Garman’s accident occurred in September 2006, when she received twice her prescribed dose five separate times because a physicist had “entered an incorrect magnification factor into the treatment planning computer,” according to state regulators.

Five months later, she complained of severe pain, and doctors discovered that she had broken ribs, a known side effect of her type of overdose. Mrs. Garman’s daughter, Joyce Lilya, said her mother, who had walked two miles daily before the procedure, could now barely walk two blocks.

Even though her cancer did not reappear, a year after the overdose, Mrs. Garman ended up in intensive care with breathing troubles. No cause could be determined, her daughter said.

A month later, Mrs. Garman took an overdose of Tylenol, tied a plastic bag around her head and killed herself. “I was really trying, but it was too much for me,” she said in a note. “Let me go!!! Please.”

Ms. Lilya said she and her family were stunned, calling her mother a “positive person” who would never hurt herself even though her husband had died several months earlier. Seeking reasons for her mother’s suicide, Ms. Lilya began searching the Internet and reached out with dozens of calls and e-mail messages to professional groups and government agencies.

Only then, she said, did she learn of the radiation overdose. Much to her surprise, the state had cited the hospital only for failing to promptly report the mistake to state authorities. There was no fine. And while Mrs. Garman’s medical records show that she had asked for a written account of her overdose, the hospital could produce no such document nor was one in her medical file.

James Gosky, a spokesman for Akron General, said in a recent interview that Mrs. Garman had been informed of her overdose.

Still, Ms. Lilya said, “none of this made any sense.” So she kept pressing — without success — for a more thorough investigation of her mother’s accident.

In a conference call last summer, she said Lance D. Himes, assistant counsel for the Ohio Department of Health, explained part of the department’s enforcement philosophy.

“He told me they don’t get into assessing penalties because that is what malpractice is for,” she said.

A spokesman for the state said Mr. Himes denied making that statement. And in October 2007, the state did fine the hospital $4,000 for other infractions — but not for Mrs. Garman’s overdose.

Ms. Lilya said her investigation had taught her much about how hospitals respond when they make a mistake. “It has been a long and tragic journey for my family,” she said, And, she added, “No one was held accountable.”

Reporting was contributed by Simon Akam, Renee Feltz, Andrew Lehren, Kristina Rebelo and Rebecca R. Ruiz.

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Sri Lanka’s President Declared Victor by Wide Margin

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COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s president, was re-elected by a wide margin, election officials here said Wednesday, defeating the newly retired army general who had tried to lay claim to Mr. Rajapaksa’s biggest political victory, the defeat of the Tamil Tiger insurgency.

Official results gave Mr. Rajapaksa an 18-point advantage over his nearest opponent, Sarath Fonseka, the general who carried out the successful military operation against the Tigers. Mr. Fonseka rejected the result, saying that campaign had been marred by violence and irregularities in the vote counting.

“The enthusiasm of the people we noticed in the campaign is not reflected in the result,” Mr. Fonseka said at a news conference.

Independent Sri Lankan election monitors said that there was no evidence of major fraud in the voting, but left open the possibility of problems in the counting.

More broadly, election observers and advocacy groups have questioned the fundamental fairness of the campaign, accusing Mr. Rajapaksa of using state resources to run his campaign. State-owned news media all but shut out opposition candidates.

The election results illustrate the still-yawning ethnic and religious divides that plunged Sri Lanka into civil war in the first place, and underscore the difficulties Mr. Rajapaksa will face in trying to reconcile the country after 26 years of conflict.

Mr. Fonseka spent the day secluded in a five-star hotel, which the government surrounded with commandos, saying they had been placed there for security reasons. He said that he feared for his safety.

“They are trying to make me a prisoner,” Mr. Fonseka said, addressing a conference room packed with journalists. “They have made things very clear today.”

Lucien Rajakarunanyake, a government spokesman, rejected the suggestion that Mr. Fonseka was in danger, saying that the troops outside the hotel were merely for safety. “He is free to leave at any time,” the spokesman said.

The Tamil Tiger insurgency fought to create a Tamil homeland in the north and east of Sri Lanka, separate from the Sinhalese majority. But over the years the group became little more than a criminal enterprise famous for its cruel tactics, human rights groups say, like holding civilians as human shields as well as using child soldiers and female suicide bombers.

While Mr. Rajapaksa won a large majority, Tamil and Muslim voters largely rejected him.

Mr. Rajapaksa pledged to be a president for all Sri Lankans, not just those who voted for him, an apparent effort to reach out to Tamil voters who shunned him in large numbers.

“Six million people voted for me,” Mr. Rajapaksa said at a news conference at his office late Wednesday evening. “Even the people who voted for other candidates, I have to look after their interests.”

It had been an ugly and sometimes violent campaign between two men who had once been close allies. The evidently exasperated elections commissioner, Dayananda Dissanayake, described numerous transgressions by the government during the campaign, concluding that “state institutions operated in a manner not befitting state organizations.”

Guidelines for the state media to behave fairly toward both candidates were ignored, he said, adding that the stress of overseeing the election had taken a toll on his health.

A long night of counting ballots confirmed that turnout in northern Tamil areas was very low, in the single digits in some war-hit areas, while voters had flocked to the polls in Mr. Rajapaksa’s southern stronghold.

Dayan Jayatilleka, a political analyst who was Sri Lanka’s representative to the United Nations in Geneva until the government fired him last year, said that the Tamil political parties had lost touch with the electorate during the long years of war.

“They have been engaging in the politics of exile,” Mr. Jayatilleka said. “They have not done the hard yards of rebuilding their political network.”

But election observers said that explosions and other disturbances, along with the heavy militarization of the northern and eastern Tamil areas, also suppressed the vote.

The other political parties in Mr. Fonseka’s coalition also struggled to bring in voters. The center-right United National Party failed to deliver the capital, Colombo — its stronghold — for Mr. Fonseka. And the Marxist party known as the J.V.P., the Sinhalese acronym for People’s Freedom Party, seemed to make little headway against the president in its southern Sinhalese bastions.

Mr. Fonseka, who ran on his record of winning the war against the Tamil Tigers, had counted on support from Tamil voters, who he hoped would choose him over Mr. Rajapaksa as the more palatable of the two options. Though Mr. Fonseka led the military campaign that may have killed thousands of Tamil civilians, he portrayed himself as committed to healing ethnic divisions and allowing communities a greater measure of self-rule.

He also sought to capitalize on dissatisfaction with Mr. Rajapaksa in some quarters of the Sinhalese majority. Voters expressed concern about the concentration of state power within Mr. Rajapaksa’s family. One of his brothers is the powerful secretary of defense, another is a senior adviser and many members of his extended family work in senior government positions.

But Mr. Rajapaksa emerges from the election in many ways stronger than ever. He ran on his war record, arguing that if he delivered on his pledge to win the war he could also bring a peace dividend and heal the nation’s ethnic rifts.

“The president keeps his promises,” said Gamage Banduwathie, a voter who left the United National Party to support Mr. Rajapaksa in the election. “I hope that he will be a savior for Sri Lanka.”

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Yearbooks ending at University of Virginia, other colleges

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By Jenna Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 27, 2010; B01

Last spring was the first time since World War II that University of Virginia students did not publish their yearbook, "Corks and Curls."

No one seemed to notice.

This school year, despite hopes that the yearbook could be resurrected, no staff has formed, and the yearbook office is dark. The Cavalier Daily, the student newspaper, reported this week that "Corks and Curls" had died one year shy of its 120th edition for lack of funding and student interest.

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College yearbooks have been slowly disappearing as campuses expand and diversify and students' lives move online, away from paper records of their college memories. The thick volumes can cost as much as $100 each at a time when some students have difficulty paying for textbooks.

"This is a sad thing for many people, but I think it's also a sign of the times," said Aaron Laushway, an associate dean of students who pulls out old yearbooks to explain U-Va history and traditions. "The idea of having a physical binder of reminders of an academic year is waning."

In the past two years, several universities have closed their yearbooks. Towson University near Baltimore sold about two dozen yearbooks to its more than 20,000 students last year and is considering not printing one this year.

Yearbook publisher Jostens estimates that about 1,000 colleges, mostly small campuses and liberal arts schools, still produce a yearbook.

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"Today, you have larger campuses with satellite campuses . . . and student populations that cover such a diverse group, from high school graduates to working adults to online students," said Richard Stoebe, the company's spokesman. "Successful yearbooks are inclusive. That's obviously tougher to do in college."

A slow demise

College yearbooks have been in slow decline since campus life changed in the 1960s and '70s, Stoebe said. Recently, several large schools, including Purdue University and Mississippi State University, have folded their yearbooks.

Schools that have yearbooks have tried attracting the Facebook generation with year-in-review DVDs or online features or have switched to digital yearbooks to save money. Some universities have begun to fund the creation of the yearbook or added the price to student fees. Others campuses have transferred responsibility for the project to alumni associations.

The student government at St. Mary's College of Maryland decided to pay small salaries for the yearbook editor and staff members this year so the struggling publication could stabilize and determine its direction, said Clinton Neill, coordinator of student activities.

"Technology is changing," he said. "Other schools are looking at other ways of documenting their years. Maybe we can look at some of those ways for documenting our years."

Yearbook staffers and campus historians gush about the importance of yearbooks, how they capture an academic year and preserve it for future generations. Even the titles of the books evoke student life from long ago: Georgetown University's yearbook is called "Ye Domesday Booke." Johns Hopkins University calls its yearbook "Hullabaloo."

"With yearbooks, you look at them the first day you get them, then you put them away and don't look at them for years," said Ashley Kemper, 22, editor of American University's yearbook, "The Talon," which sells about 400 copies a year to the campus's 6,000 undergraduates. "We try to give things context. Fifty years from now, people can open their yearbook and remember what it was like."

A long tradition

U-Va.'s "Corks and Curls" was first published in 1888 by a group of fraternity members, making it one of the oldest college yearbooks in the country. Its name captured the two types of students on campus: "Corks," who were unprepared for class and corked up when called on, and "curls," who when patted on the head by admiring teachers "curleth his tail for delight thereat."

The old volumes trace the history of the prestigious school, as the artwork transitions from pen-and-ink sketches to black-and-white photos to color layouts.

"It was a tradition; it had a lot of history," said Lorenzo Mah, 27, a 2005 graduate who worked on the yearbook for four years. "I don't think there are a lot of yearbooks that have been around for more than 100 years."

Early editions contained "statistics" of the average student's height, weight, hair color, religion, bedtime and expenses, showing that he was white, male and wealthy. Those early copies also contained caricatures of blacks and racist language. The first African American student graduated from the university in 1962, and the next year the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on campus, but neither event is documented in the yearbook, according to a history of the yearbook written by Whitney Spivey, who graduated in 2005.

When women began to enroll in 1970, the all-male yearbook staff joked: "There are ads for women's lingerie in the Cavalier Daily, and there are 42 rejected urinals in the men's dormitories, and there are lipsticks and powder puffs and false eyelashes and bride's magazines in Newcomb Hall, and there are painted fingernails waving in the faces of professors." In 1975, the first female yearbook editor was elected.

Little hope seen

But by about 2003, the U-Va. yearbook began to run into financial problems. One year, the book was finished late and the organization went into debt mailing the heavy 500-plus-page volumes to students who had graduated, Mah said. By that point, there wasn't enough money in the budget to pay for staff pizza parties.

The last yearbook was published after the 2007-08 school year. The next year, another staff got together and excitedly began to plan the school's 120th edition but realized there was not enough money or student interest to continue, said Michelle Burch, an economics major who was co-editor in chief that year. The yearbook has been suspended since.

"Can 'Corks & Curls' be revived? I don't know," Burch wrote in an e-mail. "It would take a completely different approach to bring it back to life in this digital world."

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U.S. military teams, intelligence deeply involved in aiding Yemen on strikes

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By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 27, 2010; A01

U.S. military teams and intelligence agencies are deeply involved in secret joint operations with Yemeni troops who in the past six weeks have killed scores of people, among them six of 15 top leaders of a regional al-Qaeda affiliate, according to senior administration officials.

The operations, approved by President Obama and begun six weeks ago, involve several dozen troops from the U.S. military's clandestine Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), whose main mission is tracking and killing suspected terrorists. The American advisers do not take part in raids in Yemen, but help plan missions, develop tactics and provide weapons and munitions. Highly sensitive intelligence is being shared with the Yemeni forces, including electronic and video surveillance, as well as three-dimensional terrain maps and detailed analysis of the al-Qaeda network.

As part of the operations, Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a compound where a U.S. citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of U.S. citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said. The officials, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the operations.

The broad outlines of the U.S. involvement in Yemen have come to light in the past month, but the extent and nature of the operations have not been previously reported. The far-reaching U.S. role could prove politically challenging for Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who must balance his desire for American support against the possibility of a backlash by tribal, political and religious groups whose members resent what they see as U.S. interference in Yemen.

The collaboration with Yemen provides the starkest illustration to date of the Obama administration's efforts to ramp up counterterrorism operations, including in areas outside the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones.

"We are very pleased with the direction this is going," a senior administration official said of the cooperation with Yemen.

Obama has ordered a dramatic increase in the pace of CIA drone-launched missile strikes into Pakistan in an effort to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban members in the ungoverned tribal areas along the Afghan border. There have been more such strikes in the first year of Obama's administration than in the last three years under President George W. Bush, according to a military officer who tracks the attacks.

Obama also has sent U.S. military forces briefly into Somalia as part of an operation to kill Saleh Ali Nabhan, a Kenyan sought in the 2002 bombing of an Israeli-owned resort in Kenya.

Republican lawmakers and former vice president Richard B. Cheney have sought to characterize the new president as soft on terrorism after he banned the harsh interrogation methods permitted under Bush and announced his intention to close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Obama has rejected those two elements of Bush's counterterrorism program, but he has embraced the notion that the most effective way to kill or capture members of al-Qaeda and its affiliates is to work closely with foreign partners, including those that have feeble democracies, shoddy human rights records and weak accountability over the vast sums of money Washington is giving them to win their continued participation in these efforts.

In the case of Yemen, a steady stream of high-ranking officials has visited Saleh, including the rarely seen JSOC commander, Vice Adm. William H. McRaven; White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan; and Gen. David H. Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command.

A Yemeni official briefed on security matters said Tuesday that the two countries maintained a "steadfast cooperation in combating AQAP, but there are clear limits to the U.S. involvement on the ground. Information sharing has been a key in carrying out recent successful counterterrorism operations." AQAP is the abbreviation for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the affiliate operating in Yemen.

In a newly built joint operations center, the American advisers are acting as intermediaries between the Yemeni forces and hundreds of U.S. military and intelligence officers working in Washington, Virginia and Tampa and at Fort Meade, Md., to collect, analyze and route intelligence.

The combined efforts have resulted in more than two dozen ground raids and airstrikes. Military and intelligence officials suspect there are several hundred members of AQAP, a group that has historical links to the main al-Qaeda organization but that is thought to operate independently.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, told a Navy War College class in early January that the United States had "no plans" to send ground troops to Yemen and that he had been concerned about the growing al-Qaeda presence there "for a long time now."

"We have worked hard to try to improve our relationships and training, education and war-fighting support," Mullen said. "And, yet, we still have a long way to go."

Saleh has faced pressure not only from the United States but also his country's main financial backers, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to gain better control over its lawless northern border. In August, Saleh asked U.S. officials to begin a more in-depth conversation over how the two countries might work together, according to administration officials. The current operation evolved from those talks.

"President Saleh was serious about going after al-Qaeda and wasn't going to resist our encouragement," the senior official said.

The Obama administration's deepening of bilateral intelligence relations builds on ties forged during George J. Tenet's tenure as CIA director.

Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Tenet coaxed Saleh into a partnership that would give the CIA and U.S. military units the means to attack terrorist training camps and al-Qaeda targets. Saleh agreed, in part, because he believed that his country, the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden, was next on the U.S. invasion list, according to an adviser to the Yemeni president.

Tenet provided Saleh's forces with helicopters, eavesdropping equipment and 100 Army Special Forces members to train an antiterrorism unit. He also won Saleh's approval to fly Predator drones armed with Hellfire missiles over the country. In November 2002, a CIA missile strike killed six al-Qaeda operatives driving through the desert. The target was Abu Ali al-Harithi, organizer of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. Killed with him was a U.S. citizen, Kamal Derwish, who the CIA knew was in the car.

Word that the CIA had purposefully killed Derwish drew attention to the unconventional nature of the new conflict and to the secret legal deliberations over whether killing a U.S. citizen was legal and ethical.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush gave the CIA, and later the military, authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad if strong evidence existed that an American was involved in organizing or carrying out terrorist actions against the United States or U.S. interests, military and intelligence officials said. The evidence has to meet a certain, defined threshold. The person, for instance, has to pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests," said one former intelligence official.

The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a U.S. citizen joins al-Qaeda, "it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them," a senior administration official said. "They are then part of the enemy."

Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called "High Value Targets" and "High Value Individuals," whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three U.S. citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi's name has now been added.

Intelligence officials say the New Mexico-born imam also has been linked to the Army psychiatrist who is accused of killing 12 soldiers and a civilian at Fort Hood, Tex., although his communications with Maj. Nidal M. Hasan were largely academic in nature. Authorities say that Aulaqi is the most important native, English-speaking al-Qaeda figure and that he was in contact with the Nigerian accused of attempting to bomb a U.S. airliner on Christmas Day.

Yemeni Foreign Minister Abubaker al-Qirbi said in Washington last week that his government's present goal is to persuade Aulaqi to surrender so he can face local criminal charges stemming from his contacts with the Fort Hood suspect. Aulaqi is being tracked by the country's security forces, the minister added, and is now thought to be in the southern province of Shabwa.

Staff writer R. Jeffrey Smith and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

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Salvadoran Immigrants in the United States

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Salvadoran Immigrants in the United States
Source: Migration Information Source

As civil wars engulfed several Central American countries in the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled their country and came to the United States.

Between 1980 and 1990, the Salvadoran immigrant population in the United States increased nearly fivefold from 94,000 to 465,000. The number of Salvadoran immigrants in the United States continued to grow in the 1990s and 2000s as a result of family reunification and new arrivals fleeing a series of natural disasters that hit El Salvador, including earthquakes and hurricanes.

By 2008, there were about 1.1 million Salvadoran immigrants in the United States. Salvadorans are the country’s sixth largest immigrant group after Mexican, Filipino, Indian, Chinese, and Vietnamese foreign born.

The immigrant population from this tiny Central American country is now nearly as large as the immigrant population from much larger China. (As reference, China’s total population is 200 times larger and its territory is about 500 times larger than El Salvador’s.)

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