Helping hands to injured birds of prey

from the August 07, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0807/p20s01-ussc.html

In Oregon, volunteers endure scrapes, scars, and sometimes all-out attacks to help raptors in need of rehabilitation.

By Melissa Hart Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

Eugene, Ore.

In a place where people regularly walk around with mouse guts and bird poop festooning their clothing, Sandy Jenness has the monopoly on gross. Every evening, she leaves work as a medical office assistant and drives up a winding mountain road to Cascades Raptor Center. Here, 30 volunteers spend dozens of hours a week scrubbing hawk feces and hand-feeding chunks of cut-up quail to owls, but none has it as bad as Ms. Jenness.

She's been training Lethe, a turkey vulture with a 6-foot wingspan and a beak that could hack off her finger, for six months. A woman with a passion for Renaissance frocks, a fairy tattoo on her calf, and long pink acrylic nails, she's been known to show up at the center in a frothy floral dress, strap the bird into the back seat of her Ford Focus, and drive around town, preparing him to travel to area schools, where he'll sit calmly on a perch while she discusses the allure of raptors in general, and turkey vultures in particular.

"Sometimes the car ride unnerves him and he throws up on my shirt," Jenness says of the unexpected consequence of a vulture's natural defense mechanism.

She once drove to work oblivious to red-tailed hawks hunting voles from fence posts. But two years ago, she spotted a golden eagle at one of CRC's festival booths. Mesmerized by the 3-foot bird, she approached it and its caretaker.
"How can I get next to that eagle?" she demanded.

Louise Shimmel, the founder and executive director of the CRC, assessed Jenness with a hawk-like gaze and folded her arms over her chest, where resident screech owls often find purchase enough to perch.

"Fill out a volunteer application," she replied, "but only if you're serious."

It's Ms. Shimmel's ringing challenge and the appeal of close proximity to powerful birds that compel professors, counselors, accountants and other professionals to shed business suits at the end of their workdays and pull on T-shirts. They pay up to $80 to take her weekend rehabilitation classes, learning to care for birds that have ingested poison or collided with a car.

They want a piece of the action at the CRC, which treats as many as 200 injured birds a year. There's no glory in this kind of work, but there is a chance to indulge the thing that links the volunteers to the clinic and each other – a bizarre fascination with flesh-eating birds.

In the clinic, seasoned volunteers compare battle scars from talons and beaks. One story takes the cake: It took three people to unclench a golden eagle's talon from one woman's palm. A biology professor by day, she quickly treated and bandaged her wound, turning her attention to her attacker's own injured wing.

• • •

Six years, ago I began volunteering at the center, to impress a photographer I'd met at the dog park. Jonathan Smith was already a seasoned volunteer, catching bald eagles in the center's recovery field for bimonthly checkups and glove-training a Swainson's hawk. A vegetarian, I held my breath when I carried plates of euthanized chicks and mice to owls on my evening shift. My hands shook as I learned to hold an injured great-horned owl's head and wedge my thumb into a corner of its strong, keen-edged beak to force-feed it.

My dedication paid off. Last year, Jonathan and I were married at CRC's first wedding with a great-horned owl bearing our rings on a ribbon around one talon.

Such transcendent moments balance the drudgery of day-to-day cage cleaning. A volunteer drives 60 miles to pluck a screech owl – sooty but surviving – from someone's chimney flue where it was trapped for two days, antagonizing the family dog with its hooting. An injured bald eagle heals from a scuffle with another bald, and 40 volunteers and their families applaud its release at the lake where the bird was discovered, turning an ordinary Friday evening into a celebration. An emaciated barred owl found starving tries to scalp a volunteer, its eagerness to puncture everything it can get its talons on proving it could survive again in the wild.

These small triumphs inspire retired Army helicopter pilot Stan Perry to make the 75-minute drive from Salem, Ore. to the center each Thursday for his four-hour shift. Perry snaps to attention as he ducks into the clinic. He scans stacks of sheet-covered pet carriers, the injured patients quiet within, and studies a board covered with a multicolored code of letters and numbers.

"COHA 108," he reads. "1 c/u M 3 TID." Skilled at flight and combat, Perry spent months learning to translate this chicken-scratch into "Cooper's Hawk number 108, 1 cut-up mouse to be fed three times a day." Overcoming the queasiness such instructions inspire in some beginning volunteers took time for Perry – a man otherwise cool enough to relate the time a Vietcong soldier had him in his cross-hairs.

"Volunteering here makes me more anxious than anything I ever felt in the Army," he says. "You have to get things just right or a bird could die."

Part of that anxiety may come from the tight ship Shimmel runs: Each volunteer must commit to a four-hour – at the same time, on the same day – shift a week . "Treat your shift like a job," Shimmel admonishes prospective volunteers. "Two unexcused absences is grounds for dismissal."

Like her volunteers, Shimmel has also worked frenetic, high-stress day jobs. Before she discovered raptor rehabilitation, she worked in investment banking in Madrid. Disillusioned a year later, she came to Eugene and worked in different corporate jobs before rehabilitating a few injured birds as a hobby.

"It was instantly obvious when I got into rehab that this was it for me, I was 36, and I thought, 'Finally,'" she says. Not long after, she founded the CRC.

• • •

Almost every day, groups from area schools, day camps, or retirement homes come to Shimmel's center for formal natural history programs. It's not uncommon to hear stunned laughter and applause for the great horned owl who swallows a mouse whole or, even better, drops it on her handler's foot.

But the greater good of all the education isn't enough to dispel the unease some feel when wandering past cage after cage of permanently injured birds.

"I don't like zoos. I'm not sure it's OK that these raptors are caged," one visitor, his young toddler in tow, told me recently.

"Wait here for a moment," I told him, going to get the baby barred owl I'd been glove-training over the summer.
"This is Bodhi," I said. "He's a barred owl who got blown out of his nest and broke his wing. He can't fly well enough to hunt, but he'll live here to teach people about barred owls in the wild."

The man's eyes grew as round as those of the bird on my glove. "Look, Antonio!" he said, pointing at Bodhi's white breast feathers, each with a distinctive brown stripe. "Owl."

"Owl!" Antonio repeated.

Boy and bird stared at each other. Their connection felt electric, instantly recognizable. This is the moment that snags you – quick as a hawk takes a mid air songbird– and compels you to donate a chunk of your life to these creatures. Like this child, volunteers know the secret of CRC. Once a raptor gets its talons into you, you're prey to its grandeur.

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Chestnut tree poised for comeback

from the August 07, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0807/p02s01-sten.html

A hybrid, 25 years in the making, is designed to resist a devastating blight.

By Mark Clayton Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WRENTHAM, MASS.

Tromping through a Massachusetts state forest, Brad Smith spots an old stump with dead shoots and one lone, green sprout – a sad but not uncommon remnant of a once-proud species – the American chestnut tree.

Except for a few mature trees, the species has struggled for 50 years to survive. It does that in the same way: Stumps send up sprouts that are quickly attacked by the same invasive blight that wiped out about 3.5 billion chestnut trees between 1904 and 1950.

"What you're seeing is the former king of the forest reduced to surviving as a mere shrub," says Mr. Smith, president of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Chestnut Foundation (ACF).

Now, however, an American chestnut revival may be imminent. Scientists using traditional plant breeding techniques are on the verge of a breakthrough. In fact, Smith smiles and shares a little secret: the "holy grail" of
American chestnut trees – a hybrid supertree fully resistant to the blight – is alive and growing down south.

Hidden on a country road that winds through rural Meadowview, Va., is a 93-acre plot of ground that holds the future of the American chestnut: about 120 hybrid saplings. The trees – going on two years old and four feet tall – are considered "fully blight resistant" and are thriving.

At this rate, by 2010 there should be enough "holy grail" nuts to begin planting in selected test sites in national forests. By 2015, production from such plots is expected to grow exponentially – yielding enough nuts to allow for full-blown replanting – if everything goes well.

Cross-breeding American chestnut trees is a challenge because they do not produce fruit until their sixth year. Researchers have spent 25 years breeding resistant Chinese varieties of chestnut with nonresistant American versions – then "back-crossing" or breeding resistant American chestnuts with one another. It's a difficult project that the US government attempted but dropped long ago.

Restoring the species to its former glory has been the life's work of Fred Hebard, whom some regard as the American chestnut tree's Johnny Appleseed. What he's growing on his research farm in Meadowview is a tree now 15/16ths American chestnut that will grow tall and true, with 1/16 Chinese chestnut resistance.

"We're starting to produce the critical generation of fully resistant chestnut, the one we intend to release into the woods," he says. "Within three to five years we hope to begin putting out large numbers of trees, maybe 10,000 of them."

Known as the "sequoia of the East," the American chestnut was once dominant in forests from Maine to Florida, a majestic giant that easily grew four feet across, 120 feet high and lived for centuries. Its nuts were an important source of food for animals and humans and its rot-resistant wood prized by timber and furniture companies.

It's taken Dr. Hebard 18 years of painstaking hybridization to get to this point of having several hundred fully blight-resistant trees. Before him, predecessor Charles Burnham began the work in 1983.

Earlier this year, about 2,000 partially blight-resistant American chestnuts were planted on reclaimed mine land. Those trees may not survive beyond about six or seven years because they are not blight resistant. Even so, the effort will enable researchers to better understand growing conditions on such land.

Trials of the fully resistant American chestnut are expected within three years, when the ACF and the US Forest Service expect to plant thousands of the best of the "holy grail" seeds in two forests – in Kentucky and West Virginia – the heart of the chestnut's domain. About that same time, members of the ACF will also begin receiving seeds for planting.

Indeed, 13 state ACF chapters, whose orchards maintain about 40,000 partially resistant chestnut trees, will play a vital role in the chestnut restoration. Smith's Massachusetts chapter, like the others, is growing small orchards of the trees, slowly doing their own hybridization programs. Pollen from the best trees will be sent from Virginia to ACF chapters to accelerate development of varieties well-suited to regional weather and soil.

One new problem the foundation is facing isn't blight, but keeping the seeds from being sold on eBay for fat profits.
"Everybody and his cousin wants these seeds, but we've got to be real careful about naming it and what we're going to claim about [the trees' capabilities]," says Paul Sisco, a co-architect of the recovery plan with Hebard. "We won't really know how good it's going to be until about five years from now."

In fact, a tree labeled "fully blight resistant" may still contract the blight, but it should be able to ward off the fungus altogether.

Other groups, such as the American Chestnut Cooperators Foundation, are taking different approaches to breeding. Some hold out hope for a direct genetic-engineering fix, although that task is daunting because the tree's genes have not been sequenced.

"We are planting the hope, and making a commitment, that this noble hardwood will be restored to the American landscape and its vital ecological role in our nation's forests," Dirk Kempthorne, US Secretary of the Interior, said on July 26.

Today when consumers buy chestnuts for "roasting by an open fire" during the holiday season, they come from the Asian chestnut and other varieties that resist blight. But now it looks as if the American version could return one day. "I'm looking forward to growing a really big one in my backyard," Smith says.

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All claws on deck for lobster tours

from the August 09, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0809/p20s01-ussc.html

A twist on ecotourism turns kids into sternmen, adults into foragers, a lobsterman into a floating mentor, and crustaceans into unwitting stars of the show.

By Cynthia Anderson Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Portland, Maine

The first lesson comes about 15 minutes out to sea, as the lobster boat drops to an idle beside a green-striped white and red buoy. This particular pattern marks the buoy as belonging to Capt. Tom Martin and, more generally, to everyone on board the Lucky Catch today — 17 people from as far away as Seattle.

All the children and a few adults rush to starboard to watch the winch haul a lobster trap up from the deep. "Stand back a little," says Captain Martin, a clean-cut man who laughs easily and often, and who seems to have taken on the role of teacher as readily as he did that of lobsterman 20 years ago.

With a splash of cold water, the trap comes aboard. Inside, scrabbling in the sudden bright sunlight, are a rock crab and the object of the excursion: a lobster, reddish-brown, beady-eyed, and dripping.

The lobster is small, not even close to the 3-¼ inch body length required by law for it to be kept. He's two or three years old – Martin knows it's a "he" because the swimmerets are hard and orange-tipped – and he's probably molted recently, which means his shell is still soft. Even so, the lobster snaps and flails menacingly. The more timid among the tourist crew back off.

Except for Martin, everyone on board has paid to be here – adults $22 and children $14. From Memorial Day to Columbus Day, Martin brings people out lobstering with him on four or five runs a day. It's a coastal Maine twist on ecotourism – one replicated at ports from Ogunquit to Bar Harbor – and one that gives passengers hands-on experience. Everyone here today came to Portland expressly with the Lucky Catch in mind.

Each of Martin's cruises – the lighthouse route, White Head Passage, and this one, to Seal Rocks – lasts about 90 minutes. That's barely enough time to check eight traps at four buoys, to unload the catch and sort it, to change the bait and replace the trap, and – most important – to impart something of The Ways of the Lobster and to point out seals and ferry boats along the way.

"Let's get that bait loaded," Martin says. Theo, Celia, and Max Shriver, who are on board with their parents and grandparents, take turns holding the net bag and stuffing it with herring.

"Okay, that's enough," says Theo – at 10, the eldest of the siblings. All three are gloved and bibbed in orange waterproof pants, which, given the overripe state of the fish, is probably a good thing.

At each of the four stops, Martin demonstrates and instructs, always patient. During the off-season, he lobsters on his own – the solitary work of tending 800 traps through autumn rain and winter ice. If the role of lobster spokesperson and guide is burdensome at times – when, for instance, a child drenches the inside of gloves that must be shared – Martin doesn't let on.

Instead, he holds the brass wheel and pilots the boat from buoy to buoy. He made the decision to shift from full-time lobstering nine years ago, he says, after the limit on the number of traps allowed was reduced from 1,200 to 800.

Other fishermen are largely silent on the practice of commercial lobster boats taking on passengers. "I'd just as soon hold out on that," said one who would not give his name. "Maybe it's not selling out, but I wouldn't want to do it."

For Martin, the shift was less about compromise than about adaptation. He's unfazed by criticism, implied or
otherwise. "I love lobstering," he says, "and I love doing this."

•••

Martin may be captain of the Lucky Catch, but the real star is Homarus Americanus, the American lobster, a mysterious creature that tastes with its feet, hears with its legs, and has remained virtually unchanged for 100 million years.

Homarus myths abound: They are not scavengers, as was once thought, but primarily catch fresh food – fish, clams, mussels, crabs, worms, and sea urchins (generally not other lobsters). They prefer a cobble bottom and can range a mile or more at night in search of prey. Another myth is that lobsters mate for life. They are far less monogamous than that.

And here's one that may or may not be true, from Dave Woodman, grandfather of the three Shriver children: There's no natural limit to a lobster's life. Certainly they have enemies: Lobsters get eaten by seals and large fish, attacked by parasites, and consumed (sometimes over-consumed) by humans. How they otherwise die remains unclear. Some are documented to have lived 100 years.

In any case, it would seem that the lobster has some serious fans aboard today. Richard Garvais of Stafford, Conn., is here for the second time with his two stepchildren and a grandson. By the end of this trip, 8-year-old Matthew Garvais will have baited enough bags, banded enough claws, and pushed enough traps off the side of the Lucky Catch to have qualified for the position of sternman.

But staunchest by far among the lobster devotees are Kym Hauser and Pete Cleveland, who traveled to Portland by train from Massachusetts. Ms. Hauser and Mr. Cleveland love lobsters so much, it turns out, that they kept one at home in a tank as a pet, along with some crayfish. "We came up just to do this," says Hauser. They went out on the Lucky Catch yesterday and enjoyed it so much, they came back again today.

"You always learn something from him," Hauser says of Martin. "Yesterday we saw a female with eggs that we had to throw back. Oh, here. I took a picture of it." She pulls out her digital camera, locates the photo and zooms in. "See?"

The eggs – sometimes several thousand – exit the lobster's body through two holes and adhere to the underside of her tail. The female will carry them that way for up to a year, at which point the eggs will hatch. For about a month, the larvae will float near the surface, where most of them will perish. After that, a few fortunate survivors will settle to the bottom, to continue the lobster life.

•••

Back on shore, the next crew of tourists is beginning to gather. Some take cover in the scant shade of the ticket booth, while others stand in the sun. Dennie and Sharon Congrove, of Lake Harasu City, Ariz., are part of the latter group, waiting eagerly at the top of the boat ramp.

The Congroves read about Martin and the Lucky Catch in a magazine. They're looking forward to the hands-on experience, they say, and to learning a thing or two, but in truth they have an even more basic goal in mind: dinner.

They will, they hope, pull from one of Martin's traps the lobsters they will carry off the boat to a nearby restaurant that will cook them. The lobsters are cheaper this way, probably $5-6 a pound instead of $7 – effectively wholesale because there's no middleman.

"We're going to eat them right there," says Ms. Congrove, gesturing to a waterfront patio just off the pier.

Whether this qualifies as ecotourism is debatable, just as it's hard to say whether knowing Martin's facts will enhance their meal or detract from it. The Congroves will, at any rate, understand the precise origins of the food on their plates – and know exactly how it got there.

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A quest to save South America's freshwater dolphins

from the August 09, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0809/p15s01-sten.html

Biologists comb the continent's major rivers, counting mammals threatened by deforestation, pollution, and fishing.

By Sibylla Brodzinsky Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Ichilo River, Bolivia

The cloudy waters of the Ichilo River run swift but shallow through Bolivia's tropical Amazon basin. Six biologists perched on the roof of an observation boat peer out onto the creamy brown waters waiting for the first powder-pink sign of one of the most threatened mammals in the world: the freshwater dolphin.

"Sighting," yells one of the biologists, pointing over the bow. A burst of excitement takes over the boat, cameras trained on the spot where the dolphin might resurface. There is a swell in the water and the dolphin's elongated pinkish-grey nose breaks the surface. A graceful curve and he plunges back into the water.

The expedition of Bolivian, Colombian, and Argentine scientists is part of a year-long census of freshwater dolphins in the Amazon and Orinoco river basin. The study aims to measure the health of the rivers by sizing up the population of dolphins, or bufeos, as they are known here locally.

South America's river dolphins aren't as sleek as their marine cousins. Rather than a dorsal fin they have a dorsal hump and an elongated beak. But their coloring is eye catching. Bufeos can range from shades of pink blush to flamingo fuchsia, depending on their physical activity. Conservationists are counting on the bufeo to act as a sort of poster child for South American rivers under threat from pollution, overfishing, and deforestation.

"Dolphins are an emblematic species," says Saulo Usma, coordinator for fresh water programs in Colombia for the international wildlife conservation group WWF, which is funding the research. "By studying the dolphins we are collecting information for the conservation of entire ecosystems."

South American pink dolphins are thought to be descendants of marine mammals that migrated into the Orinoco River from the Atlantic Ocean about 50 million years ago. About 100,000 years ago, another species – the gray marine dolphin – is believed to have adapted to the Orinoco and Amazon.

Colombian conservation biologist Fernando Trujillo has been studying these aquatic mammals for nearly 20 years. He has seen thousands of pink dolphins but still gets excited every time he spots one. "Sighting, starboard, two individuals," he shouts, peering through a camera while waiting for the dolphins to resurface.

"I love being alone in a small boat and being surrounded by dolphins, I close my eyes and breathe in their breath. It's fetid, like rotting fish, but I love it," he says.

The benefits of a census

Dr. Trujillo, director of the Colombia-based Omacha Foundation, is the ideologue behind the five-nation census of dolphins along the Orinoco and Amazon River basins. Working with colleagues in Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Bolivia, he and his team have logged more than 1,850 miles on the rivers since the survey began last year. Brazilian researchers, who did not participate in the census project, have been working on separate abundance estimations. The biologists hope to pool their data next year.

The information will help them to establish a baseline population of the dolphins and develop a conservation plan – not just for the mammals but for the entire ecosystem in which they live, Trujillo notes. "If dolphins start to disappear from rivers it means something is happening to the fish and the river itself," he says.

A similar survey is being conducted in Asia, where different species of river dolphins live, though just barely. The baiji dolphin in China's Yangtze River was declared extinct last year, and those of the Indus, Ganges, and Mekong rivers are on the endangered list.

Hope remains, though, for the river dolphins of South America where huge development projects are still on the drawing boards. The major threats for the moment are habitat change due to deforestations, pollution from gold and other mining, and getting caught in nets of local fisherman.

Historically, the bufeo has been spared human persecution because of beliefs that it has special powers. Riverside communities tell tales of women impregnated by dolphins or how each dolphin is an incarnation of a man.

A plea to spare the dolphins

Today however, fishermen increasingly view them as an unwanted competitor for fish. All along the Ichilo river, fishermen in wooden canoes cast their nets hoping to catch pacú, surubí, or sábalo to sell on the local market.

Before setting out on the expedition, Trujillo and Belgium-born biologist Paul Van Damme, director of the Bolivian conservation group Faunagua, explained to a group of fishermen in the town of Puerto Villaroel what the trip was about and how the bufeo could eventually bring much-needed income to their communities through ecotourism.

Fisherman Fortunato Vargas was unconvinced by the sales pitch. To him, dolphins are a nuisance. "When one gets caught in our nets, it eats half of our fish, and the best ones, too. Of course we get angry. So we kill it," he says, adding that the dolphin can be used as medicine.

Conservation biologist Enrique Crespo, the Latin American coordinator of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society, accompanied the team of scientists on the Ichilo expedition. Once the count is complete, he says, the difficult work will be agreeing on a conservation plan that takes into account the needs and attitudes of the people who live side by side with the dolphins. "Science is science, conservation is about politics," he says.

Here on Bolivia's Ichilo River, Trujillo and his team of Bolivian and Colombian biologists were pleased with their results and pleased to see little human impact on the area. In over 550 linear kilometers, they sighted 485 dolphins.
Other countries show more alarming figures. "Ecuador was troubling," says Trujillo. In seven days, only 33 pink dolphins were spotted. And in Colombia they found dolphins poisoned with mercury, apparently from eating fish downstream in Venezuela contaminated by gold mining operations along the Orinoco River.

"The threats that the species faces in both [the Orinoco and the Amazon] watershed are the same, though in some countries they are stronger than in others," says Trujillo.

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All claws on deck for lobster tours

from the August 09, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0809/p20s01-ussc.html
A twist on ecotourism turns kids into sternmen, adults into foragers, a lobsterman into a floating mentor, and crustaceans into unwitting stars of the show.

By Cynthia Anderson Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Portland, Maine

The first lesson comes about 15 minutes out to sea, as the lobster boat drops to an idle beside a green-striped white and red buoy. This particular pattern marks the buoy as belonging to Capt. Tom Martin and, more generally, to everyone on board the Lucky Catch today — 17 people from as far away as Seattle.

All the children and a few adults rush to starboard to watch the winch haul a lobster trap up from the deep. "Stand back a little," says Captain Martin, a clean-cut man who laughs easily and often, and who seems to have taken on the role of teacher as readily as he did that of lobsterman 20 years ago.

With a splash of cold water, the trap comes aboard. Inside, scrabbling in the sudden bright sunlight, are a rock crab and the object of the excursion: a lobster, reddish-brown, beady-eyed, and dripping.

The lobster is small, not even close to the 3-¼ inch body length required by law for it to be kept. He's two or three years old – Martin knows it's a "he" because the swimmerets are hard and orange-tipped – and he's probably molted recently, which means his shell is still soft. Even so, the lobster snaps and flails menacingly. The more timid among the tourist crew back off.

Except for Martin, everyone on board has paid to be here – adults $22 and children $14. From Memorial Day to Columbus Day, Martin brings people out lobstering with him on four or five runs a day. It's a coastal Maine twist on ecotourism – one replicated at ports from Ogunquit to Bar Harbor – and one that gives passengers hands-on experience. Everyone here today came to Portland expressly with the Lucky Catch in mind.

Each of Martin's cruises – the lighthouse route, White Head Passage, and this one, to Seal Rocks – lasts about 90 minutes. That's barely enough time to check eight traps at four buoys, to unload the catch and sort it, to change the bait and replace the trap, and – most important – to impart something of The Ways of the Lobster and to point out seals and ferry boats along the way.

"Let's get that bait loaded," Martin says. Theo, Celia, and Max Shriver, who are on board with their parents and grandparents, take turns holding the net bag and stuffing it with herring.

"Okay, that's enough," says Theo – at 10, the eldest of the siblings. All three are gloved and bibbed in orange waterproof pants, which, given the overripe state of the fish, is probably a good thing.

At each of the four stops, Martin demonstrates and instructs, always patient. During the off-season, he lobsters on his own – the solitary work of tending 800 traps through autumn rain and winter ice. If the role of lobster spokesperson and guide is burdensome at times – when, for instance, a child drenches the inside of gloves that must be shared – Martin doesn't let on.

Instead, he holds the brass wheel and pilots the boat from buoy to buoy. He made the decision to shift from full-time lobstering nine years ago, he says, after the limit on the number of traps allowed was reduced from 1,200 to 800.

Other fishermen are largely silent on the practice of commercial lobster boats taking on passengers. "I'd just as soon hold out on that," said one who would not give his name. "Maybe it's not selling out, but I wouldn't want to do it."

For Martin, the shift was less about compromise than about adaptation. He's unfazed by criticism, implied or otherwise. "I love lobstering," he says, "and I love doing this."

•••

Martin may be captain of the Lucky Catch, but the real star is Homarus Americanus, the American lobster, a mysterious creature that tastes with its feet, hears with its legs, and has remained virtually unchanged for 100 million years.

Homarus myths abound: They are not scavengers, as was once thought, but primarily catch fresh food – fish, clams, mussels, crabs, worms, and sea urchins (generally not other lobsters). They prefer a cobble bottom and can range a mile or more at night in search of prey. Another myth is that lobsters mate for life. They are far less monogamous than that.

And here's one that may or may not be true, from Dave Woodman, grandfather of the three Shriver children: There's no natural limit to a lobster's life. Certainly they have enemies: Lobsters get eaten by seals and large fish, attacked by parasites, and consumed (sometimes over-consumed) by humans. How they otherwise die remains unclear. Some are documented to have lived 100 years.

In any case, it would seem that the lobster has some serious fans aboard today. Richard Garvais of Stafford, Conn., is here for the second time with his two stepchildren and a grandson. By the end of this trip, 8-year-old Matthew Garvais will have baited enough bags, banded enough claws, and pushed enough traps off the side of the Lucky Catch to have qualified for the position of sternman.

But staunchest by far among the lobster devotees are Kym Hauser and Pete Cleveland, who traveled to Portland by train from Massachusetts. Ms. Hauser and Mr. Cleveland love lobsters so much, it turns out, that they kept one at home in a tank as a pet, along with some crayfish. "We came up just to do this," says Hauser. They went out on the Lucky Catch yesterday and enjoyed it so much, they came back again today.

"You always learn something from him," Hauser says of Martin. "Yesterday we saw a female with eggs that we had to throw back. Oh, here. I took a picture of it." She pulls out her digital camera, locates the photo and zooms in. "See?"

The eggs – sometimes several thousand – exit the lobster's body through two holes and adhere to the underside of her tail. The female will carry them that way for up to a year, at which point the eggs will hatch. For about a month, the larvae will float near the surface, where most of them will perish. After that, a few fortunate survivors will settle to the bottom, to continue the lobster life.

•••

Back on shore, the next crew of tourists is beginning to gather. Some take cover in the scant shade of the ticket booth, while others stand in the sun. Dennie and Sharon Congrove, of Lake Harasu City, Ariz., are part of the latter group, waiting eagerly at the top of the boat ramp.

The Congroves read about Martin and the Lucky Catch in a magazine. They're looking forward to the hands-on experience, they say, and to learning a thing or two, but in truth they have an even more basic goal in mind: dinner.

They will, they hope, pull from one of Martin's traps the lobsters they will carry off the boat to a nearby restaurant that will cook them. The lobsters are cheaper this way, probably $5-6 a pound instead of $7 – effectively wholesale because there's no middleman.

"We're going to eat them right there," says Ms. Congrove, gesturing to a waterfront patio just off the pier.

Whether this qualifies as ecotourism is debatable, just as it's hard to say whether knowing Martin's facts will enhance their meal or detract from it. The Congroves will, at any rate, understand the precise origins of the food on their plates – and know exactly how it got there.

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Boundaries, not divides

from the August 06, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0806/p18s03-hfes.html

Butterflies and birds easily flit between nations. Wouldn't it be nice if people could always do the same.

By Miriam C. Daum

It was a perfect photo opportunity – one foot in Sweden, the other in Norway. I stood on the Old Svinesund Bridge, straddling the boundary between two Scandinavian countries. The flags of Sweden and Norway, on their respective sides, waved cheerfully in the breeze.

I looked down from the bridge across the Ide Fjord. There was no corresponding demarcation of nations in the water. Identical aqueous molecules flowed freely from one country to the other. The same types of plants grew on either side. If there were fish and other aquatic organisms swimming underneath, I was sure they did not collide with some boundary wall.

Neither of my legs felt different from the other, even though an official national line bisected my body. And that set me to wondering: What does a boundary make? The Oxford Dictionary of Current English defines it as "a line marking the limits of an area."

What, then, I asked myself, defines a limit? According to the same dictionary, it is "a point beyond which something does not or may not pass." At least not without careful scrutiny, I parenthetically added, which many a traveler, waiting in long immigration lines, can affirm.

Several years before, I was crossing another international boundary, from Canada to the United States. At the border, I was closely questioned as to the length of my stay in Canada and the purpose of my visit. The trunk of my car was searched. Despite my innocence, I began to feel potentially guilty. Finally I was cleared to proceed home.

Meanwhile, above my head, monarch butterflies were nonchalantly flitting their way southward, without stopping. Boundaries presented no limits for them.

In some areas of the globe, guards with guns preserve their country's boundaries, and refugees risk their lives crossing borders to a safer place. Yet avian travelers freely traverse international lines without passports, IDs, or official permission.

In skies above the perpetually war-threatened Middle East, an average of half a billion birds (half a million raptors alone) travel back and forth twice every year. Between summer sites and winter grounds, their biannual migration flyways pass through Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt. Storks and pelicans brazenly swoop over border patrols' heads.

Even in peaceful places, boundaries abound, albeit of the natural kind. Geological and aquatic formations present potential limits "beyond which something does not pass."

Yet man has found ways to cross many of those barriers with boats, planes, and trains. We build bridges over water and make tunnels through rock. Yet, when constructed by human disharmony, man-made limits loom large and insurmountable.

Boundaries can bring beauty. I remember a childhood friend's collection of foreign dolls, each dressed in the unique costume of the country from which it came. Over and over my friend and I wondered about the exotic languages and lives of people of such diverse cultures – so very different from our own, so much more interesting, we thought.

And so it was during that trip to Scandinavia, when I marveled at the rich history and traditions each country called its own. Norway and Sweden, peacefully adjacent to each other – the point at which one began and the other ended was clearly marked on the Svinesund Bridge. But as was proven there beneath my feet, boundaries need not limits make.

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On this trip to Egypt, the beggars were the ones who gave

from the August 03, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0803/p19s01-hfes.html

A world traveler was used to beggars. What he hadn't counted on was the lesson these two taught him.

By Joel Carillet

For hours I had been traveling up the Nile Valley, from Luxor to Cairo, on a train jammed with Egypt's working poor. Having been one of the last to board, I had no choice but to take one of the worst seats. So along with maybe a dozen other men, I sat scrunched on the floor in the rear of the car, my chin resting on my knees.

The train followed the route of the world's longest river, the Nile. Egypt was once a great civilization because of the Nile's gifts of water and silt, and today the river remains the reason the country can sustain a population of 80 million people, the largest in the Middle East.

At 1 a.m. I reached Cairo and took a taxi to Tahrir Square, the city's central hub. I was hungry and, having been to Cairo before, knew that while most of the city was closed down at this hour, a couple of fast-food restaurants would be open there.

The taxi dropped me off across the street from Hardee's. A moment later, just as I was about to open the restaurant door, two street children pounced on me with plaintive cries for food.

Had the square been dense with cars, people, and noise, I probably wouldn't have noticed them so clearly. But now it seemed as though there were no people in all of Egypt except these two boys and me, standing together in the chilly January air.

Being a veteran traveler as well as having once lived in Egypt for a year, I was no stranger to children begging or people asking me for help. But seldom had I been so moved by the sincerity of the plea.

In my broken Arabic I asked when they had last eaten – about 16 hours ago, they said – and then I turned to look through the window beside us. For the boys, to look through this window was to gaze upon a world inaccessible to them; for me, it was to see familiar ground.

I turned back to the boys and asked them to wait while I went inside to buy them food. Since I was traveling on a tight budget and was even skipping meals on occasion, part of me identified with the children's hunger. But mostly, the children reminded me how rich I really was.

At the counter I ordered two hamburgers for the boys. Then, as the burgers were being cooked, I overcame my remaining stinginess and bought them one of Hardee's delicious, big chocolate chip cookies, figuring they could split it.

When their food was ready, I walked back outside and invited them in to eat with me. "No!" they cried, terror-stricken. "We do not belong in such a nice place!"

Unable to persuade them otherwise, I brought the food out, and as they took the burgers, they showered me with 30 seconds of nonstop blessings, praying that Allah would bless me always.

After they finished, I reached into the bag and pulled out the cookie, extending it for them to take. Both boys fell silent now, and tears welled up in their eyes as they insisted this was too much.

They refused the cookie six times.

I knelt down beside them, looked into their eyes, and marveled at what was before me: two destitute boys who asked only for what they needed, unwilling to take a crumb more.

Still on my knees, I spoke with the same sincerity with which they had refused the cookie. "Please," I said, "take this cookie. It is yours now, not mine."

And on this seventh attempt, after a long and silent pause, they held out their hands and took the cookie.

I had seen many wonders in Egypt – the Pyramids, the Aswan High Dam, the temples of Karnak, the Valley of the Kings, the treasures of King Tut. But it was this scene outside Hardee's that left me truly awestruck, for here I found people who, amid their grubby poverty and outcast existence, taught me – a "rich man" from the West – a lesson I've long remembered.

The events of that night are now in the past, but there are moments when I'm transported back to that empty square and to the earnest faces of two boys who, upon receiving a simple burger, took to praising God and to praising me.
I'm reminded of them, for example, when I hear again the story of a Pharaoh whose heart was so hardened that he ignored the desperate cries of his kingdom's Hebrew slaves. The slaves longed for wholeness, for the easing of their burdensome yoke, but the Pharaoh did not listen to their cries.

The story of Pharaoh reminds me of the two boys not only because both events were set in Egypt but also because, in the Pharaoh, I see something of myself. The imperfect heart, which so often fails to incline itself to the cries of those around us, isn't just a problem for ancient kings; it seems to be a chronic ailment of the human condition.

Similarly, the ones who cry for help are not just ancient slaves read about in the pages of a book; they are people we come upon even in the routine of our lives.

And this is why, five years later, I still ask God's blessings for those two Egyptian boys. I pray as sincerely as they had for me, remembering that while they had nothing material to give, they had given me something greater: an awareness of my spiritual poverty and a desire for a softer heart.

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US tourists flock to Paris despite prices

from the August 01, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0801/p07s02-woeu.html

Despite a record exchange rate of $1.37 to the euro, Americans flock to the world's No. 1 tourist stop.

By Robert Marquand Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Paris

For Americans, summer in Europe evokes fun and education: Soak in the Tuscany hills, visit storied castles, wander the Normandy beaches, take in a London play. Connect with the Renaissance and World War II. Hop a plane, pop in a Joni Mitchell CD, and dream of "a free man in Paris ... unfettered and alive."

Yet as the dollar sinks like 10 lead balloons against the euro this summer, very little in the eurozone seems "free." Visitors from dollar-land are fettered by $10 onion soups, $7 ice teas, and street exchange rates that run as high as $1.55 to the euro.

"We got the dinner bill and found [$28] for mineral water," says Robert Behrens, an acoustics specialist from Boston who visited Germany, France, and Switzerland with a family of five in July. "We didn't think when ordering it, but now we are."

Still, Americans are coming. They aren't thrilled about prices, they aren't shopping much, but nor are they yet reconsidering a visit. A baby-boom nation willing to pay $5 for designer lattes is grinning and bearing the high cost of vacationing across the puddle.

"After several years of the euro getting stronger against the dollar, last year I said I'm not going back until it gets better," says Phyllis Fenner, a high school French teacher and devoted Francophile from Manassas, Va. "Then I realized it's probably never going to get better. So here we are, because we love it."

In the peak travel month of June, passenger travel to Europe from the US on the top nine air carriers was up 4.5 percent this year over 2006 figures, according to Donald N. Martin and Co. of New York, a marketing agency that follows transatlantic travel trends. In its July 25 newsletter, Martin and Co. predicts a record 7 million-plus US visits to Europe between May and September. And all at a time when the dollar is at 72 cents to the euro, a record low.

There really is no more Europe on $5 dollars a day, as the old guide books used to say, when visitors pay $5 for a coke.

"It is more like $500 a day," says Fred Hunter, a screenwriter from Santa Barbara, Calif., who most notices the hike in food prices since he last visited Paris 20 years ago. "Our four daily croissants were $5, our quart of fresh-squeezed jus d'orange was $7... about $12 for the lightest of continental breakfasts. But ... where else do you get such croissants?"

France remains the world's No. 1 tourist destination, with 79 million visits last year, according to French official figures. Europe as a whole continues to be a hot spot for US vacationers. "Tourists with high spending power from the United States, the Middle East and Asia, who spend more than 150 euros a day," continue to arrive in high numbers, says Didier Arino, the head of the Paris-based Protourisme.

Erik Smith, a newlywed from Philadelphia honeymooning here with his wife, Kelly, is one of them – though perhaps unintentionally.

"We took out 200 euros at the ATM. But after a couple of cafés, a ride around the city, a few museums, we are down to five," he says. "It feels like we spent 200 euros on nothing."

By all accounts, families are hardest hit. Everything multiplies – hotel rooms, dinner bills, transport, and venues. Some US families say costs would still be high if the exchange rate were 1 to 1, so they simply decide not to spoil their time by living in fear of the euro. "We just tried not to look, told ourselves a euro equaled a dollar, and didn't bother with reality checks until we got home," Mr. Hunter said.

Still, despite such strategies, the current rate of ¤1 to $1.37 isn't entirely forgettable, and many Americans are changing behaviors and itineraries. There's a search for decent two-star hotels, a rethinking of big-ticket items like operas and EuroDisney, and the discovery of grocery stores.

"For a short vacation, pizza, pasta, tomatoes, and figs will definitely do it!" says Daniella del Amo, a translator from Venice Beach, Calif., who annually visits Rome, where she says the tomatoes and figs are cheaper and better than in California supermarkets. "It's a savings."

Ms. Fenner has also looked to economize, shopping at markets and picnicking by the Seine. But she allows herself the occasional treat. "Yesterday we splurged and went to Au Pied de Cochon [a famous brasserie], and had a full-course meal, were waited on and pampered. But we don't do it every day," she says.

Another tourist discovery: Budding low-cost airlines in Europe like EasyJet, Air Berlin, Lauda Air, and RyanAir that allow immediate online booking for costs as low as $75 per one-way ticket for intra-Europe travel.

Americans also find it saves to pay with cash in many places, and that ATM machines give better rates than banks and private vendors. Credit-card transaction firms often tack on exorbitant fees for purchases, noted in the fine print. Hotels and shops in Rome, for example, may use card processing firms that add as much as another 15 to 20 cents to the dollar.

Tiffany Gobbi, from a Washington suburb, bought a pair of sunglasses in Rome for ¤200. When she got home, her credit-card statement read $297. "I just could not believe that."

How much has a euro cost lately?

2002 $0.98

2003 $1.13

2004 $1.20

2005 $1.21

2006 $1.27

2007 $1.37

Source: OANDA.com

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Scotland's idyllic isles

from the August 01, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0801/p19s01-hfes.html

Here's where to go to get away from it all and really relax.

By Christopher Andreae

I have never visited South Uist – or North Uist, for that matter.

Actually, I might as well come clean: I haven't been to Lewis or Harris either. Nor have I ever trodden the hallowed earth of Benbecula or Barra. And, I should hasten to say, I haven't made the slightest foray to Scalpay, Grimsay, Eriskay, or Vatersay.

These are all in the chain of islands off the west coast of Scotland known as the Outer Hebrides, and, as such, are really only a hop, skip, and a jump from where I live. Glasgow is also in western Scotland – so why have I been to Crete and Venice and dropped off at several wee islands in the Baltic Sea, but never headed for the Outer Hebrides?
I have been across to two or three inner isles and up to a couple of northern ones (Shetland and Orkney), so I am not completely Scottish-island deprived.

We once went "over the sea to Skye" – although these days you take a bridge, which is OK, but not very romantic.
We spent one memorable weekend on Iona, having driven across the Isle of Mull en route.

Incidentally, the habit of Scots and people with Scottish roots to name their offspring after Scottish islands means that some people go through life called Iona. And just the other day, a friend living in Maine mentioned a grandchild named Skye.

On investigation, however, I find that this particular form of insular name-derivation – a practice I was firmly convinced is widespread – is largely a myth. It turns out that Scots almost never name their children after islands – and to be honest I am not entirely sorry to hear this news when you consider some of the possibilities: Mull, Calf of Flotta, Yell, Muckle Flugga ... not great names to admit on the first day of school.

One day when we were on Iona, we went by boat to Staffa, where Mendelssohn was inspired by the sound of the sea reverberating in Fingal's Cave to write his "Hebrides Overture."

But what sticks in my mind even more was that we were forced to spend an extra day on Iona because the crew of the Sunday ferry to Mull was on strike. I didn't much mind, because by then my urban urgencies were beginning to slow down.

On our eventual way home, we arrived in good time for the second ferry's imminent crossing, only to be told to wait an hour or so for the operator to have his lunch. My Glaswegian wife explained we were encountering the characteristic teuchter. This is a lowlander's title of disapprobation for the "take me as you find me," sometimes unaccommodating nature of Highlanders.

Such attitudes (which may well indicate the prejudices of lowlanders rather than objective fact) are cleverly illustrated by a story. A Spanish nobleman is fishing in a Highland loch, accompanied by a ghillie (fishing guide).
The ghillie asks: "What is this I hear about a Spanish approach to life called mañana?"

The Spaniard replies: "Well, you see, it means you can always put off until tomorrow anything that need not be done today. You surely have something similar in the Highlands?"

The ghillie ponders the question at length as the water laps gently against the boat and no fish disturbs the line. Eventually he says: "Och, no, I think not. Here we have no such emergency."

One heads for the islands in search of tranquillity and remoteness. A friend who recently returned from a spell on South Uist certainly found that.

But at the tourist office, she asked if there was a What's On magazine for South Uist. In Britain, What's On lists current cultural events in different places. She thought that there might be some ceilidhs or Scottish music on South Uist while she was there.

The eyes of the young woman in the tourist office opened round like saucers. "What's On in South Uist?" she exclaimed. A pronounced stillness descended on the office.

Later, the lady who owned the place where my friend was staying explained: "The sun comes up in the morning and the sun goes down in the evening. That is what happens on Uist."

In a typical year, there is only one cultural event on the island – a music and dance summer school – and my friend's visit didn't coincide with it.

So she did what you do on South Uist. She walked and watched a golden eagle and helped rescue a sheep in trouble and gazed in wonder at the flowers.

What could be a better antidote to city life? She loved it. If she had stayed longer, who knows, she might have unwound until she turned into a teuchter.

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Support for Attorney General Gonzales slips further

from the August 02, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0802/p03s03-usju.html

Even among GOP lawmakers on the Hill, concerns mount about the attorney general's truthfulness.

By Peter Grier Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Washington

Seldom have a cabinet official and a Congress been so at odds. After months of bickering over fired US attorneys, congressional subpoenas, and secret eavesdropping, embattled Attorney General Alberto Gonzales now has few supporters left on Capitol Hill, even among his fellow Republicans.

Mr. Gonzales's bitterest foes have gone so far as to call for a special counsel to investigate whether he has perjured himself in congressional testimony. Others have begun pushing for his impeachment.

But it remains unlikely that lawmakers alone will oust the attorney general from office. By all accounts Gonzales retains the support of the person who could fire him in a stroke: President Bush.

And the most important recent developments in the case may not involve Gonzales himself. In defending him against charges that he lied to Congress last week, administration officials indirectly may have confirmed that the National Security Agency's secret eavesdropping program involves more extensive activities than previously revealed.

"The administration has finally copped to a broader [surveillance] program," wrote Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), in a July 31 analysis of recent developments in the case.

Testimony revives Gonzales's woes

The most recent chapter in this long-running saga began with a July 24 appearance by Gonzales before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where senators queried him about a 2004 confrontation between administration officials that occurred at the hospital bedside of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Perhaps choosing his words with care, Gonzales said the dispute was not about the National Security Agency's (NSA) secret eavesdropping effort, named the terrorist surveillance program.

However, two days later FBI Director Robert Mueller told the House Judiciary Committee that the confrontation did involve that program.

"The discussion was on a national, an NSA program that has been much discussed, yes," Mr. Mueller told the House panel.

Some Democrats believe that Mueller's admission proved that Gonzales had flat-out lied. Four Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee have now called on Solicitor General Paul Clement for a special perjury probe of Gonzales.

But administration officials have insisted that technically Gonzales was telling the truth, as he was talking about the terrorist surveillance program that was publicly confirmed by Mr. Bush in 2005 following news reports of its existence.

"The particular aspect of these activities that the president publicly described was limited to the targeting for interception without a court order of international communications of Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist organizations coming into or going out of the United States," wrote Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell in a July 31 letter to Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Judiciary Committee's ranking minority member. [Editor's note: The original version incorrectly named the Director of National Intelligence.]

In other words, administration officials are saying the 2004 bedside dispute was about something other than the basic thrust of the program, something that has yet to be officially disclosed.

Given this defense, it perhaps would be hard to pin a perjury rap on the attorney general, according to some analysts. Perjury cases are hard to prove and can turn on technicalities.

Even so, Democrats say Gonzales clearly meant to mislead the panel. That fits a pattern of obfuscation on the part of the attorney general, they say. During a Senate hearing in April, Gonzales said more than 60 times that he did not recall certain aspects of the firings of US attorneys. Among the things he did not remember was a crucial final meeting on the subject in his office prior to the dismissals, a meeting which other testimony and documents show he did attend.

Sen. Russ Feingold (D) of Wisconsin said July 26 that he had read the classified record of the program, and that Gonzales's testimony was "misleading at best."

Other secret surveillance programs?

That leaves open the question as to what other aspects of the terrorist surveillance program remain secret.

Reports in The New York Times and elsewhere have said the confrontation may have involved a dispute over "data mining," a practice in which computers perform complicated searches through masses of electronic records, in an attempt to piece together personal relationships or other networks that might reveal the workings of terrorists.

Large-scale data mining has long been controversial in the US, due to its potential for infringement on basic civil liberties. One post-9/11 effort, the Pentagon's Information Awareness Office, had its funds cut off by Congress in 2003 following criticism by the American Civil Liberties Union and others that it went too far.

The publicly admitted outlines of the terrorist surveillance program are "only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the NSA's spying on the American public," writes Ms. Cohn.

Despite opposition from EFF and other watchdog groups, Congress on Aug. 1 appeared close to updating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to make it easier for the NSA to eavesdrop without a warrant on terror suspects overseas.

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DNA exoneration starts with Innocence Project gatekeeper

from the August 06, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0806/p20s01-usju.html

Huy Dao plays a reluctant 'god' to hopeful prisoners

By Christa Case Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

New York

The prisoner's name is one that Huy Dao has never forgotten. For years, it would resurface amid the thousands of requests for free legal aid that flood his office – an annual, meticulously typewritten plea for help, a last-ditch effort from a man convicted of rape but convinced of his innocence.

Mr. Dao turned that case down in 1997, but he still can't put it out of his mind. Maybe it was the fact that the man was from Philadelphia, where Dao grew up as the son of Vietnamese refugees, knowing what it's like to have cops look at you askance because of your skin color. Or that it smelled like a faulty conviction, but the evidence that could have provided an indisputable forensic verdict had been destroyed.

"There was something from the letters that he wrote back to me, screaming, basically, 'I have to be innocent, this can't be the end,' " recalls Dao, whose organization uses post-conviction DNA testing to help wrongfully convicted prisoners gain freedom. "It's not fair. But it's my job to evaluate whether DNA can prove innocence, and the answer [in this case] is no."

Such are the difficult decisions that echo in the conscience of the case director of New York's Innocence Project, a 15-year-old nonprofit that recently won its 205th exoneration of an innocent prisoner.

"Many clients write to us as a last resort. If we say no to their cases, they may very well die in prison," says staff attorney Vanessa Potkin, a colleague of Dao's. "Huy has had to live with that burden for so many years. Sometimes they say doctors play God – well, Huy does. You really do have someone's life in your hands."

• • •

Politicized, angered by societal injustice, and fresh out of Cornell University in 1997, Dao figured that if he was going to work for peanuts, he didn't want to be getting someone's coffee. So he took a job delivering freedom.

It didn't start so gloriously. When he arrived, he was the second rung on a two-rung ladder. The Innocence Project was in its infancy – an outgrowth of a criminal-law clinic started by two professors at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law – and he was relegated to such tasks as helping clients' mothers pay for postage so that their cases could be evaluated.

But mainly, he read mail. Serious mail: thousands of heart-wrenching stories from convicted criminals serving long, or life, sentences – or even sitting on death row. Penned in quasi-calligraphy or pecked out on old typewriters, sent on everything from personal letterhead to toilet paper, pleas can be as simple as, "Help me, I'm innocent," or as complex as a 35-page handwritten life story. Sometimes they're accompanied by biological samples or gifts as strange as a mail-order bride catalog with a Japanese DNA biologist circled.

Dao's job: Weigh stories of wrongful conviction of heinous crimes – "a full range of horrors" including sexual assaults and murders – and winnow out those with a claim of innocence that could be proven by DNA testing. Those selected become clients of the project, which hunts down crime-scene evidence, pushes for DNA testing, and helps exonerate those proved innocent.

An English major with no legal training, Dao relies on – of all things – his appreciation of poetry to bring to light new aspects of a case that a police officer or jury may have overlooked. It's a poetic license of sorts that takes him beyond literal, legalistic meanings.

For Bruce Godschalk, Dao's knack for new meaning meant hope. Mr. Godschalk's case didn't look promising: A relative had identified him as the man in a composite sketch drawn by one of two rape victims; Godschalk had even confessed to both rapes. But Dao knew DNA would prove whether he was innocent. It took years to win the right to DNA testing; when they did, Dao was the only one available to go take Godschalk's DNA sample.

It was Dao's first visit to a prison. It smelled like school lunch, he remembers, and bulky prisoners in jumpsuits deferred to him as if he were the teacher they feared. In a sterile room, he swabbed the inside of Godschalk's mouth and while he waited for the sample to dry, he listened. Godschalk – alone in the world, chasing exoneration – saw Dao as his ticket to freedom. At their parting, Godschalk sought assurance that the test would come out in his favor. Dao says the moment was an epiphany: It struck him that it wasn't his job to be a God-like judge. The test alone could determine innocence.

And it did. Godschalk was exonerated in his 15th year of a 10- to 20-year sentence. Released from a Pennsylvania prison on Valentine's Day, 2002, he had virtually nothing and no one, so he came to New York where Dao and Ms. Potkin were. They knew every detail of his case, but now they found themselves worrying: What was his waist size? Was he going to blast his ears out with that new CD player?

• • •

"The first thing I was taught [in evaluating cases] was to err on the side of generosity," explains Dao, adding that he's never worried much about recommending a case in which the client turns out to be guilty – something that does happen. "The part that keeps you up at night is if you don't recommend a case, you're never going to know [if someone is innocent or not]."

Passionately disturbed by what he sees as unfairness in the justice system – such as racism and coerced confessions – Dao is committed to making one thing in these prisoners' lives fair: the evaluation of their applications. He will not let the pressure of thousands of cases push him to be indifferent, nor will he be driven by emotion to dwell on a case that doesn't meet the Innocence Project's narrow mandate.

But people like Marvin Anderson complicate that detachment. Convicted in 1982 at age 18 of raping and sodomizing a young white woman, Mr. Anderson, who is black, was sentenced to 210 years in a Virginia prison. Six years into his sentence, another man confessed to the crime. But because the crime-scene evidence had been destroyed, Anderson's quest to clear his name seemed lost. Through the perseverance of a law student at the Innocence Project, forgotten samples of evidence were found in a lab technician's notebook, and Anderson was exonerated in 2002.

Dao was invited to the ceremony at the Virginia governor's mansion. He'd been wary until then of meeting exonerees – worried that having his heartstrings plucked would cloud his objectivity. In Virginia, that changed. "His family just enveloped us – I think I met 80 people that day who claimed to be his cousin," recalls Dao, who saw Anderson's motorcycle and asked for a ride. And so a bit of burnt rubber heralded Dao's first of numerous friendships with exonerees.

"It's easier to process the objective parts of this work when you're just focusing on whether they meet the criteria or not," he explains. "But that factors into how you treat these people on the phone – just as units."

Dao "has a certain inflexibility in his commitment to making the process fair," admits Potkin and other colleagues who see him as a bulldog who won't back down. "While that sometimes can be frustrating to people ... everyone recognizes what it's about and respects where it's coming from."

But as he's evolved from solo warrior to head honcho in a department of seven, Dao has taken on an almost parental thoughtfulness about his role: "When I first started working here, the main thing that kept me going was anger. But that went away – it has to. This department is tasked with dealing with the humanity of what we do ... but also with getting to as many people as possible. And anger doesn't help you keep that balance."

But the No. 1 thing that keeps his staff plowing through transcripts of heinous crimes and forging through countless judicial roadblocks is the exonerations: bittersweet proof that their work is both imperative and powerful. Using the cases of innocence to "show why these people went to prison in the first place shines light" on the justice system, he says.

Those freed by that light can testify to its effectiveness.

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In Big Easy, slow headway against crime

from the August 07, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0807/p01s02-usju.html

More murders are being solved and convictions won. But concerned residents wonder if the city can sustain inroads in the face of rampant violence.

By Patrik Jonsson Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

NEW ORLEANS

In the two years since hurricane Katrina soaked the Big Easy, the murder rate has soared, and street justice has prevailed over the notoriously ineffective halls of justice.

But there are signs now that this city, famous for its laissez-faire lethargy and laid-back detectives, is gaining some ground against a tide of criminality that residents say threatens to sweep away the promise of recovery. From Coronado Heights to Lakeview, hope is returning that "the battle for New Orleans," as residents call it, is winnable – on the streets and inside the city's corruption-tinged criminal justice system.

Reforms in the squad room and the courtroom have lifted the rate of solved murders here from 16 percent to 42 percent since January. Moreover, a new violent-crime unit has won convictions in 19 of 20 cases since April. It's a dramatic turnaround that may indicate an abrupt awakening to the need to check crime at this particular juncture in city history.

"We're in a brave new world here. It's the wild, wild West, and a circumstance that very, very few cities have ever been through," says Stella Baty Landis, an anticrime activist and owner of Sound Cafe in the Marigny neighborhood. "Right now we have some very positive developments happening, but it's unclear whether we'll be in a position to sustain them."

The picture from the "Sliver on the River" still looks grim. This year the city's murder rate is on track to top 100 for every 100,000 residents, more than 11 times the national average. The latest crime wave mirrors the dark days of the late 1980s' crack epidemic and marks New Orleans as the city with the sharpest spike in violent crimes in the US over the past year. A murder suspect in nearby Houston is five times more likely to get caught and be put on trial than one in New Orleans.

The roots of the crime wave can be linked to both social and institutional breakdowns that worsened after, but were not necessarily created by, the storm, says Jim Bernazzani, FBI Special Agent in Charge for New Orleans.

"This [criminal] segment of society, primarily African-American males, are products of an education system that didn't educate, a state judicial system that failed to mete out consequence for criminal activity, and an economic landscape devoid of meaningful jobs," says Mr. Bernazzani.

A citywide crime summit last year failed to bring about change, giving way to bureaucratic infighting and one-upmanship that has long defined New Orleans politics.

The blame game flared to new heights last month after the dismissal of two cases that had sparked major marches and protests: the shooting of five teenagers last summer and the murder of a popular jazz drummer early this year.
In the case of the slain teenagers, District Attorney Eddie Jordan claimed that a key witness had disappeared. The next day, at a press conference, Police Superintendent Warren Riley produced the witness in question.

This past winter, residents were reminded of the corruption within the city's police department when seven police officers were indicted on murder charges for a shooting on the Danziger Bridge in the wake of Katrina. The city already has two of its former police officers on death row – both for plotting murders on the job.

"All the old problems have resurfaced," says Marc Morial, a former New Orleans mayor. He led many reforms in the 1990s, which helped to cut the murder rate by 60 percent.

Yet for the first time in the city's history a major civic reform movement is taking shape. Residents have been emboldened by the possibility of rebuilding a new kind of New Orleans, but are also concerned about the potential for anarchy in the city, says New Orleans native Fred Smith, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Businessmen, homeowners, and clergy have joined forces not just to take part in marches, but also to keep pressure on city leaders. "The community is ... realizing that if we don't make a change we don't survive as a city," says Greg Rusovich, chairman of the New Orleans Crime Coalition.

A citizen-led push to hire five top homicide prosecutors and raise their pay from $60,000 to $80,000 has helped the Violent Crime Unit to squeeze the city's worst criminals.

A new volunteer jury-watch committee is working to make the judicial system more transparent, and new "witness cards" that offer residents the opportunity to give anonymous tips have increased calls from a few a week to dozens a day.

And public pressure resulted in the resignation of a bond judge, who was known for releasing violent criminals without hearings. Also helpful is the reopening in May of the city's crime lab, which was destroyed in the flood.
The FBI is lending nine extra agents with homicide experience to the NOPD until September, having racked up a series of major arrests. Last month, a new cooperative unit began busting crack houses at midday to shake up the local crime syndicates.

Police Superintendent Riley is also poised to approve much of a new policing plan that focuses on a return to community policing, using technology to pinpoint high-crime areas, and focusing patrols during times of the night when most crimes are committed.

Criminologist Peter Scharf of Texas State University says reforming the NOPD, which he calls a nest of grudges and vendettas, is key to cutting crime.

Despite its rough reputation, Mr. Morial says, the NOPD has come a long way.

Since Katrina, the NOPD has jettisoned policies such as residency requirements for officers and no longer bans lateral hires that bring in higher-ranking officers at higher pay grades. Pay, too, has increased.

Officer Tracie Savalas says a core group of police has leveraged the solidarity brought about by the storm into a mission to protect the city.

Keeping the recovery and crime wave in perspective is essential, she says. "Don't give false hope that we're going to rebuild something that's going to be second only to Heaven, USA. That's not reality."

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Farm boom undercuts push for new subsidy package

A House panel cut subsidies for wealthy farmers Thursday. Will Congress slash even deeper?

from the July 24, 2007 edition

Genoa, Ill. - On a warm July afternoon, with the Illinois sun glinting off a field of lush green corn, Joel Gerlt steps between the rows and disappears.

"This is really exceptional," he says, standing among stalks that tower above him and are not done growing. "I've never seen it this high at this time of year."

For Mr. Gerlt and many other Midwestern farmers, these are exceptional times indeed. Prices are high. The national appetite for corn seems insatiable. At the same time, farmers' good fortune has thrust them into the center of a fierce debate in Washington over how much help they deserve from US taxpayers.

As Congress enters the late stages of crafting a new farm bill, high prices for many commodities have made it harder than ever to defend crop subsidies that pay farmers billions of dollars a year, even in good years. At the same time, a growing chorus of voices is calling for a shift to other priorities, including rural development, aid to fruit and vegetable growers, food stamps, biofuel programs, and especially conservation.

Under those twin pressures, the House Agriculture Committee last week approved a five-year measure eliminating subsidies for farmers with $1 million or more in adjusted gross income. But it also increased supports for some crops and introduced new ones for others. The full House could take up the bill this week.

Agriculture groups "are strong enough now, but smart people among the commodity groups say all the time that they know it's a rear-guard battle and that we have to change something," says Ferd Hoefner, policy director for the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, an umbrella organization in Washington, D.C. "Production subsidies are losing public support."

Conservation is a likely beneficiary of change. For example, the House committee bill boosts land-conservation programs and wetlands protection.

US farm policy has already been tilting toward conservation for two decades. Earlier programs focused on removing marginal land from cultivation. But the last farm bill, passed in 2002, made an unprecedented commitment to farmers who use or wish to adopt environmentally friendly practices on their land.

Conservation programs are popular in farm country, where farmers are applying to carry out projects in far greater numbers than there's money to fund them. Proponents say the programs should be expanded to meet the demand. They also say that the expansion of corn acreage – up 19 percent to 95 million acres, the highest since 1944 – has made conservation more critical than ever. Corn requires massive quantities of fertilizer and other farm chemicals and is blamed for widespread soil degradation and water pollution.

Proponents also point out that "green payments," which are unrelated to production, are permissible under international trade rules. Current crop subsidies have been repeatedly challenged by the World Trade Organization.

In theory, few groups oppose spending more on conservation. But their support often hinges on where the funding will come from. One of the most obvious places is crop payments, which, after food stamps, consume the largest share of farm bill spending, and which many critics say is money wasted.

"A lot of people think that farm programs encourage production, lower food costs, and are saviors of agriculture," says Bruce Babcock, an economist and director of the Center for Agriculture and Rural Development at Iowa State University. "The facts are far different." Mr. Babcock says his research into corn, soybean, and wheat production from 2002 to 2005 suggests that crop payments have little effect on how much farmers grow. Only 43 percent of producers receive farm-program payments, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) says, and most of them receive less than $10,000 a year.

Others argue that crop subsidies hurt rural communities by driving up land prices, discouraging new farmers, and promoting the consolidation of farms into ever larger operations.

But crop subsidies are popular in farm country, especially among farmers in the corn-producing states of the Midwest, who receive a greater share of farm payments than producers in any other region. In 2005 they received 42 percent of total crop payments and 31 percent of conservation payments, the USDA says. One type of subsidy – direct payments – puts money in farmers' pockets no matter how much they grow or what price their crop fetches. Others pay farmers when prices fall below a certain level. Farmers are loath to give these up, especially the subsidies that tide them over in bad years.

"Farmers need a safety net for economics beyond their control," says Tom Buis, president of the National Farmers Union, the country's second-largest farmer organization. "They don't need a safety net in years with high prices."

For the most part, Mr. Gerlt agrees. Between 1996 and 2005, his 1,000-acre operation received corn and soybean subsidies ranging from $16,700 to $87,600 a year. Some of the money came in the form of direct payments that the government paid in years when high prices meant he hardly needed them.

Last year, he also began earning a modest conservation payment – about $20,000 – under a new federal program that rewards farmers and ranchers for using methods that protect the water and soil and encourage wildlife. Gerlt also took advantage of financial incentives to make additional improvements this season, such as planting strips of native grass to attract upland game birds and switching to a less virulent weed killer.

While Gerlt acknowledges that crop subsidies in good years are "hard to understand," he can't imagine giving them up altogether. In years when crop prices fall below what it costs to grow the crop, the math doesn't work out without government help, he says. "I don't know how we can survive without it."

There's no dearth of proposals in Washington. The House Agriculture Committee has assembled a bill that would slightly increase conservation spending but leaves crop subsidies intact. Rep. Ron Kind (D) of Wisconsin champions an alternative that would gradually replace crop subsidies with "risk management accounts" – funds held in a tax-exempt account like an IRA that farmers could draw on during bad years. Other groups favor more modest changes, such as stricter limits on subsidies.

At the moment, the moderate approach seems to be gaining momentum. Farm policy is notoriously difficult to change, in part because of resistance from powerful farm and commodity interests. Democrats, who cling to a narrow majority, will tread carefully for fear of losing seats in farming areas. But reformers say a broader coalition of interests is on their side this year.
"Market conditions are ripe for reform," Mr. Kind says.

Church giving turns digital

from the August 01, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0801/p13s02-lire.html

To keep up with the times, houses of worship offer electronic payment options.

By Jane Lampman Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

The earliest worshippers brought their gifts to the altar from the tangible fruits of their labor – be it crops, sheep, or cattle. Coins came later, then paper money, followed by checks. Now, as society moves toward an era of "digital money," houses of worship are scurrying to keep pace with the times.

The collection plate won't disappear any time soon, but many churches have begun offering electronic-giving options, including automatic deductions from bank accounts and payment by credit or debit card. A few are even experimenting with a "giving kiosk" in the lobby.

This shift away from just dropping cash into the weekly collection got an extra nudge this year from the Internal Revenue Service, which is mandating receipts for charitable tax deductions.

For houses of worship, the main impetus toward electronic giving has been to respond to churchgoers' changing lifestyles. But churches themselves are benefiting from the regularized giving and the often increased contributions that come with expanded giving options.

In today's era of plastic, fewer and fewer people, particularly in younger generations, are carrying cash or checkbooks. Some live by their debit cards.

"A lot of people, like me, are moving to 'paperless cash,' " says Nate Gibson, chief financial officer at Ginghamsburg (United Methodist) Church in Tipp City, Ohio. "It's a way to be of service to our people who prefer that method of payment." And he wouldn't be surprised, he adds, "if 20 years from now we had tap-swipe cards on the offering basket."

Electronic funds transfer (EFT) has been offered by churches for several years, allowing members to automatically debit their checking or savings account weekly, twice a month, or monthly. Then an electronic-payment firm handles the transactions for a church.

Vanco Services in Minnetonka, Minn., began serving churches in 1997, and now has more than 8,500 in 29 denominations in its program. "In a normal week, we have 40 to 50 churches signing up," says Len Theide, Vanco's vice president for corporate sales.

Both churches and churchgoers are pleased with the way automated giving strengthens stewardship, he says. Not only does it bring in donations on a consistent basis, even when people are on vacation or business travel, but it also can help the faithful fulfill annual pledges, a sometimes-challenging task for families with children or unplanned expenses.

"One woman in my own church told me that after seven years, this was the first year they'd made their pledge – after signing up for electronic debit," he says.

Religious institutions can also see a significant increase in donations. According to Msgr. Francis Kelley of Sacred Heart Parish in Roslindale, Mass., signing on to the program of ParishPay (a firm serving Catholic parishes) increased contributions by 75 percent from the parishioners who switched to electronic giving.

Some churches have begun offering credit- and debit-card payments. But use of credit cards has stirred controversy, given the country's massive credit-card debt.

"At first there was a lot of concern that churches were helping people get into greater debt," Mr. Thiede says. "I'm not sure that's gone away totally, but more churches are saying they'll do everything to encourage people to be financially responsible, but leave the decision to them."

Still, some steer clear of the credit-card option. At Christ's Church of the Valley in Phoenix, they've had automated giving for close to three years and make it available online, but they don't take credit cards.

"We went through a series on 'Getting Out of Debt,' and ... talked about getting rid of credit cards," explains Jon Edmiston, the church's director of information technology and communications. "So we didn't want to turn around and say, 'But you can give on your credit card!' "

On the other hand, ParishPay, which went into business in 2001 and serves 8 million parishioners, has found credit-card payments very popular.

"After three years, we surveyed 25,000 families using our service, and 55 percent used a credit card, while 45 percent gave through their bank account," says Tim Dockery, ParishPay's president.

They also found that 80 percent of those paying by credit card would not have signed up if the only option were debiting their bank account. They liked the added security, flexibility – and getting affinity points or frequent flier miles.

That kind of response worries some people, who say automated methods take away from giving as a part of worship, or turn it into a passive experience.

Mr. Dockery disagrees. "In the ideal world, our gift back to God is a thoughtful, prayer-filled response of generosity for what God has given us," he says. "But when the plate gets passed in most churches, I see a fumbling of wallets, a scramble in purses.... Our program gives people the ability to prayerfully decide what they want to give on a monthly basis and build discipline into their budget."

Yet there is the potential of being inspired to give during a service, or of responding to a new mission a church may undertake.

"People tend to give when they are ... thinking about the Lord's work," says the Rev. Marty Baker, founding pastor of Stevens Creek Church in Augusta, Ga.

About five years ago, Dr. Baker pondered how to enable members to donate electronically while at church. When a search turned up no options, he created a "giving kiosk" that features a PIN-secure pad like those at gas stations. Church members gave $100,000 via the kiosk the first year, and $200,000 the second (in 2006). "That's about 20 to 25 percent of our total income," he says.

The experience sparked interest beyond his own church, and Baker formed SecureGive to make the capability available to other churches and nonprofits. The giving kiosks will be in 34 other locations by the end of August.

Some people worry that the use of such technology commercializes what should be a sacred responsibility. But Baker says it's the motive that counts.

"The gift still comes from the heart," he adds. "This is just ... our financial system growing."

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Dogfighting case triggers public outrage

Why has the case resonated so strongly with the American public?

By Patrik Jonsson Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor from the July 27, 2007 edition

Atlanta - ESPN and the sports pages routinely cover the bad behaviors of athletes, but the dogfighting charges against superstar quarterback Michael Vick have struck a different chord with Americans.

Since a US attorney in Virginia indicted Mr. Vick 10 days ago for conspiring to "pit" dogs against one another, the case has triggered animal rights protests, talk show laments, and kitchen table disgust.

On Monday, the NFL ordered the the fleet-footed and hugely popular Atlanta Falcons franchise man barred from training camp while it conducts its own investigation.

The case, experts say, has forced Americans to confront the history of dogfighting, their own feelings on the nature of human primacy over animals, and even the covert appeal of blood sport.

The first US dogfighting bans were put in place in the 1830s. Today, it's a felony in all but two states – Idaho and Montana – to promote the "sport." Still, the Humane Society of the United States estimates that approximately 40,000 high-stakes dog fighters operate in the US, and perhaps as many as 100,000 amateur "street fighters" who fight for smaller stakes often simply for cachet.

According to the indictment, Vick and three compatriots, under the guise of Bad Newz Kennels, carried out a professional breeding and training operation out of his Surry County home. There, investigators say they found a variety of paraphernalia and evidence that dogs not fit to fight were killed by electrocution, hanging, shooting, and pummeling, often in front of a crowd.

"I think this case awakens us and frightens us," says Tom Regan, the noted animal rights philosopher at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. "We realize that success, including financial success and being worshiped by many, is no barrier against being pulled to this kind of enjoyment of cruelty. It's much closer than we think."

Of 622 Atlantans polled by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week, 65 percent wanted Vick gone. (Meanwhile, 97 percent of people had heard about the case, according to the AJC poll.)

Judging by the broad condemnation of the alleged acts, many Americans understand that breeding and training dogs to fight is a "perversion" of nature, says Eric Sakach, who spent nearly 20 years infiltrating clandestine dog and cockfights and is now the director of Western operations of the Humane Society in Sacramento, Calif. "Whereas dogs have always been man's best friend, this is how we betray them," he says.

Much of dogfighting's recent popularity has been fueled by athletes and music stars. In 2005, NBA player Qyntel Woods and NFL player LeShon Johnson, in separate incidents, pleaded guilty to animal cruelty charges related to dogfighting.

Some hip-hop artists, including Jay-Z and DMX, have glommed onto dogfighting as an image of street credibility.

The idea that dogs can convey a sense of "power that you control" appeals to men who feel marginalized by society, says Brian Luke, author of the newly released book, "Brutal: Manhood and the Exploitation of Animals." "Why is this the kind of case where we can really totally feel all of our compassion for animals and express outrage?" asks Mr. Luke. "Part of the reason is that it's associated with the working class, and now black men, and that makes it unacceptable."

Terry Fields of Atlanta, who considers himself a fan of Vick, says that dogfighting is a bad idea. On the other hand, he says, "these kinds of dogs pull on the chain to fight."

But he questions whether the charges are as bad as allegedly being involved in killing a man, which Baltimore Ravens star Ray Lewis was charged with before pleading guilty to a misdemeanor, or allegedly raping a woman, a charge NBA star Kobe Bryant faced before the alleged victim refused to testify. The NFL and NBA did not take action against the players in those cases.

The charges and the punishment against Vick are unjust, Mr. Fields says. "But there's a lot of dog lovers out there."

No matter how the case against the quarterback plays out in the courts and backrooms of the NFL, the national debate on dogfighting is likely to have an impact. No longer is it acceptable, Mr. Kacach says, for rural lawmakers in particular to protect animal-fighting constituencies. Louisiana will begin enforcing a new cockfighting law in 2008. Georgia, the only state that hasn't outlawed the act of attending a fight, is likely to pass a spectator law this year.

"We're realizing that as long as we've got animals being treated in violent, horrible ways, it spills over into human activity," says David Nibert, a sociologist at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. "It's the same social fabric, all entangled."

GOP field appears to narrow

from the July 24, 2007 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0724/p01s04-uspo.html

Some analysts are saying the race could come down to a two-man contest between former senator Fred Thompson and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

By Linda Feldmann Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

Washington

He's hiring staff, raising money, making public appearances, and doing nicely in the polls – all without announcing even an exploratory committee for his presidential campaign.

In fact, Fred Thompson might consider never formally entering the 2008 presidential sweepstakes, he's doing so well – or at least wait "until after he's wrapped up the [Republican] nomination," quips pundit Stu Rothenberg.

But in the end, the former senator from Tennessee, lawyer/lobbyist, and TV actor does, by many press accounts, plan to announce in early September that he is running for president; he may formalize an "exploratory" phase before then. One point is already clear: GOP nomination race 2.0 has begun.

"It's down to three [candidates]. Some would say 2-1/2. I would say three," says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

The half-candidate would be former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who still leads in national polls, but whose numbers have been falling steadily for several months – in direct proportion to the steady, upward trajectory of Mr. Thompson's, according to Pollster.com.

The campaign of Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona, once seen as the GOP heir apparent, is nearly bankrupt, and with Thompson entering the race, that makes his money chase all the more difficult. Mr. Giuliani could remain strong if there's continued national focus on terrorism – and especially if the US is attacked again before the primaries. But failing that, the race may well boil down to Thompson and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, analysts say.

Despite Giuliani's longstanding position at the top of the GOP heap in national 2008 presidential polls, political experts have attributed that lead to name recognition. As conservative base voters have learned about Giuliani's liberal positions on abortion and gay rights, the former mayor's overall support has declined.

But more important than national polls are the early nomination states – Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida. Mr. Romney is strong in the first three, but mired at 4 percent in South Carolina in the latest poll, conducted by CNN July 16-18. In Florida, Romney is at 9 percent and 12 percent, in the latest polls taken there – the first by Quinnipiac University and the second by American Research Group.

Giuliani still leads in both Southern states, but the formal entrance of Thompson into the race could change that dramatically. Thompson is expected to play especially well on his Southern home turf, where his accent, mainstream religious affiliation (Church of Christ), and consistent conservative voting record as a senator contrast with Romney's Northern sensibility, Mormon faith, and recent conversion to conservative social views.

The wild card is whether Thompson will live up to his advance hype. But going in, he enjoys enormous goodwill from the core of the Republican Party. Religious conservatives have shrugged at evidence that Thompson lobbied on behalf of an abortion-rights group in the early 1990s.

People will say, "Well, he's a lawyer, he's got to represent his clients," says Richard Land, a top official of the Southern Baptist Convention. "His statements on life have been as strong as they possibly can be."

Thompson could also have been hurt among religious conservatives for his initial support for campaign finance reform. Senator McCain earns conservative enmity for being the measure's chief Republican sponsor, but Thompson has since called the reform a mistake, and so conservatives give him a pass there as well.

"He's the only one that everyone in the party can live with," says John Geer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. "Romney will get some people upset; Giuliani will get some people upset. Thompson doesn't face that. That's his big asset."

In delaying the formal announcement, originally expected earlier this month, Thompson and his team are "playing it safe and just making sure they're ready," says Mr. Geer. The GOP field's underperformance in fundraising, as compared with the Democratic field, shows that Republicans are sitting on their wallets and waiting to be inspired by a candidate. Thompson is expected to hold a major fundraiser in Washington later this month, an event that will demonstrate just how strong he can be in the crucial "money primary."

The last presidential candidate to enter a race late and in response to a draft movement was Gen. Wesley Clark (D) of Arkansas, in 2004. In his case, the advance hype proved greater than the reality of his campaigning skill. But General Clark had never run for office before. Thompson has proven skill at politics, with his ambling, Southern manner and actor's touch.

The one hole in Thompson's résumé is his lack of demonstrated executive ability. But, says Mr. Land, "if he is able to put together a campaign that can successfully compete, then he will fill in that hole."

One advantage to holding off on his announcement may be that it squeezes Newt Gingrich out of the GOP race. The former House speaker has long talked about making a decision on whether to run in late September. If Thompson announces in early September, there may still be enough buzz that there's no room for Mr. Gingrich, suggests Geer.

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