Lauren Karsten

2004-03-17T01:35:00.000-08:00

First State seeks first national park

DOVER, Delaware -- Despite a state slogan that boasts "It's Good to be First," Delaware ranks dead last when it comes to the National Park Service.

Delaware is the only state in the country that does not have a national park, national monument, national historic site or any other unit of the National Park Service. That distinction might come as a surprise to travelers in the mid-Atlantic region who have flocked to the state's beautiful beaches, parks and historic sites for generations.

U.S. Sen. Thomas Carper believes it's time the First State joins the rest of the nation.

"I've pretty much concluded that this is a road that we want to go down," said Carper, D-Delaware. "But I've not concluded to what destination."

Carper's staff conducted a Web-based survey and held a series of workshops across the state last fall to gauge interest in joining the national park system and to receive suggestions about what Delaware has to offer.

The suggestions include an underwater marine park off Cape Henlopen, where a popular state park known for its frequent dolphin-sightings already exists; Fort Delaware on Pea Patch Island; the 353-year-old cobblestoned town of New Castle; and a historic site related to Caesar Rodney, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

At a workshop in Dover, Bonnie Johnson of the Dover Historical Society proposed that The Green, a tiny downtown square laid out by William Penn and lined with historic buildings and government offices, would be a good addition to the national park system.

The Green was where Rodney, the Revolutionary War patriot, began his famous ride to Philadelphia to cast Delaware's vote for independence in 1776. It was also the site of the long-gone Golden Fleece Tavern, where colonists gathered for the historic vote by which Delaware became the first state to ratify the Constitution.

"I understand that the national park comes in all sizes and shapes," Johnson said. "I consider The Green to be ground zero for Delaware's American history."

Proposed sites

James Soles, a retired University of Delaware professor heading a citizens' research committee that will present findings to Carper, said "all of Delaware is ground zero for American history," but agreed with Johnson that size does not matter.

"There are national parks bigger than all of Delaware," Soles noted.

Indeed.

The Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska covers more than 13 million acres, enough to accommodate a dozen Delawares.

Conversely, the Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial in Philadelphia covers a scant .02 acres, making The Green a virtual behemoth.

Jane Hovington, head of Georgetown's volunteer parks and recreation group, offered up a 52-acre tract currently designated as a site for a local park.

Hovington noted that part of the Underground Railroad went through Georgetown, which also is home to Return Day, a ritual, election-year burying of the hatchet by newly elected officials and their vanquished opponents.

"It would be a perfect spot for a national park," she said.

A front-runner among Delaware's possibilities is Fort Delaware, site of an infamous prison camp where thousands of Confederate soldiers died during the Civil War.

Such a site would not be out of line in the National Park Service, which includes the Andersonville prison camp in Georgia, where more than 12,000 Union soldiers died, as a National Historic Site.

"All history isn't pretty," said Soles, who noted that every fort in Delaware has been nominated by citizens as a possible federal park site.

One site that will not be on any list of finalists is the Great Cypress Swamp in Sussex County. Locals, apparently concerned about the potential for hordes of visitors, were upset in the 1980s when Sen. Joseph Biden, at the request of environmentalists, proposed a feasibility study for including the swamp in the National Park Service system.

"I told people when we kicked this off that the one place we will not be considering as a national park site is the Great Cypress Swamp," Carper said. "We don't want to get bogged down there."

Tough criteria
The National Park System consists of 387 units in more than a dozen categories, including parks, battlefields, parkways, monuments, preserves, historic sites, memorials, cemeteries, recreation areas, rivers and seashores.

The park service has no role in the approval of an addition to the system, a decision that is made by Congress. It does, however, establish criteria for national significance, suitability, feasibility and management alternatives.

"I don't think it's going to be an easy task to meet the National Park Service's requirements," Soles said. "You have to be able to make a very compelling case."

The process of getting a new NPS site approved and built often takes years. Government officials say the record for the quickest site is likely the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania, which was dedicated September 24, 2002, just over a year after a hijacked airliner plowed into the ground during the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Gerry Gaumer, an NPS spokesman in Washington, said the ability of lawmakers to persuade their colleagues in Congress can be a key factor in getting a site approved.

"A lot of it has to do with how good your congressional representatives are, how good a package you put together," he said. "There's a lot more to it than just a good idea."

Carper said he's up to the challenge and hopes to introduce legislation in the near future.

"With a really exciting concept that I and other Delawareans can get juiced up about ... I'm prepared to give this issue a good deal of my time and energy," he said.

Even if the political battle is won, money is an issue.

Gaumer noted that several sites approved by Congress have yet to be included in the NPS system because land acquisition and private funding of other capital needs are incomplete. Those sites include Ronald Reagan's boyhood home in Illinois, memorials to Dwight Eisenhower, Martin Luther King Jr. and the John Adams family in Washington, and the Sand Creek Massacre site in Colorado.

Fortunately, perhaps, for a small state such as Delaware, potential visitation is not a factor for addition of a unit to the National Park Service.

While the Blue Ridge Parkway received more than 21 million visitors in 2002, the Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve, a volcanic crater in the Aleutian Mountains of Alaska, welcomed a grand total of 241 visitors.

2004-03-10T00:39:00.000-08:00

Tenet defends Iraq intelligence

WASHINGTON -- CIA chief George Tenet said Tuesday he does not believe the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify war in Iraq but declined to say whether he tried to cool U.S. officials' rhetoric about the now-disputed claim Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

"I'm not going to sit here today and tell you what my interaction was ... and what I did and didn't do, except that you have to have confidence to know that when I believed that somebody was misconstruing intelligence, I said something about it," Tenet told a congressional hearing. "I don't stand up publicly and do it."

The CIA director's comments came at the end of an exchange in which Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., asked whether Tenet privately challenged President Bush and others -- and why he didn't speak up publicly -- when officials portrayed the threat from Saddam Hussein as more urgent than CIA reports suggested.

"I do the intelligence ... they take the intelligence and assess the risk and make a policy judgment," Tenet said.

Kennedy cited several occasions when officials referred to an urgent threat, the possibility of a nuclear attack and other "war monger" descriptions of weapons programs it now appears Saddam didn't have.

"If you're saying there was no immediate threat and you hear ... the president, vice president, secretary of defense using that superheated rhetoric, we have to ask what is your responsibility," Kennedy said.

Asked specifically whether he thinks policy makers misrepresented the intelligence facts to justify the war, Tenet said: "No sir, I don't."

Tenet said that besides key intelligence findings, his agency also believed that Saddam made a continuing effort to deceive the world about this weapons and that it was possible he could surprise them with something.

2004-03-03T03:07:00.000-08:00

Raintree sees downpour of sequels

(Variety) SINGAPORE MediaCorp's local studio Raintree Pictures anticipates a prosperous New Year - with breakeven in sight and a slate of new movies.

"Our 2003 financial year ends in March so we're expecting to break even by then," says CEO Daniel Yun.

Raintree is looking forward to upcoming releases including the Jack Neo-helmed "Money Still No Enough" slated for June. Pic is sequel to the highest-grossing local movie, 1998's "Money No Enough" (also helmed by Neo), which reaped $3.4 million.

Neo's previous Raintree successes also include 2003's Golden Horse Award-winning "Home Run" ($1.5 million) and 2002's "I Not Stupid" ($2.2 million) - the studio's most successful export to date, enjoying a five-month run in Hong Kong.

Yun says co-productions with markets like Hong Kong and China are essential to the studio's growth beyond Singapore. "The biggest challenge on our agenda is to give our artists pan-regional exposure," he says.

Slated for March release is "The Eye 2," sequel to the successful co-production with Hong Kong's Applause Pictures. Midyear sees "1318," a Chinese-lingo co-production with Hong Kong's Springtime Pictures' Clifton Koh. In the second half of 2004, Raintree will release horror pic "The Void Deck Trilogy," a co-production with Celestial, helmed by Eric Khoo.

And 2005 will see Frank Saperstein-helmed animated feature "Song to the Dawn," the first of a 10 movie funding deal with government body Media Development Authority.

2004-02-25T05:02:00.000-08:00

Kerry Takes 3 States Before Super Tuesday

Fresh from three more easy victories in the Democratic presidential race, John Kerry looked to a fight with President Bush over jobs lost to foreign countries.

Kerry defeated Sen. John Edwards by large margins Tuesday in Utah and Idaho, and also won in Hawaii, where Edwards ran third. That gave Kerry 18 wins in 20 contests. The two leading candidates bypassed the three states to focus on the huge delegate prizes at stake when 10 states vote next week on Super Tuesday.

Two weeks after the president's chief economic adviser described the shipping of American jobs abroad as "just a new way of doing international trade," Kerry was announcing his plan to address that situation.

Although Kerry frequently tells audiences that no president can stop companies from leaving the country, the Massachusetts senator said he will require companies that ship jobs offshore to disclose their plans to the government.

"Companies will no longer be able to surprise their workers with a pink slip instead of a paycheck — they will be required to give workers three months notice if their jobs are being exported offshore," Kerry said in a speech prepared for delivery Wednesday in Toledo, where he also was picking up an endorsement from former astronaut and retired Sen. John Glenn.

Kerry said that during the three years Bush has been in office, 270,000 workers have lost their jobs in Ohio, site of one of the 10 nominating contests on Super Tuesday. He is looking for a decisive victory that day to bring an end to the campaign of his last remaining major rival, Edwards.

Kerry was spending Wednesday in Ohio and Minnesota, and was to launch a new campaign ad in the Buckeye State in which he describes Bush's economic policy as "an astonishing failure" and promises to protect U.S. jobs. The commercial, which also was to run in upstate New York, was meant to soften criticism of Kerry's vote for a free-trade pact as he campaigns in states that have been hit hard by job losses.

Edwards was campaigning across California.

Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich finished in single digits in Idaho and Utah, but ran second in Hawaii.

Counting returns from Tuesday's contests, Kerry's lead in the Democratic delegate chase swelled to 663 in the Associated Press tally, with Edwards at 199, Al Sharpton 16 and Kucinich eight. Nomination requires 2,162 delegates.

A total of 61 pledged delegates were at stake in the night's races. Of the longshot hopefuls, Sharpton failed to win any delegates, though Kucinich finally pocketed his first pledged delegates, winning six in Hawaii.

His options running short, Edwards looked to Georgia, Ohio and upstate portions of New York to slow Kerry's rush toward the nomination.

The North Carolina senator has been appealing to voters in communities that have suffered job losses by criticizing Kerry's support for free trade. But both Democratic candidates have put the bulk of the blame for unemployment on Bush.

In his speech, Kerry says Bush lavished special favors on corporations while workers lost their jobs, their pensions and their retirement savings.

"Here's what I'm going to tell our corporate leaders: We will give you all the help you need to create new jobs and strengthen our economy," Kerry said. "But if I'm president our government won't provide a single reward for shipping our jobs overseas, or exploiting the tax code to go to Bermuda to avoid paying taxes while sticking the American people with the bill."

Kerry said he will require companies that plan to outsource jobs overseas to inform the affected workers, the Labor Department, state agencies responsible for helping laid off employees and local government officials. The Labor Department would be required to compile statistics of jobs sent offshore and report them on an annual basis to Congress.

Kerry's speech is part of the beginning of a possible general election fight between the Democratic front-runner and the incumbent president. Bush opened his case against Kerry this week in his most partisan remarks of the campaign, although Edwards reminded the president that the race for the Democratic nomination is not over.

"Not so fast, George Bush," Edwards said Tuesday. "You don't get to decide who our nominee is."

2004-02-20T00:18:00.000-08:00

Cecil Beaton's enduring glamour

Cecil Beaton invented celebrity photography, and the photographer as celebrity.

The British portraitist, born 100 years ago, shot the icons of five decades -- Garbo, Dietrich, Monroe -- and became as famous as his subjects: as an artist, designer, dandy, wit and social chameleon.

You could argue that subsequent celebrity snappers, from David Bailey to Mario Testino, owe him their successful careers.

"The way he started was to make himself famous, so people wanted to be photographed by him," said Terence Pepper, curator of a Beaton retrospective that opened February 5 at the National Portrait Gallery in London. "He loved putting himself in a mirror, in a corner of the picture. He was very interested in reflected glory."

The centenary of his birth provides a chance to reassess the work of Beaton, who died at 76 in 1980. Pepper's show is the first major retrospective in 35 years, while Sotheby's auction house, which owns Beaton's archive, is mounting an exhibition at its London showrooms this month.

The 150 pictures in the Portrait Gallery show are a cavalcade of celebrity, from Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich to Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn and Mick Jagger.

The Queen Mother Elizabeth is there, swathed in tulle in a grand room at Buckingham Palace; so is one of her nemeses, American divorcee Wallis Simpson, who brought down, then married, King Edward VIII.

Beaton began his career photographing hedonistic bright young things in the 1920s, including Tallulah Bankhead and the eccentric Sitwell siblings. He remained in a rarefied world of glamour and celebrity for the next 50 years, working for Vogue, Vanity Fair and other glossy publications.

He was commissioned by Britain's royal family in 1939 and became their favorite photographer, documenting the king, queen and young Princess Elizabeth -- now Queen Elizabeth II -- as they did their bit on the home front during World War II.

He shot Hollywood royalty, too, as well as artists, including Salvador Dali and Lucien Freud, and such writers as T.S. Eliot, Jean-Paul Sartre and Gertrude Stein.

Iconic images

A middle-class boy who won an entry to high society through hard work and ceaseless networking, Beaton liked to cast himself as the ultimate amateur.

"My lack of scientific ability ... was outweighed by my enthusiasm," he once wrote. Besides his photography, he was a not very successful writer, and an extremely successful illustrator and costume designer for plays and films, including "My Fair Lady" and "Gigi."

"He ranked photography very low down in his achievements, but it was what he was good at," Pepper said.

Beaton was not purely a celebrity photographer; he shot airmen, munitions workers and child evacuees, and traveled to Egypt, India and China for the British government during World War II. Even his war work includes many images of the rich and famous, including the Shah of Iran and 7-year-old King Faisal II of Iraq.

And Beaton's most famous wartime image -- a heart-tugging shot of a 3-year-old British child injured by German bombs which adorned the cover of Life magazine in 1940 -- is more sentimental than gritty.

Glitz and glamour were his true metier. Baubles and shiny surfaces abound in the early work on display at the Portrait Gallery, giving way to ultrachic classicism, and even formal restraint, as seen later in his career.

Above all, Beaton had an eye for capturing beauty and for making most unlikely people look sensuous and sensitive. The Portrait Gallery show offers a sultry John Wayne and a hunky Yul Brynner.

Beaton's style -- glossy, elegant, artfully abstract -- influenced many subsequent photographers of fame.

"It's not warts and all," Pepper said. "They're great compositions. He's collaborated with (his subjects) to create the iconic image. ... He was good at helping people put on a show."

He had a dark side, too. Beaton was fired by Vogue in 1938 after including tiny anti-Semitic doodles on an illustration for the magazine, an incident he never fully explained. His diaries, recently published in full, reveal his often wildly unflattering opinions of his subjects.

Nonetheless, Pepper said, "He had the professionalism to make a good picture. He loathed Elizabeth Taylor, but he made her look wonderful."

Some of Beaton's images are iconic -- Monroe, sleepy-eyed and reclining, or Winston Churchill with his cigar and pugnacious scowl. And he had an eye for the zeitgeist and changing fashions. Of Hepburn he wrote, "Nobody ever looked like her before World War II; yet we recognized the rightness of this appearance in relation to our historical needs."

"Cecil Beaton: Portraits" is on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London until May 31. "Beaton at Large" is at Sotheby's in London February 10-20. The Beaton show moves to the Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg, Germany from March 11-June 6, 2005.

2004-01-27T03:30:00.000-08:00

Mars probe hits 'scientific jackpot'.

NASA scientists have said they have hit a "scientific jackpot" as Opportunity, the second of two roving US Mars probes, transmitted astonishing images from the Red Planet's surface.

The $820 million mission's scientific director, Steve Squyres, was left gasping for words as Opportunity sent back to Earth pictures of what he described as an "alien landscape".

"I am flabbergasted, I'm astonished, I'm blown away," the 47-year-old scientist said at the National Aeronautic and Space Administration's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

The pictures enlivened scientists who continued working to repair the mission's first robotic probe, Spirit, which started communicating with NASA again on Friday, two days after a worrisome communications breakdown.

Rock outcrop

Opportunity's black-and-white and colour pictures showed that it landed near a rock outcropping that seemed very promising to geologists in the Mars Exploration Rover mission.

"This is the first rock outcrop ever found on Mars," Squyres, a professor at Cornell University in New York state, said in a news conference during which he was visibly excited.

"Opportunity has touched down in a bizarre, alien landscape."

The rock outcropping is scientifically invaluable because, unlike stones that can come from elsewhere, they are historically linked to their location, he said.

To Squyres, who conceived the idea for the mission in 1987, the rover's success is the culmination of 16 years of work.

In 2000, NASA picked him to lead the mission's scientists and to choose the instruments the rovers would need.

"It was exactly what it was in my wildest dream," said Squyres, who heads a group of more than 180 researchers.

Safe landing

Opportunity landed safely on Mars at 0505 GMT on Saturday in a small crater in an area known as the Meridiani Planum, and approaching the nearby rock outcropping will be one of the rover's first objectives.

"We are lucky," said Larry Soderblom, of the US Geological Survey, calling the mission a "scientific jackpot".

"It is difficult to find a place safe enough to land and expecting to find something interesting when you get there," he said.

The Meridiani Planum is a zone of grey hematite, an iron oxide.

Scientists plan to use the robot's instruments to determine whether the grey hematite layer comes from sediments of a former ocean, from volcanic deposits altered by hot water or from other ancient environmental conditions.

Mine of information

"We could spend most of the mission just in this little crater," the mission's scientific director Steve Squyres said at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Unlike the area where Opportunity's twin probe Spirit landed, the rocks in Opportunity's neighbourhood were formed where they lie, giving scientists a chance to try to unravel the planet's geologic history.

Spirit, which landed on 3 January but broke down last week, remains "serious," said its mission chief Pete Theisinger.

"We are kind of on the way to a normal recovery. I think we have a very good chance that we will have a very good rover. Once again, it will take some time to make sure that we have completely characterised the problem."

2004-01-26T02:21:00.000-08:00

DiCaprio's environmentalism.

SANTA MONICA, California (AP) -- Leonardo DiCaprio wants activists to use the Internet to protect the environment.

The 29-year-old actor and conservationist appeared Thursday at the Natural Resources Defense Council's regional headquarters for the unveiling of an environmental museum with Internet-ready computers.

DiCaprio hopes activists will use computers in his new "Leonardo DiCaprio e-Activism Zone" to access information about environmental issues and to send e-mails to public and corporate officials.

"For the thousands of young people who will be visiting the building each year, hopefully it will be the start of a lifetime of environmental activism," DiCaprio said at the opening.

Also on hand were comedian Larry David and his wife Laurie David, who dedicated a museum and gift store known as the David Family Environmental Action Center that houses the computers.