New York Times Upfront articles from February 2005

New York Times Upfront archives from February 2005

A 25-foot-high boulder tumbled onto a highway in Malibu, Calif., during a weekend of relentless rainstorms in early January.(news & Trends)
February 14, 2005... A 25-foot-high boulder tumbled onto a highway in Malibu, Calif., during a weekend of relentless rainstorms in early January. A work crew uncoiled a long yellow fuse for the explosives that would be used to blast it apart and clear the road a...

Lake Chargog Ga What?(Americana)
February 14, 2005... The sprawling lake with its even more sprawling name (we're only going to say it once)--Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg--is not for the tongue-tied. Some folks just call it Lake Webster, after the Massachusetts town where...

Numbers in the news.(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... 23 Average number of hours per week that 8th-grade boys spend playing video games; 8th-grade girls average 12 hours a week. SOURCE: MICHIGAN STATE UNIV. 71% Percentage of teens who say their political views are about the same as their...

'Robo-roach' takes charge.(Science)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Nature has given us so many real cockroaches that it seems quite unnecessary to create artificial ones. But a team of scientists in Belgium has done just that. The purpose of their matchbox-size "robo-roaches" is to study collective...

Caught in the Web.(China)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... In the fast four years, the number of people online in China has quadrupled to around 90 million, second only to the number of Internet users in the U.S. While the Chinese government has embraced the Internet as an economic tool, it has also...

Noted & quoted.(Soundbites)
February 14, 2005... 'To have the individuals on the show eat and drink dead rats was crazy and from a viewer's point of view made me throw up.' --Austin Aitken, 49 of Cleveland, who has sued NBC for $2.5 million. He claims that Fear Factor's rat-eating episode...

A surfable sea of knowledge.(Media)
February 14, 2005... Within a few years, much of the world's literature and accumulated knowledge may literally be at your fingertips. Google is joining forces with several American research libraries and England's Oxford University to convert their collections...

Repeat after us and improve your English.(Q&A)(Brief Article)(Interview)
February 14, 2005... In July 2003, while volunteering at a center for Hispanic immigrants in Los Angeles, Ellie Wen, 18, launched RepeatAfterUs.com to help people speak better English. The site features texts and audio clips ranging from Aesop's Fables to the...

Helping tsunami victims.(International)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
February 14, 2005... In response to the Dec. 26 tsunami, the United Nations broke down by country how it would allocate money for various emergency needs. (See p. 10.) The Biggest Needs FOOD AND HEALTH NEEDS Indonesia ...

Exam anxiety: the pressure to perform.(Education)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Researchers at Michigan State University say that exam pressure is more likely to impair the performance of good students than average ones. When the heat is on, good students can lose the strong short-term or working memory that enables them...

How 'brand loyal' is your brain?(Technology)
February 14, 2005... Corporations have long used telephone surveys, focus groups, and questionnaires to gauge consumer preferences. Now, by using the latest brain-imaging technology, "neuromarketers" hope to zero in on the emotional, forces that drive people to buy...

Why haven't we found.(International)
February 14, 2005... More than three years after the September 11 attacks turned Osama bin Laden into the most wanted man in the world, the search for him remains stalled. The manhunt is frustrated by the remote topography of his likely Pakistani sanctuary, stymied...

When nature changes history: a nation and its people can be changed forever by the social and political aftershocks of a natural disaster.(International)
February 14, 2005... On Dec. 26, the world's most powerful earthquake in 40 years erupted deep below the Indian Ocean, just off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, displacing trillions of tons of water within a few seconds. The resulting tsunami--a series of massive...

Forces of nature have halted invading armies, prompted political change, and united bitter enemies.
February 14, 2005... The area where the tsunami caused the greatest loss of life, Indonesia's Aceh Province, had been under virtual martial law, largely closed to the outside world as 40,000 troops hunted separatists. Indonesia's military remains suspicious that...

Too young to die? There are 72 juvenile offenders on death row. The Supreme Court is set to decide whether executing them amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.(National)(Cover Story)
February 14, 2005... Last August, Robert Acuna, a high school student from Baytown, Tex., became the newest teenager on death row. Acuna was convicted of killing two elderly neighbors, James and Joyce Carroll, when he was 17, shooting them "execution style," as...

Utah: the perfect genetics lab: big families, Mormon Church records, and even 19th-century polygamy are proving a boon to the study of genes and genealogy.(National)
February 14, 2005... Utah is famous for its big families, with seemingly endless branches of aunts, uncles, and cousins, and roots stretching back to Mormon pioneer days. But what once appeared to be a regional quirk is increasingly viewed by scientists as...

Climbing blind: in Tibet, where the blind are treated as outcasts, six blind teenagers set an improbable record trekking through the Himalayas.(International)
February 14, 2005... Erik Weihenmayer is the only blind man to reach the 29,035-foot summit of Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain. When he decided to teach six blind Tibetan teenagers how to climb, he returned to the scene of his greatest accomplishment....

1965: at last, freedom to vote: forty years ago, police attacks on civil rights protesters in Alabama led to passage of the Voting Rights Act.(Times Past)
February 14, 2005... Using tear gas, nightsticks, and whips, Alabama state troopers tore into a crowd of hundreds of black marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on March 7, 1965. The marchers were seeking the right to vote. The clash,...

The gym is brought to you by ... high school athletics are finding new fans in corporate sponsors.(Education)
February 14, 2005... For 75 years, children in tiny Brooklawn, N.J., have attended the Alice Costello Elementary School. But there's something new at Costello: a seven-foot illuminated sign outside the gym. The sign reads "ShopRite of Brooklawn Center," and is...

15 cents for foreign aid, 60 cents for soda.(Opinion)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Americans are the most generous people on Earth, aren't we? No, alas, we're not. The tsunami illustrates the problem: When grieving victims intrude onto our TV screens, we dig into our pockets and provide a massive response; the rest of the...

At the movies: commercials without a mute button.(Opinion)
February 14, 2005... It was the 11th straight commercial, that pushed the audience over the edge. These people had gone to a theater in New York to see a film. But at the announced starting time of the movie, they were pounded instead by an advertisement blitz....

Focus on energy independence.(Opinion)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... If President Bush is looking for a legacy, I have just the one for him: a crash science initiative for alternative energy and conservation to make America energy-independent in 10 years. [It would read to] political reform from Moscow to Riyadh...

Should naturalized citizens be President? The constitution says that on 'natural-born' citizens can be President. Should we change that?(Debate)
February 14, 2005... YES My son, Jonah, came to the U.S. from Vietnam as a 4-month-old baby. When his second-grade class studied the presidency, he was told that he cannot run for President when he grows up, even if he wants to. According to the Constitution, only...

A teenage athlete deals with Bulimia.(Voices)
February 14, 2005... Sometimes social influence is a good thing and sometimes it's a bad thing. In my case it was bad. Various pressures and misconceptions caused me to develop an eating disorder called bulimia. It causes people to believe that they are fat or...

Cartoons.(Comic)
February 14, 2005... TODAY'S SPORTS SECTION... OVERPAID ATHLETES CRIME BRAWLS STEROIDS ACTUAL STORIES ON SPORTS Drew Litton * Rocky Mountain News (Denver) * Newspaper Enterprises Association The latest suicide car bombing attack is...

Letter from the editor.(Editorial)
February 14, 2005... There are many aspects of the death penalty that inspire heated debate, but an especially contentious issue (and one we thought would be of particular interest to your students) is the execution of offenders who committed crimes as 16- and...

Executions in America.
February 14, 2005... Since 1930, more than 4,800 people have been executed in the United States, according to data from the Department of Justice. Today, 38 states have the death penalty on the books, but they vary widely in how often they actually carry out...

Opinion & debate.(Quiz 4)(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... 1. Columnist Nicholas Kristof says the U.S. government a gives little to other countries in the wake of natural disasters. b gives comparatively little to combat ongoing problems in poor countries. c spends more on soda than on...

Game show.(Brief Article)
February 14, 2005... Use with articles identified. Divide the class into two to four teams. Read the statements below, which are answers to questions. In this game, modeled after the TV show Jeopardy!, students must give their answers in the form of...