Bombings in Baghdad Aim at Diplomatic Locations
By ROD NORDLAND and RIYADH MOHAMMED
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: April 4, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/world/middleeast/05iraq.html?hp
BAGHDAD — The Iraqi capital echoed with explosions on Sunday, with three suicide car bombings killing dozens of people around Baghdad. Other bombs and rockets went off at widely scattered locations, paralyzing traffic and disrupting communications throughout the city.
An official in the Interior Ministry said there were three suicide bombers who had targeted the Iranian embassy as well as the residences of the Egyptian chargé d’affaires and the German ambassador, all in the Mansour District and nearby on the western side of the city. Officials said that at least 32 people were killed in all, with dozens more seriously wounded. Separately, a police official in Kerrada, a neighborhood in eastern Baghdad, said that a fourth would-be suicide bomber targeted the offices of the government’s embassy protective services but policemen shot and wounded the driver before he could detonate his bomb. The police identified that suspect, who they claimed was on drugs, as an Iraqi — Ahmed Jassim, 17 — and said he had been driving a Kia minibus carrying one ton of explosives. Bomb disposal experts worked for several hours to defuse the bomb.
Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity in line with their agencies’ policies.
Maj. Gen. Qassim Atta, spokesman for the Baghdad Operations Command, said the car bombers also wore suicide vests. He speculated that the Mar Yosif Chaldean Catholic church in the Mansour area may have been one of the intended targets.
A spokeswoman for the church, Ann Sami Matloub, said that the church was packed with Easter worshipers at the time but was not damaged by the blast. She said that the explosion was so close that services had to be suspended for a short time until parishioners could compose themselves.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for the bombings, but Abdul Kareem al-Thirib, head of the security committee in Baghdad’s provincial government, blamed them on the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. “They are trying to show that the situation is bad,” he said. “This is a campaign launched by terrorists against innocent civilians to create chaos, but the security forces are totally in control of the situation.”
General Atta was critical of local news coverage of the bombings. “Some of the media had information even before we did, which means they had connections with the terrorists,” he charged during an interview on state-owned Iraqiya television.
A press release from the Baghdad Operations Command, which is in charge of security in the capital, said that the other explosions Sunday morning had included four improvised explosive devices, which killed no one. In addition, the command said, “two terrorists were killed and another one wounded” when the car bomb they were rigging in the Sadiya neighborhood in southern Baghdad exploded prematurely Sunday.
Without giving details, the command said it had arrested those responsible for launching rockets into the Jadriyah neighborhood of the city.
It was the first major suicide bomb spree in Baghdad since January, when three downtown hotels were bombed, killing 41 people. On Friday night, gunmen wearing army uniforms, some posing as American soldiers, killed 25 people. Most of the dead were members of the Sunni Awakening or Sons of Iraq groups or the Iraqi security services, in a village just south of Baghdad.
In addition, a series of rockets were fired into the Green Zone on Saturday night, but there were no reports of deaths. Two mortars were also fired into the Green Zone on Sunday, the Interior Ministry official said.
Muhammed al-Obaidi and Tim Arango contributed reporting from Baghdad.
Sunday, April 04, 2010
Devil of a Scandal
Devil of a Scandal
By MAUREEN DOWD
Copyright by the The New York Times
Published: April 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/opinion/04dowd.html?th&emc=th
WASHINGTON
The Devil didn’t make me do it.
The facts did.
Father Gabriele Amorth, the chief exorcist for the Holy See, said in Rome that The Times’s coverage of Pope Benedict, which cast doubt on his rigor in dealing with pedophile priests, was “prompted by the Devil.”
“There is no doubt about it,” the 85-year-old priest said, according to the Catholic News Agency. “Because he is a marvelous pope and worthy successor to John Paul II, it is clear that the Devil wants to grab hold of him.”
The exorcist also said that the abuse scandal showed that Satan uses priests to try to destroy the church, “and so we should not be surprised if priests too ... fall into temptation. They also live in the world and can fall like men of the world.”
Actually, falling into temptation is eating cupcakes after you’ve given them up for Lent. Rape and molestation of children is far beyond what most of us think of as succumbing to worldly temptation.
This church needs a sexorcist more than an exorcist.
As this unholy week of shameful revelations unfurls, the Vatican is rather overplaying its hand. At the moment, the only thing between Catholics and God is a defensive church hierarchy that cannot fully acknowledge and heal the damage it has done around the globe.
How can the faithful enjoy Easter redemption when a Good Friday service at the Vatican was more concerned with shielding the pope than repenting the church’s misdeeds? The Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the papal household, told those at St. Peter’s Basilica, including the pope, that he was thinking about the Jews in this season of Passover and Easter because “they know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms.”
Amazingly enough, it turns out that the Franciscan priest was not referring to the collective violence and recurring symptoms of the global plague of Catholic priests who harmed children, enabled by the malignant neglect of the Vatican.
He was talking about the collective violence and recurring symptoms of those critics — including victims, Catholics worldwide and commentators — who want the church to face up to its sins.
Father Cantalamessa went on to quote from the letter of an unnamed Jewish friend: “I am following with indignation the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful by the whole world. The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt, remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”
As they say in Latin, “Ne eas ibi.” Don’t go there.
Mindful of the church’s long history of anti-Semitism, Leon Wieseltier, the New Republic literary editor and Jewish scholar, noted: “Why would the Catholic Church wish to defend itself by referring to other enormities in which it was also implicated? Anyway, the Jews endured more than a bad press.” This solidarity with Jews is also notable given that Italy’s La Repubblica reported that “certain Catholic circles” suspected that “a New York Jewish lobby” was responsible for the outcry against the pope.
It’s insulting to liken the tragic death of six million Jews with the appropriate outrage of Catholics at the decades-long cover-up of crimes against children by the very men who were supposed to be their moral guides. Even the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, tried to walk the cat back: “I don’t think it’s an appropriate comparison.”
Father Cantalamessa was expressing the sense of self-victimization permeating the Vatican at a time when more real victims are pouring forth. News reports said that the abuse hot line set up by the Catholic Church in Germany imploded the first day out when more than 4,000 callers charging abuse flooded the lines.
There is the pope’s inability to say anything long, adequate and sincere about the scandal and what role he has played, including acceding to the petition of the Wisconsin priest who abused 200 deaf kids that he should not be defrocked in his infirmity, to spare his priestly “dignity.” And there is his veiled dismissal of criticism as “petty gossip.” All this keeps him the subject of the conversation.
It is in crises that leaders are tested, that we get to see if they succumb to their worst instincts or summon their better angels. All Benedict has to do is the right thing.
The hero of the week, for simply telling the truth, is Ireland’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin. His diocese is Dublin, where four archbishops spent three decades shrugging off abuse cases.
“There is no shortcut to addressing the past,” he said during a Holy Week Mass. “This has been a difficult year. We see how damaging failure of integrity and authenticity are to the body of Christ. Shameful abuse took place within the church of Christ. The response was hopelessly inadequate.”
Amen.
By MAUREEN DOWD
Copyright by the The New York Times
Published: April 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/opinion/04dowd.html?th&emc=th
WASHINGTON
The Devil didn’t make me do it.
The facts did.
Father Gabriele Amorth, the chief exorcist for the Holy See, said in Rome that The Times’s coverage of Pope Benedict, which cast doubt on his rigor in dealing with pedophile priests, was “prompted by the Devil.”
“There is no doubt about it,” the 85-year-old priest said, according to the Catholic News Agency. “Because he is a marvelous pope and worthy successor to John Paul II, it is clear that the Devil wants to grab hold of him.”
The exorcist also said that the abuse scandal showed that Satan uses priests to try to destroy the church, “and so we should not be surprised if priests too ... fall into temptation. They also live in the world and can fall like men of the world.”
Actually, falling into temptation is eating cupcakes after you’ve given them up for Lent. Rape and molestation of children is far beyond what most of us think of as succumbing to worldly temptation.
This church needs a sexorcist more than an exorcist.
As this unholy week of shameful revelations unfurls, the Vatican is rather overplaying its hand. At the moment, the only thing between Catholics and God is a defensive church hierarchy that cannot fully acknowledge and heal the damage it has done around the globe.
How can the faithful enjoy Easter redemption when a Good Friday service at the Vatican was more concerned with shielding the pope than repenting the church’s misdeeds? The Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the papal household, told those at St. Peter’s Basilica, including the pope, that he was thinking about the Jews in this season of Passover and Easter because “they know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms.”
Amazingly enough, it turns out that the Franciscan priest was not referring to the collective violence and recurring symptoms of the global plague of Catholic priests who harmed children, enabled by the malignant neglect of the Vatican.
He was talking about the collective violence and recurring symptoms of those critics — including victims, Catholics worldwide and commentators — who want the church to face up to its sins.
Father Cantalamessa went on to quote from the letter of an unnamed Jewish friend: “I am following with indignation the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful by the whole world. The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt, remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”
As they say in Latin, “Ne eas ibi.” Don’t go there.
Mindful of the church’s long history of anti-Semitism, Leon Wieseltier, the New Republic literary editor and Jewish scholar, noted: “Why would the Catholic Church wish to defend itself by referring to other enormities in which it was also implicated? Anyway, the Jews endured more than a bad press.” This solidarity with Jews is also notable given that Italy’s La Repubblica reported that “certain Catholic circles” suspected that “a New York Jewish lobby” was responsible for the outcry against the pope.
It’s insulting to liken the tragic death of six million Jews with the appropriate outrage of Catholics at the decades-long cover-up of crimes against children by the very men who were supposed to be their moral guides. Even the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, tried to walk the cat back: “I don’t think it’s an appropriate comparison.”
Father Cantalamessa was expressing the sense of self-victimization permeating the Vatican at a time when more real victims are pouring forth. News reports said that the abuse hot line set up by the Catholic Church in Germany imploded the first day out when more than 4,000 callers charging abuse flooded the lines.
There is the pope’s inability to say anything long, adequate and sincere about the scandal and what role he has played, including acceding to the petition of the Wisconsin priest who abused 200 deaf kids that he should not be defrocked in his infirmity, to spare his priestly “dignity.” And there is his veiled dismissal of criticism as “petty gossip.” All this keeps him the subject of the conversation.
It is in crises that leaders are tested, that we get to see if they succumb to their worst instincts or summon their better angels. All Benedict has to do is the right thing.
The hero of the week, for simply telling the truth, is Ireland’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin. His diocese is Dublin, where four archbishops spent three decades shrugging off abuse cases.
“There is no shortcut to addressing the past,” he said during a Holy Week Mass. “This has been a difficult year. We see how damaging failure of integrity and authenticity are to the body of Christ. Shameful abuse took place within the church of Christ. The response was hopelessly inadequate.”
Amen.
New York Times Editorial: We Can’t Tell You
New York Times Editorial: We Can’t Tell You
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/opinion/04sun1.html?th&emc=th
For more than 20 years, it was settled law, born of bitter experience, that the government may not eavesdrop on people in the United States without a warrant.
Until, that is, after the 9/11 attacks, when President George W. Bush ordered the National Security Agency to ignore the law. When The Times disclosed the spying in late 2005, Mr. Bush argued that the attacks changed everything: Due process and privacy were luxuries the country could no longer afford. Far too many members of Congress bought this argument. Others, afraid of being painted as soft on terror, refused to push back. In 2008, at the White House’s insistence, they expanded the government’s ability to eavesdrop without warrants.
Even that was not enough for the Bush administration, which insisted that targets of the earlier, illegal spying could not sue the government because what happened was “too secret” even to be discussed in court. The Obama administration has embraced the secrecy argument and has used it to block several cases.
Fortunately, it has not completely succeeded.
The chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, Vaughn Walker, ruled last week that the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was the law of the land for Mr. Bush and that when the government failed to get a warrant to wiretap, it broke the law. He also said that the government could not evade accountability with absurdly broad claims of state secrets.
This ruling does not end warrantless wiretapping. The particular program The Times uncovered has been suspended; there are still others, however, and the 2008 FISA amendments permit warrantless spying.
Judge Walker’s ruling establishes that state secrecy claims do not trump the requirements of FISA. The next big case, filed by several human rights groups and still being appealed, challenges the 2008 amendments.
Judge Walker’s ruling also provides a chilling account of the relentless efforts by the Bush administration and then the Obama administration to kill the civil lawsuit filed by an Islamic charity in Oregon called Al Haramain. The group was subjected to warrantless surveillance and then declared a sponsor of terrorism in 2004.
When the lawsuit was filed in 2006, the government argued that the charity and two lawyers who worked with it could not sue unless they knew the charity was being wiretapped. They could not know that because the wiretapping was secret. If they somehow found out, they could not prove the wiretapping was warrantless, because that was also a secret.
The plaintiffs first tried to build their case on a classified document they were given by mistake. When that document was suppressed, they showed from public records that they were subject to illegal surveillance. The government said that those should be suppressed, too. The lawyers argued that the only basis for a suit would be if the government admitted it had no warrant. And it would not admit that, because that was a secret.
A clearly exasperated Judge Walker said all the government had to do was produce a FISA warrant. It refused. Because any warrant was, well, you get it.
That reminded us of the movie “Animal House” and the college dean who puts a fraternity on “double-secret probation.” It doesn’t know the rules, or even that it is on probation, so it can never get out of it. Judge Walker more politely called the government’s defense “argumentative acrobatics” that took a “flying leap” and missed “by a wide margin.”
The new suit over the FISA amendments points out that the Supreme Court recognized more than 40 years ago that there are few threats to liberty “greater than that posed by the use of eavesdropping devices.” In fact, FISA was originally passed because of spying conducted on anti-Vietnam War protesters and civil rights activists.
Senator Obama promised repeatedly in the 2008 campaign to reverse Mr. Bush’s many abuses of power. This was one of them. President Obama should read this court ruling with chagrin and eliminate warrantless spying. It is also far past time to stop hiding behind spurious, often ludicrous, claims of national security.
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/opinion/04sun1.html?th&emc=th
For more than 20 years, it was settled law, born of bitter experience, that the government may not eavesdrop on people in the United States without a warrant.
Until, that is, after the 9/11 attacks, when President George W. Bush ordered the National Security Agency to ignore the law. When The Times disclosed the spying in late 2005, Mr. Bush argued that the attacks changed everything: Due process and privacy were luxuries the country could no longer afford. Far too many members of Congress bought this argument. Others, afraid of being painted as soft on terror, refused to push back. In 2008, at the White House’s insistence, they expanded the government’s ability to eavesdrop without warrants.
Even that was not enough for the Bush administration, which insisted that targets of the earlier, illegal spying could not sue the government because what happened was “too secret” even to be discussed in court. The Obama administration has embraced the secrecy argument and has used it to block several cases.
Fortunately, it has not completely succeeded.
The chief judge of the Federal District Court in San Francisco, Vaughn Walker, ruled last week that the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was the law of the land for Mr. Bush and that when the government failed to get a warrant to wiretap, it broke the law. He also said that the government could not evade accountability with absurdly broad claims of state secrets.
This ruling does not end warrantless wiretapping. The particular program The Times uncovered has been suspended; there are still others, however, and the 2008 FISA amendments permit warrantless spying.
Judge Walker’s ruling establishes that state secrecy claims do not trump the requirements of FISA. The next big case, filed by several human rights groups and still being appealed, challenges the 2008 amendments.
Judge Walker’s ruling also provides a chilling account of the relentless efforts by the Bush administration and then the Obama administration to kill the civil lawsuit filed by an Islamic charity in Oregon called Al Haramain. The group was subjected to warrantless surveillance and then declared a sponsor of terrorism in 2004.
When the lawsuit was filed in 2006, the government argued that the charity and two lawyers who worked with it could not sue unless they knew the charity was being wiretapped. They could not know that because the wiretapping was secret. If they somehow found out, they could not prove the wiretapping was warrantless, because that was also a secret.
The plaintiffs first tried to build their case on a classified document they were given by mistake. When that document was suppressed, they showed from public records that they were subject to illegal surveillance. The government said that those should be suppressed, too. The lawyers argued that the only basis for a suit would be if the government admitted it had no warrant. And it would not admit that, because that was a secret.
A clearly exasperated Judge Walker said all the government had to do was produce a FISA warrant. It refused. Because any warrant was, well, you get it.
That reminded us of the movie “Animal House” and the college dean who puts a fraternity on “double-secret probation.” It doesn’t know the rules, or even that it is on probation, so it can never get out of it. Judge Walker more politely called the government’s defense “argumentative acrobatics” that took a “flying leap” and missed “by a wide margin.”
The new suit over the FISA amendments points out that the Supreme Court recognized more than 40 years ago that there are few threats to liberty “greater than that posed by the use of eavesdropping devices.” In fact, FISA was originally passed because of spying conducted on anti-Vietnam War protesters and civil rights activists.
Senator Obama promised repeatedly in the 2008 campaign to reverse Mr. Bush’s many abuses of power. This was one of them. President Obama should read this court ruling with chagrin and eliminate warrantless spying. It is also far past time to stop hiding behind spurious, often ludicrous, claims of national security.
Can Animals Be Gay?
Can Animals Be Gay?
By JON MOOALLEM
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: March 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04animals-t.html?th&emc=th
The Laysan albatross is a downy seabird with a seven-foot wingspan and a notched, pale yellow beak. Every November, a small colony of albatrosses assembles at a place called Kaena Point, overlooking the Pacific at the foot of a volcanic range, on the northwestern tip of Oahu, Hawaii. Each bird has spent the past six months in solitude, ranging over open water as far north as Alaska, and has come back to the breeding ground to reunite with its mate. Albatrosses can live to be 60 or 70 years old and typically mate with the same bird every year, for life. Their “divorce rate,” as biologists term it, is among the lowest of any bird.
When I visited Kaena Point in November, the first birds were just returning, and they spent a lot of their time gliding and jackknifing in the wind a few feet overhead or plopped like cushions in the sand. There are about 120 breeding albatrosses in the colony, and gradually, each will arrive and feel out the crowd for the one other particular albatross it has been waiting to have sex with again. At any given moment in the days before Thanksgiving, some birds may be just turning up while others sit there killing time. It feels like an airport baggage-claim area.
Once together, pairs will copulate and collaboratively incubate a single egg for 65 days. They take shifts: one bird has to sit at the nest while the other flaps off to fish and eat for weeks at a time. Couples preen each other’s feathers and engage in elaborate mating behaviors and displays. “Like when you’re in a couple,” Marlene Zuk, a biologist who has visited the colony, explained to me. “All those sickening things that couples do that gross out everyone else but the two people in the couple? . . . Birds have the same thing.” I often saw pairs sitting belly to belly, arching their necks and nuzzling together their heads to form a kind of heart shape. Speaking on Oahu a few years ago as first lady, Laura Bush praised Laysan albatross couples for making lifelong commitments to one another. Lindsay C. Young, a biologist who studies the Kaena Point colony, told me: “They were supposed to be icons of monogamy: one male and one female. But I wouldn’t assume that what you’re looking at is a male and a female.”
Young has been researching the albatrosses on Oahu since 2003; the colony was the focus of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, which she completed last spring. (She now works on conservation projects as a biologist for hire.) In the course of her doctoral work, Young and a colleague discovered, almost incidentally, that a third of the pairs at Kaena Point actually consisted of two female birds, not one male and one female. Laysan albatrosses are one of countless species in which the two sexes look basically identical. It turned out that many of the female-female pairs, at Kaena Point and at a colony that Young’s colleague studied on Kauai, had been together for 4, 8 or even 19 years — as far back as the biologists’ data went, in some cases. The female-female pairs had been incubating eggs together, rearing chicks and just generally passing under everybody’s nose for what you might call “straight” couples.
Young would never use the phrase “straight couples.” And she is adamantly against calling the other birds “lesbians” too. For one thing, the same-sex pairs appear to do everything male-female pairs do except have sex, and Young isn’t really sure, or comfortable judging, whether that technically qualifies them as lesbians or not. But moreover, the whole question is meaningless to her; it has nothing to do with her research. “ ‘Lesbian,’ ” she told me, “is a human term,” and Young — a diligent and cautious scientist, just beginning to make a name in her field — is devoted to using the most aseptic language possible and resisting any tinge of anthropomorphism. “The study is about albatross,” she told me firmly. “The study is not about humans.” Often, she seemed to be mentally peer-reviewing her words before speaking.
A discovery like Young’s can disorient a wildlife biologist in the most thrilling way — if he or she takes it seriously, which has traditionally not been the case. Various forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs. A female koala might force another female against a tree and mount her, while throwing back her head and releasing what one scientist described as “exhalated belchlike sounds.” Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole. Within most species, homosexual sex has been documented only sporadically, and there appear to be few cases of individual animals who engage in it exclusively. For more than a century, this kind of observation was usually tacked onto scientific papers as a curiosity, if it was reported at all, and not pursued as a legitimate research subject. Biologists tried to explain away what they’d seen, or dismissed it as theoretically meaningless — an isolated glitch in an otherwise elegant Darwinian universe where every facet of an animal’s behavior is geared toward reproducing. One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional.
In recent years though, more biologists have been looking objectively at same-sex sexuality in animals — approaching it as real science. For Young, the existence of so many female-female albatross pairs disproved assumptions that she didn’t even realize she’d been making and, in the process, raised a chain of progressively more complicated questions. One of the prickliest, it seemed, was how a scientist is even supposed to talk about any of this, given how eager the rest of us have been to twist the sex lives of animals into allegories of our own. “This colony is literally the largest proportion of — I don’t know what the correct term is: ‘homosexual animals’? — in the world,” Young told me. “Which I’m sure some people think is a great thing, and others might think is not.”
It was a guarded understatement. Two years ago, Young decided to write a short paper with two colleagues on the female-female albatross pairs. “We were pretty careful in the original article to plainly and simply report what we found,” she said. “It’s definitely a little bit of a tricky subject, and one you want to be gentle on.” But the journal that published the paper, Biology Letters, sent out a press release a few days after the California Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. At 6 the next morning, a Fox News reporter called Young on her cellphone. The resulting story joined others, including one in this paper, and as the news ricocheted around the Internet, a stampede of online commenters alternately celebrated Young’s findings as a clear call for equality or denigrated them as “pure propaganda and selective science at its dumbest” and “an effort to humanize animals or devolve humans to the level of animals or to further an agenda.” Many pointed out that animals also rape or eat their young; was America going to tolerate that too, just because it’s “natural”?
A Denver-based publication for gay parents welcomed any and all new readers from “the extensive lesbian albatross parent community.” The conservative Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn highlighted Young’s paper on his Web site, under the heading “Your Tax Dollars at Work,” even though her study of the female-female pairs was not actually federally financed. Stephen Colbert warned on Comedy Central that “albatresbians” were threatening American family values with their “Sappho-avian agenda.” A gay rights advocate e-mailed Young, asking her to fly a rainbow flag above each female-female nest, to identify them and show solidarity. Even now, the first thing everyone wants to know from Young — sometimes the only thing — is, what do these lesbian albatrosses say about us?
“I don’t answer that question,” she told me.
A FEMALE LAYSAN albatross is physically capable of laying only one egg per year — that’s just how it’s built. Nevertheless, since as early as 1919, biologists have periodically found nests of albatrosses (and similar species of birds) with two eggs inside them, or with a second egg just outside, as if it had rolled out. (This will inevitably happen; there’s simply not enough room in the nest for two eggs and one Laysan albatross.) Scientists have a term for the phenomenon of extra eggs in a nest: a “supernormal clutch.” But in the case of the albatross, they never had a watertight explanation.
In the early 1960s, one ornithologist tried to put the whole cumbersome mystery to rest by asserting that some of those female birds must simply be able to lay multiple eggs. The claim was apparently based on sketchy data, but supernormal clutches were so rare that it was hard to rack up enough observations to disprove the hypothesis. Real progress was finally made in 1968, when Harvey Fisher, a dean of midcentury albatross science, reported on seven years of daily observations made at 3,440 different nests on the Midway atoll in the middle of the Pacific. Fisher concluded that “two eggs in a nest are an indication that two females used the nest, although at different times.” He was describing “egg dumping,” whereby, for example, an inexperienced female accidentally lays her egg in the wrong nest. From then on, egg dumping was a default explanation for supernormal clutches in albatrosses. After all, Fisher had also declared that “promiscuity, polygamy and polyandry are unknown in this species.” Lesbianism apparently never occurred to anyone — even enough to be cursorily dismissed. As Brenda Zaun recently told me, “It never dawned on anyone to sex the birds.”
Zaun, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was studying a Laysan colony on Kauai 40 years after Fisher’s publication. She realized that certain nests there seemed to wind up with two eggs in them year after year; the distribution of the supernormal clutches wasn’t random, as it would presumably be if it were caused exclusively by egg dumping. On a hunch, Zaun pulled feathers from a sample of the breeding pairs associated with two-egg nests and sent them to Lindsay Young, asking her to draw DNA from the feathers and genetically determine the sexes of those birds in her lab. When the results showed that every bird was female, Young figured she’d messed up. So she did it again — and got the same result. Then she genetically sexed every bird at Kaena Point. “Where it wasn’t totally clear, or I worried that maybe I mixed up the sample, I actually went back into the field and took new blood samples to do it again,” Young told me. In the end, she genetically sexed the birds in her lab four times, just to be sure. She found that 39 of the 125 nests at Kaena Point since 2004 belonged to female-female pairs, including more than 20 nests in which she’d never noticed a supernormal clutch. It seemed that certain females were somehow finding opportunities to quickly copulate with males but incubating their eggs — and doing everything else an albatross does while at the colony — with other females.
Young gave a talk about these findings at an international meeting of Pacific-seabird researchers. “There was a lot of murmuring in the room,” she remembers. “Then, afterward, people were coming up to me and saying: ‘We see supernormal clutches all the time. We assumed it was a male and a female.’ And I’d say: ‘Yeah? Well, you might want to look into that.’ ” Recently, journals have asked her to confidentially peer-review new papers about other species, describing similar discoveries. “I can’t say which species,” she explains, “but my guess is, in the next year, we’re going to see a lot more examples of this.”
It may seem surprising that scientists sometimes don’t know the true sexes of the animals they spend their careers studying — that they can be tripped up in some “Tootsie” -like farce for so long. But it’s easy to underestimate the pandemonium that they’re struggling to interpret in the wild. Often, biologists are forced to assign sexes to animals by watching what they do when they mate. When one albatross or boar or cricket rears up and mounts a second, it would seem to be advertising the genders of both. Unless, of course, that’s not the situation at all.
“There is still an overall presumption of heterosexuality,” the biologist Bruce Bagemihl told me. “Individuals, populations or species are considered to be entirely heterosexual until proven otherwise.” While this may sound like a reasonable starting point, Bagemihl calls it a “heterosexist bias” and has shown it to be a significant roadblock to understanding the diversity of what animals actually do. In 1999, Baghemihl published “Biological Exuberance,” a book that pulled together a colossal amount of previous piecemeal research and showed how biologists’ biases had marginalized animal homosexuality for the last 150 years — sometimes innocently enough, sometimes in an eruption of anthropomorphic disgust. Courtship behaviors between two animals of the same sex were persistently described in the literature as “mock” or “pseudo” courtship — or just “practice.” Homosexual sex between ostriches was interpreted by one scientist as “a nuisance” that “goes on and on.” One man, studying Mazarine Blue butterflies in Morocco in 1987, regretted having to report “the lurid details of declining moral standards and of horrific sexual offenses” which are “all too often packed” into national newspapers. And a bighorn-sheep biologist confessed in his memoir, “I still cringe at the memory of seeing old D-ram mount S-ram repeatedly.” To think, he wrote, “of those magnificent beasts as ‘queers’ — Oh, God!”
“What Bagemihl’s book really did,” the Canadian primatologist and evolutionary psychologist Paul Vasey says, “is raise people’s awareness around the fact that this occurs in quote-unquote nature — in animals. And that it can be studied in a serious, scholarly way.” But studying it seriously means resolving a conundrum. At the heart of evolutionary biology, since Darwin, has been the idea that any genetic traits and behaviors that outfit an animal with an advantage — that help the animal make lots of offspring — will remain in a species, while ones that don’t will vanish. In short, evolution gradually optimizes every animal toward a single goal: passing on its genes. The Yale ornithologist Richard Prum told me: “Our field is a lot like economics: we have a core of theory, like free-market theory, where we have the invisible hand of the market creating order — all commodities attain exactly the price they’re worth. Homosexuality is a tough case, because it appears to violate that central tenet, that all of sexual behavior is about reproduction. The question is, why would anyone invest in sexual behavior that isn’t reproductive?” –— much less a behavior that looks to be starkly counterproductive. Moreover, if animals carrying the genes associated with it are less likely to reproduce, how has that behavior managed to stick around?
Given this big umbrella of theory, the very existence of homosexual behavior in animals can feel a little like impenetrable nonsense, something a researcher could spend years banging his or her head against the wall deliberating. The difficulty of that challenge, more than any implicit or explicit homophobia, may be why past biologists skirted the subject.
IN THE LAST DECADE, however, Paul Vasey and others have begun developing new hypotheses based on actual, prolonged observation of different animals, deciphering the ways given homosexual behaviors may have evolved and the evolutionary role they might play within the context of individual species. Different ideas are emerging about how these behaviors could fit within that traditional Darwinian framework, including seeing them as conferring reproductive advantages in roundabout ways. Male dung flies, for example, appear to mount other males to tire them out, knocking them out of competition for available females. Researchers speculate that young male bottlenose dolphins mount one another simply to establish trust and form bonds — but those bonds actually turn out to be critical to reproduction, since when males mature, they work in groups to cooperatively gain access to females.
These ideas generally aim to explain only particular behaviors in a particular species. So far, the only real conclusion this relatively small body of literature seems to point to, collectively, is a kind of deflating, meta-conclusion: a single explanation of homosexual behavior in animals may not be possible, because thinking of “homosexual behavior in animals” as a single scientific subject might not make much sense. “Biologists want to build these unified theories to explain everything they see,” Vasey told me. So do journalists, he added — all people, really. “But none of this lends itself to a linear story. My take on it is that homosexual behavior is not a uniform phenomenon. Having one unifying body of theory that explains why it’s happening in all these different species might be a chimera.”
The point of heterosexual sex, Vasey said, no matter what kind of animal is doing it, is primarily reproduction. But that shouldn’t trick us into thinking that homosexual behavior has some equivalent, organizing purpose — that the two are tidy opposites. “All this homosexual behavior isn’t tied together by that sort of primary function,” Vasey said. Even what the same-sex animals are doing varies tremendously from species to species. But we’re quick to conceive of that great range of activities in the way it most handily tracks to our anthropomorphic point of view: put crassly, all those different animals just seem to be doing gay sex stuff with one another. As the biologist Marlene Zuk explains, we are hard-wired to read all animal behavior as “some version of the way people do things” and animals as “blurred, imperfect copies of humans.”
When I visited Zuk at her lab at the University of California at Riverside last December, an online video clip of an octopus carrying a coconut shell around the seafloor, and periodically hiding under it, was starting to go viral. For a few days, people everywhere were flipping out about how intelligent and wily this octopus was. Not Zuk, though. “Oh, spare me,” she said. To us, Zuk explained, that octopus’s behavior reads as proof that “octopuses are at one with humans” because it just happens to look like something we do — how a toddler plays peekaboo under a blanket, say, or a bandit ducks into an alleyway dumpster to avoid the cops. But the octopus doesn’t know that. Nor is it doing something so uncommon in the animal world. Zuk explained that caddis-fly larvae collect rocks and loom them together into intricate shelters. “But for some reason we don’t think that’s cool,” she said, “because the caddis-fly larvae don’t have big eyes like us.”
Something similar may be happening with what we perceive to be homosexual sex in an array of animal species: we may be grouping together a big grab bag of behaviors based on only a superficial similarity. Within the logic of each species, or group of species, many of these behaviors appear to have their own causes and consequences — their own evolutionary meanings, so to speak. The Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden told me to think of all these animals as “multitasking” with their private parts.
It’s also possible that some homosexual behaviors don’t provide a conventional evolutionary advantage; but neither do they upend everything we know about biology. For the last 15 years, for example, Paul Vasey has been studying Japanese macaques, a species of two-and-a-half-foot-tall, pink-faced monkey. He has looked almost exclusively at why female macaques mount one another during the mating season. Vasey now says he is on to the answer: “It isn’t functional,” he told me; the behavior has no discernible purpose, adaptationally speaking. Instead, it’s a byproduct of a behavior that does, and the supposedly streamlining force of evolution just never flushed that byproduct from the gene pool. Female macaques regularly mount males too, Vasey explained, probably to focus their attention and reinforce their bond as mates. The females are physically capable of mounting any gender of macaque. They’ve just never developed an instinct to limit themselves to one. “Evolution doesn’t create perfect adaptations,” Vasey said. As Zuk put it, “There’s a lot of slop in the system — which,” she was sure to add, “is not the same as saying homosexuality is a mistake.”
ABOUT TWO DOZEN birds were knocking around when Lindsay Young and I arrived at Kaena Point one afternoon. Young dished about a few of them — “Her mate didn’t show up last year”; “God, this one’s annoying” — as they waddled by. Laysan albatrosses are not nearly as graceful on land as they are in the air; even they seem surprised by the size of their feet. (Later that week, at a nearby resort, I would recognize their gait while watching an out-of-shape snorkeler toddle back to his beach towel in rented flippers.) “I’m just writing down who’s here,” Young said, reading the numbers on the birds’ leg bands and marking them on her clipboard. After trying and failing to get a clear view of one bird’s leg with binoculars, she finally just walked to within a few feet of the animal and leaned over to look.
This is the luxury of studying Laysan albatrosses. Having evolved with no natural predators, the birds have no fight-or-flight instinct — you can basically go right up to one and grab it. In fact, Young did just this a short while later, slinking up to a male on all fours, sweeping it in by its flank and, in one expert motion, straightjacketing the wings under one arm and clamping the beak shut in her other hand. Then, she walked over and handed the thing to me; she needed to take an expensive tracking device off the bird’s ankle. “Sorry, but it’s like watching a thousand-dollar bill fly around,” she said. She took some pliers from her backpack to twist off the anklet and, as I stood bear-hugging the albatross, she added: “They have a nice smell. It’s a little musty.”
Young and Marlene Zuk are now applying for a 10-year National Science Foundation grant to continue studying the female albatross pairs. One of the first questions they want to answer is how these birds are winding up with fertilized eggs. Typically, albatrosses fend off birds who aren’t their mates. So Young has been trying to determine if males who arrive back at the colony before their own partners do are forcing themselves on these females or whether these females are somehow “soliciting” the males for sex. She was staking out Kaena Point on a daily basis, trying to watch these illicit copulations unfold for herself. This was Young’s third year; so far, she’d only managed to see it happen twice.
Young and I ambled around for half an hour, maybe more. Then she pointed and, in a monotone, said, “So, that’s a female-female pair.” We crouched and watched the two birds, numbers 169 and 983. They sat under a spindly, native Hawaiian naio bush. They made baa sounds at each other. After a while, Young and I got up.
Another hour passed. (Usually, Young brings along a camping chair.) Occasionally, albatrosses danced in groups of two or three, raising their necks, groaning like vibrating cellphones, clacking their beaks or stomping. But most of the time, they didn’t do much at all. “I’ve spent a lot of my career watching animals not have sex,” Zuk later told me.
Homosexual activity is often observed in animal populations with a shortage of one sex — in the wild but more frequently at zoos. Some biologists anthropomorphically call this “the prisoner effect.” That’s basically the situation at Kaena Point: there are fewer male albatrosses than females (although not every male albatross has a mate). Because it takes two albatrosses to incubate an egg, switching on and off at the nest, a female that can’t find a male (or maybe, Young says, who can’t find “a good-enough male”) has no chance of producing a chick and passing on her genes. Quickly mating with an otherwise-committed male, then pairing with another single female to incubate the egg, is a way to raise those odds.
Still, pairing off with another female creates its own problems: nearly every female lays an egg in November whether she has managed to get it fertilized or not, and the small, craterlike nests that albatross pairs build in the dirt can accommodate only one egg and one bird. So Young was also trying to figure out how a female-female pair decides which of its two eggs to incubate and which to chuck out of the nest — if the birds are deciding at all, and not just knocking one egg out accidentally. From a strict Darwinian perspective, Young told me, “it doesn’t pay for one bird to incubate the other’s egg unless her partner is going to let her egg be incubated the following year.” But presumably, neither female bird knows whether an egg is hers or the other bird’s, much less whether it’s fertilized or not. A Laysan albatross just knows to sit on whatever’s under it. “They’ll incubate anything — I have a photo of one incubating a volleyball,” Young said.
And these were only preambles to more questions. With the male of an albatross pair replaced by another female, every step of the species’ normal, well-honed process for fledging a chick seemed suddenly to present a fresh dilemma. Ultimately, either the rules of albatrossdom were breaking down and the lesbian couples were booting up some alternate suite of behaviors, governed by its own set of rules, or else science had never thoroughly understood the rules of albatrossdom to begin with. And that’s the whole point, for Young: it’s the complexity and apparent flexibility of the species that fascinates her — the puzzle those female-female pairs create at Kaena Point just by existing. She’s not trying to explain homosexual behavior. She’s trying to explain the albatross. And that’s why the rest of the world’s politicized reaction to her work caught her by surprise.
Many people who contacted Young after the publication of her first albatross paper assumed she was a lesbian. She is not. Young’s husband, a biological consultant, was actually an author of the paper, along with Brenda Zaun (who is also not gay, for what it’s worth). Young found the assumption offensive — not because she was being mistaken for gay, but because she was being mistaken for a bad scientist; these people seemed to presume that her research was compromised by a personal agenda. Still, some of the biologists doing the most incisive work on animal homosexuality are in fact gay. Several people I spoke to told me their own sexual identities either helped spur or maintain their interest in the topic; Bruce Bagemihl argued that gay and lesbian people are “often better equipped to detect heterosexist bias when investigating the subject simply because we encounter it so frequently in our everyday lives.” With a laugh, Paul Vasey told me, “People automatically assume I’m gay.” He is gay, he added, but that fact didn’t seem to detract from his amusement.
IN RETROSPECT, the big, sloshing stew of anthropomorphic analyses that Young’s paper provoked in the culture couldn’t have been less surprising. For whatever reason, we’re prone to seeing animals — especially animals that appear to be gay — as reflections, models and foils of ourselves; we’re extraordinarily, and sometimes irrationally, invested in them.
Only a few months before I visited Kaena Point, two penguins at the San Francisco Zoo became the latest in a tradition of captive same-sex penguin couples making global headlines. After six years together — in which the two birds even fostered a son, named Chuck Norris — the penguins split up when one of the males ran off with a female named Linda. The zoo’s penguin keeper, Anthony Brown, told me he received angry e-mail, accusing him of separating the pair for political reasons. “Penguins make their own decisions here at the San Francisco Zoo,” Brown assured me. And while he stressed that there is no scientific way of determining if animals are “gay,” because the word connotes a sexual orientation, not just a behavior, he also noted that, being the San Francisco Zoo, “there’s definitely a lot of opinion here, internally, that we give in and call the penguins gay.” Another male-male penguin couple who fostered a chick at the Central Park Zoo was subsequently immortalized in 2005 in the illustrated children’s book “And Tango Makes Three.” According to the American Library Association, there have been more requests for libraries to ban “And Tango Makes Three” every year than any other book in the country, three years running.
What animals do — what’s perceived to be “natural” — seems to carry a strange moral potency: it’s out there, irrefutably, as either a validation or a denunciation of our own behavior, depending on how you happen to feel about homosexuality and about nature. During the Victorian era, observations of same-sex behavior in swans and insects were held up as evidence against the morality of homosexuality in humans, since at the dawn of industrialism and Darwinism, people were invested in seeing themselves as more civilized than the “lower animals.” Robert Mugabe and the Nazis have employed the same reasoning, as did the 1970s anti-gay crusader Anita Bryant, who, Bruce Bagemihl notes, claimed in an interview that “even barnyard animals don’t do what homosexuals do” and was unmoved when the interviewer pointed out what actually happens in barnyards. On the other hand, an Australian drag queen known as Dr. Gertrude Glossip has used Bagemihl’s book to create a celebratory, interpretive gay animal tour of the Adelaide zoo, marketed to gay and lesbian tourists. The book has also been cited in a 2003 Supreme Court case that overturned a Texas state ban on sodomy and, similarly, in a legislative debate on the floor of the British Parliament.
James Essex, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, told me he has never incorporated facts about animal behavior into a legal argument about the rights of human beings. It’s totally beside the point, he said; people should not be discriminated against regardless of what animals do. (In her book, “Sexual Selections,” Marlene Zuk writes, “People need to be able to make decisions about their lives without worrying about keeping up with the bonobos.”) That being said, Essex told me, polls show that Americans are more likely to discriminate against gays and lesbians if they think homosexuality is “a choice.” “It shouldn’t be the basis of a moral judgment,” he said. But sometimes it is, and gay animals are compelling evidence that being gay isn’t a choice at all. In fact, Essex remembers reading a brief mention of animal homosexual behavior during an anthropology class in college in the mid-’80s. “And as a closeted guy, it made a difference to me,” he told me. He remembers thinking: “Oh, hey, this is quote-unquote natural. This is normal. This is part of the normal spectrum of humanity — or life.”
But later in our conversation, Essex paused and stayed silent for a while. He was thinking like a lawyer again now, and found a hole in that line of reasoning. “I guess, some of these animals could actually be quote-unquote making a choice,” he said. How could we, as humans, ever know? “Huh,” he said. “I’m just stopping to think that through. I’m not quite sure what to do with that.” Essex had stumbled right back into what he originally identified as the underlying problem. Those wanting to discriminate against gays and lesbians may have roped the rest of us into an argument over what’s “natural” just by asserting for so long that homosexuality is not. But affixing any importance to the question of whether something is natural or unnatural is a red herring; it’s impossible to pin down what those words mean even in a purely scientific context. (Zuk notes that animals don’t drive cars or watch movies, and no one calls those activities “unnatural.”) In the end, there’s just no coherent debate there to have. Animal research demonstrating the supposed “naturalness” of homosexuality has typically been embraced by gay rights activists and has put their opponents on the defensive. At the same time, research interpreted — or, maybe more often, misinterpreted — to be close to pinpointing that naturalness in a specific “gay gene” can make people on both sides anxious in a totally different way.
In 2007, for instance, the University of Illinois neurobiologist David Featherstone and several colleagues, while searching for new drug treatments for Lou Gehrig’s disease, happened upon a discovery: a specific protein mutation in the brain of male fruit flies made the flies try to have sex with other males. What the mutation did, more specifically, was tweak the fruit flies’ sense of smell, making them attracted to male pheromones — mounting other males was the end result. To Featherstone, how fruit flies smell doesn’t seem to have anything to do with human sexuality. “We didn’t think about the societal implications — we’re just a bunch of dorky biologists,” he told me recently. Still, after publishing a paper describing this mutation, he received a flood of phone calls and e-mail messages presuming that he could, and would, translate this new knowledge into a way of changing people’s sexual orientations. One e-mail message compared him with Dr. Josef Mengele, noting “the direct line that leads from studies like this to compulsory eradication of gay sexuality . . . whether [by] burnings at the stake or injections with chemical suppressants. You,” the writer added, “just placed a log on the pyre.” (Earlier that year, PETA and the former tennis star Martina Navratilova, among others, were waging similar attacks on a scientific study of gay sheep, presuming it was a precursor to developing a “treatment” for shutting off homosexuality in human fetuses.)
Still, many people who contacted Featherstone were actually grateful — for the same, baseless prospect. Some confessed struggling with feelings for members of the same sex and explained to him, very disarmingly, the anguish they’d been living with and the hope his fruit-fly study finally offered them. There were poignant phone calls from parents, concerned about their gay children. “I felt bad in a way,” Featherstone told me. It was hard not to be moved, and he would try to explain the implications of his research, or lack thereof, politely. “But there’s also this liberal, modern side of me that’s like: ‘Take it easy, lady. Let your son be your son.’ ”
Not long ago, more than two years after the publication of the fruit-fly paper, a woman wrote to Featherstone about her college-aged daughter. The daughter couldn’t shake an attraction to other girls but honestly felt she’d never be able to bring herself to accept it either. She was now contemplating suicide. “She feels that she is losing herself,” the mother wrote, “that sweet, innocent light that is within her.” Like many who reached out to Featherstone, the woman and her daughter seemed to take for granted that homosexuality was inborn — natural. Otherwise, the situation wouldn’t feel so torturously unfair. The mother begged Featherstone to rethink his unwillingness to turn his fruit-fly research into a treatment. “We all deserve a choice,” she wrote.
GRASPING FOR PARALLELS with animals can create emotional truths, though it usually results in slushy logic. It’s naïve to slap conclusions about a given species directly onto humans.
But it’s disingenuous to ignore the possibility of any connection. “A lot of zoologists are suspicious, I think, of applying the same evolutionary principles to humans that they apply to animals,” Paul Vasey, the Japanese-macaque researcher, told me. There’s an understandable tendency among some scientists to play down those links to stave off ideological misreading and controversy. “But broadly speaking, research on animals can inform research on humans,” Vasey says. What we learn about one species can expand or reorient our approach to others; a well-supported finding about one animal’s behavior can generate new hypotheses worth testing in another. “My research on Japanese macaques might influence how someone conducts their research on octopus, or their research on moose. Or their research on humans,” he said. In fact, it has influenced Vasey’s own research on humans.
Since 2003, in addition to his investigation of female-female macaque sex, Vasey has also been studying a particular group of men in Samoa. “Westerners would consider them the equivalent of gay guys, I guess,” he told me — they’re attracted exclusively to other men. But they’re not considered gay in Samoa. Instead, these men make up a third gender in Samoan culture, not men or women, called fa’afafine. (Vasey warned me that mislabeling the fa’afafine “gay” or “homosexual” in this article would jeopardize his ability to work with them in the future: while there’s no stigma attached to being fa’afafine in Samoan culture, homosexuality is seen as different and often repugnant, even by some fa’afafine.)
In a paper published earlier this year, Vasey and one of his graduate students at the University of Lethbridge, Doug P. VanderLaan, report that fa’afafine are markedly more willing to help raise their nieces and nephews than typical Samoan uncles: they’re more willing to baby-sit, help pay school and medical expenses and so on. Furthermore, this heightened altruism and affection is focused only on the fa’afafine’s nieces and nephews. They don’t just love kids in general. They are a kind of superuncle. This offers support for a hypothesis that has been toyed around with speculatively since the ’70s, when E. O. Wilson raised it: If a key perspective of evolutionary biology urges us to understand homosexuality in any species as a beneficial adaptation — if the point of life is to pass on one’s genes — then maybe the role of gay individuals is to somehow help their family members generate more offspring. Those family members will, after all, share a lot of the same genes.
Vasey and VanderLaan have also shown that mothers of fa’afafine have more kids than other Samoan women. And this fact supports a separate, existing hypothesis: maybe there’s a collection of genes that, when expressed in a male, make him gay but when expressed in a woman, make her more fertile. Like Wilson’s theory, this idea was also meant to explain how homosexuality is maintained in a species and not pushed out by the invisible hand of Darwinian evolution. But unlike Wilson’s hypothesis, it doesn’t try to find a sneaky way to explain homosexuality as an evolutionary adaptation; instead, it imagines homosexuality as a byproduct of an adaptation. It’s not too different from how Vasey explains why his female macaques insistently mount one another.
“What we’re finding in Samoa now,” Vasey told me, “is that it’s not an either-or.” Neither of the two hypotheses, on its own, can neatly explain the existence, or evolutionary contribution, of fa’afafine. “But when you put the two together,” he said, “the situation becomes a whole lot more nuanced.” It’s significant that Vasey began his work in Samoa only after he’d gotten to the crux of the macaque situation. “The Japanese macaques,” he told me, “in terms of my personal development, they raised my awareness of the possibility that homosexual behavior might not be an adaptation. I was more likely to put the two hypotheses together because I was just more sensitive, I guess, to the reality that the world . . . is organized so that adaptations and byproducts of adaptations coexist and hinge and impinge on each other. Humans are just another species.”
Vasey and VanderLaan’s work in Samoa doesn’t come close to settling theoretical questions about homosexuality. But unlike many biologists I spoke to, Vasey still seemed at ease discussing the speculative and even philosophical ties between animal and human sexuality. He’s not concerned with how foolishly or maliciously his work might be misread. “If somebody wanted to make something out of it, they could,” Vasey told me, “but they’d just look like some kind of misinformed hillbilly.”
Thus far, interpretations of his latest paper on the fa’afafine have been wildly contradictory but all equally overconfident. “New Gay Study Will Make Anti-Gay Activists Cry Uncle,” one blog headline read. Another claimed, “Darwinian Fundamentalists Desperate to Rationalize Homosexuality,” and cleared the way for a commenter to somehow bemoan Vasey’s findings as “justification” for gay men “to sexually abuse their nephews.”
“THERE’S TWO mating right there,” Lindsay Young called out.
They were right below her, 10 yards away on a flat, vegetated ridge. It was late afternoon. One albatross lay on its stomach, wobbling with its wings pulled back — the way penguins slide over ice — while a second stood upright behind it, fat rippling down its telescoping neck, as it pumped its pelvis. “That looks pretty standard,” Young said.
The birds carried on for a while. Then the male shivered and retracted. The female came to her feet and walked off. Young read the female’s leg band with her binoculars. “You just hit the jackpot,” she told me. The bird was part of a female-female pair. The male had another mate.
Young started scribbling notes, and we sat there rapidly rehashing the details. The sex didn’t seem forced at all. In a rape, Young said — which, for all the talk of albatross monogamy, is not uncommon in the species — a male will pin a female’s neck to the ground, or back her into a bush to tangle her up. (One study observed four different gangs of males forcing themselves on a single female, which lost an eye in the process.) But these two birds hardly seemed in a rush. Young made more notes. Then, with the male bird frozen right where he’d been left, the female slapped her rubbery feet on the ground, caught an updraft and disappeared over the ocean.
The next morning, Young still seemed to be assuring herself that her interpretation of what we’d seen was reasonable. “We didn’t see how it started, but how it ended looked . . . ” — she searched for a precise, nonanthropomorphic phrase. She couldn’t really find one, and let out a self-effacing laugh. “Mutually beneficial?” she said. “I don’t know!”
Dave Leonard, a friend of Young’s, was tagging along. Leonard — tall, lanky and tan, with a ponytail and a few days of scruff — is an ornithologist but works a desk job now for a state wildlife agency and seemed to be enjoying a morning outside. He brandished a gigantic telephoto lens in all directions and had trouble recovering after realizing he’d forgotten to pack his binoculars. Leonard knows his birds, but he was here as a bird lover, not a bird researcher, and wasn’t overly concerned with scientific detachment. When Young pointed out a male albatross whinnying at every female that passed overhead, Leonard shook his head and joked, “I feel your pain, dude.”
Eventually, Young spotted a female from one of the female-female pairs calling to a male about 15 feet away. The female was standing right where the male and his partner usually build their nest. Her head was straight up in the air, and she clapped her beak animatedly. In Young’s experience, it was rare for a bird to call so determinedly to another that’s not her partner; this would definitely count as “solicitation,” she said, if the two birds wound up copulating. “Pull up a rock,” she told me and Leonard.
We sat on the ground expectantly for a while. Eventually, the male albatross took a few steps toward the calling female. Then it stopped and looked around. It was comical, given the circumstances.
“ ‘Will anyone see me if I cheat?’ ” Young said. “I’m not sure if he’s taking her up on it, or just going, ‘Why are you in my spot?’ ” She was doing the bird’s interior monologue, narrating for one blameless, anthropomorphic moment.
The male stopped again and tucked his beak into the feathers behind his neck. Then he turned around and retreated. The taut sexual anticipation — at least as felt by us three humans — seemed to let up. “Well, his partner should be very proud of the self-control,” Young said. Then she said, “I know when to cut my losses,” gathered up her backpack and clipboard full of hard-earned data and trudged off to watch some other birds.
MORE THAN 4,000 miles across the Pacific, at a place called Taiaroa Head in southeastern New Zealand, two female Royal albatrosses (a related species) were building their nest. Later that winter, those two birds would become one of only a few known female-female pairs to successfully fledge a chick at Taiaroa Head in more than 60 years of continuous observation of the colony. (Two years before, the same two birds had engaged in a threesome, presiding over a single nest with the help of one male — just another “alternative mating strategy” albatrosses sometimes engage in, it turns out.)
The tourism board of Dunedin, a gay-friendly region of New Zealand, held a publicity-grabbing contest to name the “lesbian albatross” couple’s chick. For months, as the paired females incubated their egg, a press officer at Tourism Dunedin issued releases, and news organizations around the world, from England to India, ran with the story. The P.R. woman also tried to interest me in a story about a flightless kakapo bird in the region named Sirocco who’d recently made a memorable appearance on the BBC — “He actually started to shag the presenter, Mark Carwardine!” she wrote to me — and “has avid followers on Facebook and Twitter!”
A biologist working with the albatrosses at Taiaroa Head, Lyndon Perriman, seemed to bristle at the idea of naming any albatrosses — “They are wild birds,” he wrote to me in an e-mail message. He noted that the female-female pair made for an inconvenient tourist attraction because their nest was not visible from any of the public viewing areas. It seemed fitting: people’s ideas about the couple were riveting enough; it wasn’t necessary to see the actual birds. The chick hatched on Feb. 1. Tourism Dunedin named it Lola. The shortlist also included Rainbow, Lady Gagabatross and Ellen.
By JON MOOALLEM
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: March 29, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/magazine/04animals-t.html?th&emc=th
The Laysan albatross is a downy seabird with a seven-foot wingspan and a notched, pale yellow beak. Every November, a small colony of albatrosses assembles at a place called Kaena Point, overlooking the Pacific at the foot of a volcanic range, on the northwestern tip of Oahu, Hawaii. Each bird has spent the past six months in solitude, ranging over open water as far north as Alaska, and has come back to the breeding ground to reunite with its mate. Albatrosses can live to be 60 or 70 years old and typically mate with the same bird every year, for life. Their “divorce rate,” as biologists term it, is among the lowest of any bird.
When I visited Kaena Point in November, the first birds were just returning, and they spent a lot of their time gliding and jackknifing in the wind a few feet overhead or plopped like cushions in the sand. There are about 120 breeding albatrosses in the colony, and gradually, each will arrive and feel out the crowd for the one other particular albatross it has been waiting to have sex with again. At any given moment in the days before Thanksgiving, some birds may be just turning up while others sit there killing time. It feels like an airport baggage-claim area.
Once together, pairs will copulate and collaboratively incubate a single egg for 65 days. They take shifts: one bird has to sit at the nest while the other flaps off to fish and eat for weeks at a time. Couples preen each other’s feathers and engage in elaborate mating behaviors and displays. “Like when you’re in a couple,” Marlene Zuk, a biologist who has visited the colony, explained to me. “All those sickening things that couples do that gross out everyone else but the two people in the couple? . . . Birds have the same thing.” I often saw pairs sitting belly to belly, arching their necks and nuzzling together their heads to form a kind of heart shape. Speaking on Oahu a few years ago as first lady, Laura Bush praised Laysan albatross couples for making lifelong commitments to one another. Lindsay C. Young, a biologist who studies the Kaena Point colony, told me: “They were supposed to be icons of monogamy: one male and one female. But I wouldn’t assume that what you’re looking at is a male and a female.”
Young has been researching the albatrosses on Oahu since 2003; the colony was the focus of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, which she completed last spring. (She now works on conservation projects as a biologist for hire.) In the course of her doctoral work, Young and a colleague discovered, almost incidentally, that a third of the pairs at Kaena Point actually consisted of two female birds, not one male and one female. Laysan albatrosses are one of countless species in which the two sexes look basically identical. It turned out that many of the female-female pairs, at Kaena Point and at a colony that Young’s colleague studied on Kauai, had been together for 4, 8 or even 19 years — as far back as the biologists’ data went, in some cases. The female-female pairs had been incubating eggs together, rearing chicks and just generally passing under everybody’s nose for what you might call “straight” couples.
Young would never use the phrase “straight couples.” And she is adamantly against calling the other birds “lesbians” too. For one thing, the same-sex pairs appear to do everything male-female pairs do except have sex, and Young isn’t really sure, or comfortable judging, whether that technically qualifies them as lesbians or not. But moreover, the whole question is meaningless to her; it has nothing to do with her research. “ ‘Lesbian,’ ” she told me, “is a human term,” and Young — a diligent and cautious scientist, just beginning to make a name in her field — is devoted to using the most aseptic language possible and resisting any tinge of anthropomorphism. “The study is about albatross,” she told me firmly. “The study is not about humans.” Often, she seemed to be mentally peer-reviewing her words before speaking.
A discovery like Young’s can disorient a wildlife biologist in the most thrilling way — if he or she takes it seriously, which has traditionally not been the case. Various forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs. A female koala might force another female against a tree and mount her, while throwing back her head and releasing what one scientist described as “exhalated belchlike sounds.” Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole. Within most species, homosexual sex has been documented only sporadically, and there appear to be few cases of individual animals who engage in it exclusively. For more than a century, this kind of observation was usually tacked onto scientific papers as a curiosity, if it was reported at all, and not pursued as a legitimate research subject. Biologists tried to explain away what they’d seen, or dismissed it as theoretically meaningless — an isolated glitch in an otherwise elegant Darwinian universe where every facet of an animal’s behavior is geared toward reproducing. One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional.
In recent years though, more biologists have been looking objectively at same-sex sexuality in animals — approaching it as real science. For Young, the existence of so many female-female albatross pairs disproved assumptions that she didn’t even realize she’d been making and, in the process, raised a chain of progressively more complicated questions. One of the prickliest, it seemed, was how a scientist is even supposed to talk about any of this, given how eager the rest of us have been to twist the sex lives of animals into allegories of our own. “This colony is literally the largest proportion of — I don’t know what the correct term is: ‘homosexual animals’? — in the world,” Young told me. “Which I’m sure some people think is a great thing, and others might think is not.”
It was a guarded understatement. Two years ago, Young decided to write a short paper with two colleagues on the female-female albatross pairs. “We were pretty careful in the original article to plainly and simply report what we found,” she said. “It’s definitely a little bit of a tricky subject, and one you want to be gentle on.” But the journal that published the paper, Biology Letters, sent out a press release a few days after the California Supreme Court legalized gay marriage. At 6 the next morning, a Fox News reporter called Young on her cellphone. The resulting story joined others, including one in this paper, and as the news ricocheted around the Internet, a stampede of online commenters alternately celebrated Young’s findings as a clear call for equality or denigrated them as “pure propaganda and selective science at its dumbest” and “an effort to humanize animals or devolve humans to the level of animals or to further an agenda.” Many pointed out that animals also rape or eat their young; was America going to tolerate that too, just because it’s “natural”?
A Denver-based publication for gay parents welcomed any and all new readers from “the extensive lesbian albatross parent community.” The conservative Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn highlighted Young’s paper on his Web site, under the heading “Your Tax Dollars at Work,” even though her study of the female-female pairs was not actually federally financed. Stephen Colbert warned on Comedy Central that “albatresbians” were threatening American family values with their “Sappho-avian agenda.” A gay rights advocate e-mailed Young, asking her to fly a rainbow flag above each female-female nest, to identify them and show solidarity. Even now, the first thing everyone wants to know from Young — sometimes the only thing — is, what do these lesbian albatrosses say about us?
“I don’t answer that question,” she told me.
A FEMALE LAYSAN albatross is physically capable of laying only one egg per year — that’s just how it’s built. Nevertheless, since as early as 1919, biologists have periodically found nests of albatrosses (and similar species of birds) with two eggs inside them, or with a second egg just outside, as if it had rolled out. (This will inevitably happen; there’s simply not enough room in the nest for two eggs and one Laysan albatross.) Scientists have a term for the phenomenon of extra eggs in a nest: a “supernormal clutch.” But in the case of the albatross, they never had a watertight explanation.
In the early 1960s, one ornithologist tried to put the whole cumbersome mystery to rest by asserting that some of those female birds must simply be able to lay multiple eggs. The claim was apparently based on sketchy data, but supernormal clutches were so rare that it was hard to rack up enough observations to disprove the hypothesis. Real progress was finally made in 1968, when Harvey Fisher, a dean of midcentury albatross science, reported on seven years of daily observations made at 3,440 different nests on the Midway atoll in the middle of the Pacific. Fisher concluded that “two eggs in a nest are an indication that two females used the nest, although at different times.” He was describing “egg dumping,” whereby, for example, an inexperienced female accidentally lays her egg in the wrong nest. From then on, egg dumping was a default explanation for supernormal clutches in albatrosses. After all, Fisher had also declared that “promiscuity, polygamy and polyandry are unknown in this species.” Lesbianism apparently never occurred to anyone — even enough to be cursorily dismissed. As Brenda Zaun recently told me, “It never dawned on anyone to sex the birds.”
Zaun, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was studying a Laysan colony on Kauai 40 years after Fisher’s publication. She realized that certain nests there seemed to wind up with two eggs in them year after year; the distribution of the supernormal clutches wasn’t random, as it would presumably be if it were caused exclusively by egg dumping. On a hunch, Zaun pulled feathers from a sample of the breeding pairs associated with two-egg nests and sent them to Lindsay Young, asking her to draw DNA from the feathers and genetically determine the sexes of those birds in her lab. When the results showed that every bird was female, Young figured she’d messed up. So she did it again — and got the same result. Then she genetically sexed every bird at Kaena Point. “Where it wasn’t totally clear, or I worried that maybe I mixed up the sample, I actually went back into the field and took new blood samples to do it again,” Young told me. In the end, she genetically sexed the birds in her lab four times, just to be sure. She found that 39 of the 125 nests at Kaena Point since 2004 belonged to female-female pairs, including more than 20 nests in which she’d never noticed a supernormal clutch. It seemed that certain females were somehow finding opportunities to quickly copulate with males but incubating their eggs — and doing everything else an albatross does while at the colony — with other females.
Young gave a talk about these findings at an international meeting of Pacific-seabird researchers. “There was a lot of murmuring in the room,” she remembers. “Then, afterward, people were coming up to me and saying: ‘We see supernormal clutches all the time. We assumed it was a male and a female.’ And I’d say: ‘Yeah? Well, you might want to look into that.’ ” Recently, journals have asked her to confidentially peer-review new papers about other species, describing similar discoveries. “I can’t say which species,” she explains, “but my guess is, in the next year, we’re going to see a lot more examples of this.”
It may seem surprising that scientists sometimes don’t know the true sexes of the animals they spend their careers studying — that they can be tripped up in some “Tootsie” -like farce for so long. But it’s easy to underestimate the pandemonium that they’re struggling to interpret in the wild. Often, biologists are forced to assign sexes to animals by watching what they do when they mate. When one albatross or boar or cricket rears up and mounts a second, it would seem to be advertising the genders of both. Unless, of course, that’s not the situation at all.
“There is still an overall presumption of heterosexuality,” the biologist Bruce Bagemihl told me. “Individuals, populations or species are considered to be entirely heterosexual until proven otherwise.” While this may sound like a reasonable starting point, Bagemihl calls it a “heterosexist bias” and has shown it to be a significant roadblock to understanding the diversity of what animals actually do. In 1999, Baghemihl published “Biological Exuberance,” a book that pulled together a colossal amount of previous piecemeal research and showed how biologists’ biases had marginalized animal homosexuality for the last 150 years — sometimes innocently enough, sometimes in an eruption of anthropomorphic disgust. Courtship behaviors between two animals of the same sex were persistently described in the literature as “mock” or “pseudo” courtship — or just “practice.” Homosexual sex between ostriches was interpreted by one scientist as “a nuisance” that “goes on and on.” One man, studying Mazarine Blue butterflies in Morocco in 1987, regretted having to report “the lurid details of declining moral standards and of horrific sexual offenses” which are “all too often packed” into national newspapers. And a bighorn-sheep biologist confessed in his memoir, “I still cringe at the memory of seeing old D-ram mount S-ram repeatedly.” To think, he wrote, “of those magnificent beasts as ‘queers’ — Oh, God!”
“What Bagemihl’s book really did,” the Canadian primatologist and evolutionary psychologist Paul Vasey says, “is raise people’s awareness around the fact that this occurs in quote-unquote nature — in animals. And that it can be studied in a serious, scholarly way.” But studying it seriously means resolving a conundrum. At the heart of evolutionary biology, since Darwin, has been the idea that any genetic traits and behaviors that outfit an animal with an advantage — that help the animal make lots of offspring — will remain in a species, while ones that don’t will vanish. In short, evolution gradually optimizes every animal toward a single goal: passing on its genes. The Yale ornithologist Richard Prum told me: “Our field is a lot like economics: we have a core of theory, like free-market theory, where we have the invisible hand of the market creating order — all commodities attain exactly the price they’re worth. Homosexuality is a tough case, because it appears to violate that central tenet, that all of sexual behavior is about reproduction. The question is, why would anyone invest in sexual behavior that isn’t reproductive?” –— much less a behavior that looks to be starkly counterproductive. Moreover, if animals carrying the genes associated with it are less likely to reproduce, how has that behavior managed to stick around?
Given this big umbrella of theory, the very existence of homosexual behavior in animals can feel a little like impenetrable nonsense, something a researcher could spend years banging his or her head against the wall deliberating. The difficulty of that challenge, more than any implicit or explicit homophobia, may be why past biologists skirted the subject.
IN THE LAST DECADE, however, Paul Vasey and others have begun developing new hypotheses based on actual, prolonged observation of different animals, deciphering the ways given homosexual behaviors may have evolved and the evolutionary role they might play within the context of individual species. Different ideas are emerging about how these behaviors could fit within that traditional Darwinian framework, including seeing them as conferring reproductive advantages in roundabout ways. Male dung flies, for example, appear to mount other males to tire them out, knocking them out of competition for available females. Researchers speculate that young male bottlenose dolphins mount one another simply to establish trust and form bonds — but those bonds actually turn out to be critical to reproduction, since when males mature, they work in groups to cooperatively gain access to females.
These ideas generally aim to explain only particular behaviors in a particular species. So far, the only real conclusion this relatively small body of literature seems to point to, collectively, is a kind of deflating, meta-conclusion: a single explanation of homosexual behavior in animals may not be possible, because thinking of “homosexual behavior in animals” as a single scientific subject might not make much sense. “Biologists want to build these unified theories to explain everything they see,” Vasey told me. So do journalists, he added — all people, really. “But none of this lends itself to a linear story. My take on it is that homosexual behavior is not a uniform phenomenon. Having one unifying body of theory that explains why it’s happening in all these different species might be a chimera.”
The point of heterosexual sex, Vasey said, no matter what kind of animal is doing it, is primarily reproduction. But that shouldn’t trick us into thinking that homosexual behavior has some equivalent, organizing purpose — that the two are tidy opposites. “All this homosexual behavior isn’t tied together by that sort of primary function,” Vasey said. Even what the same-sex animals are doing varies tremendously from species to species. But we’re quick to conceive of that great range of activities in the way it most handily tracks to our anthropomorphic point of view: put crassly, all those different animals just seem to be doing gay sex stuff with one another. As the biologist Marlene Zuk explains, we are hard-wired to read all animal behavior as “some version of the way people do things” and animals as “blurred, imperfect copies of humans.”
When I visited Zuk at her lab at the University of California at Riverside last December, an online video clip of an octopus carrying a coconut shell around the seafloor, and periodically hiding under it, was starting to go viral. For a few days, people everywhere were flipping out about how intelligent and wily this octopus was. Not Zuk, though. “Oh, spare me,” she said. To us, Zuk explained, that octopus’s behavior reads as proof that “octopuses are at one with humans” because it just happens to look like something we do — how a toddler plays peekaboo under a blanket, say, or a bandit ducks into an alleyway dumpster to avoid the cops. But the octopus doesn’t know that. Nor is it doing something so uncommon in the animal world. Zuk explained that caddis-fly larvae collect rocks and loom them together into intricate shelters. “But for some reason we don’t think that’s cool,” she said, “because the caddis-fly larvae don’t have big eyes like us.”
Something similar may be happening with what we perceive to be homosexual sex in an array of animal species: we may be grouping together a big grab bag of behaviors based on only a superficial similarity. Within the logic of each species, or group of species, many of these behaviors appear to have their own causes and consequences — their own evolutionary meanings, so to speak. The Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden told me to think of all these animals as “multitasking” with their private parts.
It’s also possible that some homosexual behaviors don’t provide a conventional evolutionary advantage; but neither do they upend everything we know about biology. For the last 15 years, for example, Paul Vasey has been studying Japanese macaques, a species of two-and-a-half-foot-tall, pink-faced monkey. He has looked almost exclusively at why female macaques mount one another during the mating season. Vasey now says he is on to the answer: “It isn’t functional,” he told me; the behavior has no discernible purpose, adaptationally speaking. Instead, it’s a byproduct of a behavior that does, and the supposedly streamlining force of evolution just never flushed that byproduct from the gene pool. Female macaques regularly mount males too, Vasey explained, probably to focus their attention and reinforce their bond as mates. The females are physically capable of mounting any gender of macaque. They’ve just never developed an instinct to limit themselves to one. “Evolution doesn’t create perfect adaptations,” Vasey said. As Zuk put it, “There’s a lot of slop in the system — which,” she was sure to add, “is not the same as saying homosexuality is a mistake.”
ABOUT TWO DOZEN birds were knocking around when Lindsay Young and I arrived at Kaena Point one afternoon. Young dished about a few of them — “Her mate didn’t show up last year”; “God, this one’s annoying” — as they waddled by. Laysan albatrosses are not nearly as graceful on land as they are in the air; even they seem surprised by the size of their feet. (Later that week, at a nearby resort, I would recognize their gait while watching an out-of-shape snorkeler toddle back to his beach towel in rented flippers.) “I’m just writing down who’s here,” Young said, reading the numbers on the birds’ leg bands and marking them on her clipboard. After trying and failing to get a clear view of one bird’s leg with binoculars, she finally just walked to within a few feet of the animal and leaned over to look.
This is the luxury of studying Laysan albatrosses. Having evolved with no natural predators, the birds have no fight-or-flight instinct — you can basically go right up to one and grab it. In fact, Young did just this a short while later, slinking up to a male on all fours, sweeping it in by its flank and, in one expert motion, straightjacketing the wings under one arm and clamping the beak shut in her other hand. Then, she walked over and handed the thing to me; she needed to take an expensive tracking device off the bird’s ankle. “Sorry, but it’s like watching a thousand-dollar bill fly around,” she said. She took some pliers from her backpack to twist off the anklet and, as I stood bear-hugging the albatross, she added: “They have a nice smell. It’s a little musty.”
Young and Marlene Zuk are now applying for a 10-year National Science Foundation grant to continue studying the female albatross pairs. One of the first questions they want to answer is how these birds are winding up with fertilized eggs. Typically, albatrosses fend off birds who aren’t their mates. So Young has been trying to determine if males who arrive back at the colony before their own partners do are forcing themselves on these females or whether these females are somehow “soliciting” the males for sex. She was staking out Kaena Point on a daily basis, trying to watch these illicit copulations unfold for herself. This was Young’s third year; so far, she’d only managed to see it happen twice.
Young and I ambled around for half an hour, maybe more. Then she pointed and, in a monotone, said, “So, that’s a female-female pair.” We crouched and watched the two birds, numbers 169 and 983. They sat under a spindly, native Hawaiian naio bush. They made baa sounds at each other. After a while, Young and I got up.
Another hour passed. (Usually, Young brings along a camping chair.) Occasionally, albatrosses danced in groups of two or three, raising their necks, groaning like vibrating cellphones, clacking their beaks or stomping. But most of the time, they didn’t do much at all. “I’ve spent a lot of my career watching animals not have sex,” Zuk later told me.
Homosexual activity is often observed in animal populations with a shortage of one sex — in the wild but more frequently at zoos. Some biologists anthropomorphically call this “the prisoner effect.” That’s basically the situation at Kaena Point: there are fewer male albatrosses than females (although not every male albatross has a mate). Because it takes two albatrosses to incubate an egg, switching on and off at the nest, a female that can’t find a male (or maybe, Young says, who can’t find “a good-enough male”) has no chance of producing a chick and passing on her genes. Quickly mating with an otherwise-committed male, then pairing with another single female to incubate the egg, is a way to raise those odds.
Still, pairing off with another female creates its own problems: nearly every female lays an egg in November whether she has managed to get it fertilized or not, and the small, craterlike nests that albatross pairs build in the dirt can accommodate only one egg and one bird. So Young was also trying to figure out how a female-female pair decides which of its two eggs to incubate and which to chuck out of the nest — if the birds are deciding at all, and not just knocking one egg out accidentally. From a strict Darwinian perspective, Young told me, “it doesn’t pay for one bird to incubate the other’s egg unless her partner is going to let her egg be incubated the following year.” But presumably, neither female bird knows whether an egg is hers or the other bird’s, much less whether it’s fertilized or not. A Laysan albatross just knows to sit on whatever’s under it. “They’ll incubate anything — I have a photo of one incubating a volleyball,” Young said.
And these were only preambles to more questions. With the male of an albatross pair replaced by another female, every step of the species’ normal, well-honed process for fledging a chick seemed suddenly to present a fresh dilemma. Ultimately, either the rules of albatrossdom were breaking down and the lesbian couples were booting up some alternate suite of behaviors, governed by its own set of rules, or else science had never thoroughly understood the rules of albatrossdom to begin with. And that’s the whole point, for Young: it’s the complexity and apparent flexibility of the species that fascinates her — the puzzle those female-female pairs create at Kaena Point just by existing. She’s not trying to explain homosexual behavior. She’s trying to explain the albatross. And that’s why the rest of the world’s politicized reaction to her work caught her by surprise.
Many people who contacted Young after the publication of her first albatross paper assumed she was a lesbian. She is not. Young’s husband, a biological consultant, was actually an author of the paper, along with Brenda Zaun (who is also not gay, for what it’s worth). Young found the assumption offensive — not because she was being mistaken for gay, but because she was being mistaken for a bad scientist; these people seemed to presume that her research was compromised by a personal agenda. Still, some of the biologists doing the most incisive work on animal homosexuality are in fact gay. Several people I spoke to told me their own sexual identities either helped spur or maintain their interest in the topic; Bruce Bagemihl argued that gay and lesbian people are “often better equipped to detect heterosexist bias when investigating the subject simply because we encounter it so frequently in our everyday lives.” With a laugh, Paul Vasey told me, “People automatically assume I’m gay.” He is gay, he added, but that fact didn’t seem to detract from his amusement.
IN RETROSPECT, the big, sloshing stew of anthropomorphic analyses that Young’s paper provoked in the culture couldn’t have been less surprising. For whatever reason, we’re prone to seeing animals — especially animals that appear to be gay — as reflections, models and foils of ourselves; we’re extraordinarily, and sometimes irrationally, invested in them.
Only a few months before I visited Kaena Point, two penguins at the San Francisco Zoo became the latest in a tradition of captive same-sex penguin couples making global headlines. After six years together — in which the two birds even fostered a son, named Chuck Norris — the penguins split up when one of the males ran off with a female named Linda. The zoo’s penguin keeper, Anthony Brown, told me he received angry e-mail, accusing him of separating the pair for political reasons. “Penguins make their own decisions here at the San Francisco Zoo,” Brown assured me. And while he stressed that there is no scientific way of determining if animals are “gay,” because the word connotes a sexual orientation, not just a behavior, he also noted that, being the San Francisco Zoo, “there’s definitely a lot of opinion here, internally, that we give in and call the penguins gay.” Another male-male penguin couple who fostered a chick at the Central Park Zoo was subsequently immortalized in 2005 in the illustrated children’s book “And Tango Makes Three.” According to the American Library Association, there have been more requests for libraries to ban “And Tango Makes Three” every year than any other book in the country, three years running.
What animals do — what’s perceived to be “natural” — seems to carry a strange moral potency: it’s out there, irrefutably, as either a validation or a denunciation of our own behavior, depending on how you happen to feel about homosexuality and about nature. During the Victorian era, observations of same-sex behavior in swans and insects were held up as evidence against the morality of homosexuality in humans, since at the dawn of industrialism and Darwinism, people were invested in seeing themselves as more civilized than the “lower animals.” Robert Mugabe and the Nazis have employed the same reasoning, as did the 1970s anti-gay crusader Anita Bryant, who, Bruce Bagemihl notes, claimed in an interview that “even barnyard animals don’t do what homosexuals do” and was unmoved when the interviewer pointed out what actually happens in barnyards. On the other hand, an Australian drag queen known as Dr. Gertrude Glossip has used Bagemihl’s book to create a celebratory, interpretive gay animal tour of the Adelaide zoo, marketed to gay and lesbian tourists. The book has also been cited in a 2003 Supreme Court case that overturned a Texas state ban on sodomy and, similarly, in a legislative debate on the floor of the British Parliament.
James Essex, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, told me he has never incorporated facts about animal behavior into a legal argument about the rights of human beings. It’s totally beside the point, he said; people should not be discriminated against regardless of what animals do. (In her book, “Sexual Selections,” Marlene Zuk writes, “People need to be able to make decisions about their lives without worrying about keeping up with the bonobos.”) That being said, Essex told me, polls show that Americans are more likely to discriminate against gays and lesbians if they think homosexuality is “a choice.” “It shouldn’t be the basis of a moral judgment,” he said. But sometimes it is, and gay animals are compelling evidence that being gay isn’t a choice at all. In fact, Essex remembers reading a brief mention of animal homosexual behavior during an anthropology class in college in the mid-’80s. “And as a closeted guy, it made a difference to me,” he told me. He remembers thinking: “Oh, hey, this is quote-unquote natural. This is normal. This is part of the normal spectrum of humanity — or life.”
But later in our conversation, Essex paused and stayed silent for a while. He was thinking like a lawyer again now, and found a hole in that line of reasoning. “I guess, some of these animals could actually be quote-unquote making a choice,” he said. How could we, as humans, ever know? “Huh,” he said. “I’m just stopping to think that through. I’m not quite sure what to do with that.” Essex had stumbled right back into what he originally identified as the underlying problem. Those wanting to discriminate against gays and lesbians may have roped the rest of us into an argument over what’s “natural” just by asserting for so long that homosexuality is not. But affixing any importance to the question of whether something is natural or unnatural is a red herring; it’s impossible to pin down what those words mean even in a purely scientific context. (Zuk notes that animals don’t drive cars or watch movies, and no one calls those activities “unnatural.”) In the end, there’s just no coherent debate there to have. Animal research demonstrating the supposed “naturalness” of homosexuality has typically been embraced by gay rights activists and has put their opponents on the defensive. At the same time, research interpreted — or, maybe more often, misinterpreted — to be close to pinpointing that naturalness in a specific “gay gene” can make people on both sides anxious in a totally different way.
In 2007, for instance, the University of Illinois neurobiologist David Featherstone and several colleagues, while searching for new drug treatments for Lou Gehrig’s disease, happened upon a discovery: a specific protein mutation in the brain of male fruit flies made the flies try to have sex with other males. What the mutation did, more specifically, was tweak the fruit flies’ sense of smell, making them attracted to male pheromones — mounting other males was the end result. To Featherstone, how fruit flies smell doesn’t seem to have anything to do with human sexuality. “We didn’t think about the societal implications — we’re just a bunch of dorky biologists,” he told me recently. Still, after publishing a paper describing this mutation, he received a flood of phone calls and e-mail messages presuming that he could, and would, translate this new knowledge into a way of changing people’s sexual orientations. One e-mail message compared him with Dr. Josef Mengele, noting “the direct line that leads from studies like this to compulsory eradication of gay sexuality . . . whether [by] burnings at the stake or injections with chemical suppressants. You,” the writer added, “just placed a log on the pyre.” (Earlier that year, PETA and the former tennis star Martina Navratilova, among others, were waging similar attacks on a scientific study of gay sheep, presuming it was a precursor to developing a “treatment” for shutting off homosexuality in human fetuses.)
Still, many people who contacted Featherstone were actually grateful — for the same, baseless prospect. Some confessed struggling with feelings for members of the same sex and explained to him, very disarmingly, the anguish they’d been living with and the hope his fruit-fly study finally offered them. There were poignant phone calls from parents, concerned about their gay children. “I felt bad in a way,” Featherstone told me. It was hard not to be moved, and he would try to explain the implications of his research, or lack thereof, politely. “But there’s also this liberal, modern side of me that’s like: ‘Take it easy, lady. Let your son be your son.’ ”
Not long ago, more than two years after the publication of the fruit-fly paper, a woman wrote to Featherstone about her college-aged daughter. The daughter couldn’t shake an attraction to other girls but honestly felt she’d never be able to bring herself to accept it either. She was now contemplating suicide. “She feels that she is losing herself,” the mother wrote, “that sweet, innocent light that is within her.” Like many who reached out to Featherstone, the woman and her daughter seemed to take for granted that homosexuality was inborn — natural. Otherwise, the situation wouldn’t feel so torturously unfair. The mother begged Featherstone to rethink his unwillingness to turn his fruit-fly research into a treatment. “We all deserve a choice,” she wrote.
GRASPING FOR PARALLELS with animals can create emotional truths, though it usually results in slushy logic. It’s naïve to slap conclusions about a given species directly onto humans.
But it’s disingenuous to ignore the possibility of any connection. “A lot of zoologists are suspicious, I think, of applying the same evolutionary principles to humans that they apply to animals,” Paul Vasey, the Japanese-macaque researcher, told me. There’s an understandable tendency among some scientists to play down those links to stave off ideological misreading and controversy. “But broadly speaking, research on animals can inform research on humans,” Vasey says. What we learn about one species can expand or reorient our approach to others; a well-supported finding about one animal’s behavior can generate new hypotheses worth testing in another. “My research on Japanese macaques might influence how someone conducts their research on octopus, or their research on moose. Or their research on humans,” he said. In fact, it has influenced Vasey’s own research on humans.
Since 2003, in addition to his investigation of female-female macaque sex, Vasey has also been studying a particular group of men in Samoa. “Westerners would consider them the equivalent of gay guys, I guess,” he told me — they’re attracted exclusively to other men. But they’re not considered gay in Samoa. Instead, these men make up a third gender in Samoan culture, not men or women, called fa’afafine. (Vasey warned me that mislabeling the fa’afafine “gay” or “homosexual” in this article would jeopardize his ability to work with them in the future: while there’s no stigma attached to being fa’afafine in Samoan culture, homosexuality is seen as different and often repugnant, even by some fa’afafine.)
In a paper published earlier this year, Vasey and one of his graduate students at the University of Lethbridge, Doug P. VanderLaan, report that fa’afafine are markedly more willing to help raise their nieces and nephews than typical Samoan uncles: they’re more willing to baby-sit, help pay school and medical expenses and so on. Furthermore, this heightened altruism and affection is focused only on the fa’afafine’s nieces and nephews. They don’t just love kids in general. They are a kind of superuncle. This offers support for a hypothesis that has been toyed around with speculatively since the ’70s, when E. O. Wilson raised it: If a key perspective of evolutionary biology urges us to understand homosexuality in any species as a beneficial adaptation — if the point of life is to pass on one’s genes — then maybe the role of gay individuals is to somehow help their family members generate more offspring. Those family members will, after all, share a lot of the same genes.
Vasey and VanderLaan have also shown that mothers of fa’afafine have more kids than other Samoan women. And this fact supports a separate, existing hypothesis: maybe there’s a collection of genes that, when expressed in a male, make him gay but when expressed in a woman, make her more fertile. Like Wilson’s theory, this idea was also meant to explain how homosexuality is maintained in a species and not pushed out by the invisible hand of Darwinian evolution. But unlike Wilson’s hypothesis, it doesn’t try to find a sneaky way to explain homosexuality as an evolutionary adaptation; instead, it imagines homosexuality as a byproduct of an adaptation. It’s not too different from how Vasey explains why his female macaques insistently mount one another.
“What we’re finding in Samoa now,” Vasey told me, “is that it’s not an either-or.” Neither of the two hypotheses, on its own, can neatly explain the existence, or evolutionary contribution, of fa’afafine. “But when you put the two together,” he said, “the situation becomes a whole lot more nuanced.” It’s significant that Vasey began his work in Samoa only after he’d gotten to the crux of the macaque situation. “The Japanese macaques,” he told me, “in terms of my personal development, they raised my awareness of the possibility that homosexual behavior might not be an adaptation. I was more likely to put the two hypotheses together because I was just more sensitive, I guess, to the reality that the world . . . is organized so that adaptations and byproducts of adaptations coexist and hinge and impinge on each other. Humans are just another species.”
Vasey and VanderLaan’s work in Samoa doesn’t come close to settling theoretical questions about homosexuality. But unlike many biologists I spoke to, Vasey still seemed at ease discussing the speculative and even philosophical ties between animal and human sexuality. He’s not concerned with how foolishly or maliciously his work might be misread. “If somebody wanted to make something out of it, they could,” Vasey told me, “but they’d just look like some kind of misinformed hillbilly.”
Thus far, interpretations of his latest paper on the fa’afafine have been wildly contradictory but all equally overconfident. “New Gay Study Will Make Anti-Gay Activists Cry Uncle,” one blog headline read. Another claimed, “Darwinian Fundamentalists Desperate to Rationalize Homosexuality,” and cleared the way for a commenter to somehow bemoan Vasey’s findings as “justification” for gay men “to sexually abuse their nephews.”
“THERE’S TWO mating right there,” Lindsay Young called out.
They were right below her, 10 yards away on a flat, vegetated ridge. It was late afternoon. One albatross lay on its stomach, wobbling with its wings pulled back — the way penguins slide over ice — while a second stood upright behind it, fat rippling down its telescoping neck, as it pumped its pelvis. “That looks pretty standard,” Young said.
The birds carried on for a while. Then the male shivered and retracted. The female came to her feet and walked off. Young read the female’s leg band with her binoculars. “You just hit the jackpot,” she told me. The bird was part of a female-female pair. The male had another mate.
Young started scribbling notes, and we sat there rapidly rehashing the details. The sex didn’t seem forced at all. In a rape, Young said — which, for all the talk of albatross monogamy, is not uncommon in the species — a male will pin a female’s neck to the ground, or back her into a bush to tangle her up. (One study observed four different gangs of males forcing themselves on a single female, which lost an eye in the process.) But these two birds hardly seemed in a rush. Young made more notes. Then, with the male bird frozen right where he’d been left, the female slapped her rubbery feet on the ground, caught an updraft and disappeared over the ocean.
The next morning, Young still seemed to be assuring herself that her interpretation of what we’d seen was reasonable. “We didn’t see how it started, but how it ended looked . . . ” — she searched for a precise, nonanthropomorphic phrase. She couldn’t really find one, and let out a self-effacing laugh. “Mutually beneficial?” she said. “I don’t know!”
Dave Leonard, a friend of Young’s, was tagging along. Leonard — tall, lanky and tan, with a ponytail and a few days of scruff — is an ornithologist but works a desk job now for a state wildlife agency and seemed to be enjoying a morning outside. He brandished a gigantic telephoto lens in all directions and had trouble recovering after realizing he’d forgotten to pack his binoculars. Leonard knows his birds, but he was here as a bird lover, not a bird researcher, and wasn’t overly concerned with scientific detachment. When Young pointed out a male albatross whinnying at every female that passed overhead, Leonard shook his head and joked, “I feel your pain, dude.”
Eventually, Young spotted a female from one of the female-female pairs calling to a male about 15 feet away. The female was standing right where the male and his partner usually build their nest. Her head was straight up in the air, and she clapped her beak animatedly. In Young’s experience, it was rare for a bird to call so determinedly to another that’s not her partner; this would definitely count as “solicitation,” she said, if the two birds wound up copulating. “Pull up a rock,” she told me and Leonard.
We sat on the ground expectantly for a while. Eventually, the male albatross took a few steps toward the calling female. Then it stopped and looked around. It was comical, given the circumstances.
“ ‘Will anyone see me if I cheat?’ ” Young said. “I’m not sure if he’s taking her up on it, or just going, ‘Why are you in my spot?’ ” She was doing the bird’s interior monologue, narrating for one blameless, anthropomorphic moment.
The male stopped again and tucked his beak into the feathers behind his neck. Then he turned around and retreated. The taut sexual anticipation — at least as felt by us three humans — seemed to let up. “Well, his partner should be very proud of the self-control,” Young said. Then she said, “I know when to cut my losses,” gathered up her backpack and clipboard full of hard-earned data and trudged off to watch some other birds.
MORE THAN 4,000 miles across the Pacific, at a place called Taiaroa Head in southeastern New Zealand, two female Royal albatrosses (a related species) were building their nest. Later that winter, those two birds would become one of only a few known female-female pairs to successfully fledge a chick at Taiaroa Head in more than 60 years of continuous observation of the colony. (Two years before, the same two birds had engaged in a threesome, presiding over a single nest with the help of one male — just another “alternative mating strategy” albatrosses sometimes engage in, it turns out.)
The tourism board of Dunedin, a gay-friendly region of New Zealand, held a publicity-grabbing contest to name the “lesbian albatross” couple’s chick. For months, as the paired females incubated their egg, a press officer at Tourism Dunedin issued releases, and news organizations around the world, from England to India, ran with the story. The P.R. woman also tried to interest me in a story about a flightless kakapo bird in the region named Sirocco who’d recently made a memorable appearance on the BBC — “He actually started to shag the presenter, Mark Carwardine!” she wrote to me — and “has avid followers on Facebook and Twitter!”
A biologist working with the albatrosses at Taiaroa Head, Lyndon Perriman, seemed to bristle at the idea of naming any albatrosses — “They are wild birds,” he wrote to me in an e-mail message. He noted that the female-female pair made for an inconvenient tourist attraction because their nest was not visible from any of the public viewing areas. It seemed fitting: people’s ideas about the couple were riveting enough; it wasn’t necessary to see the actual birds. The chick hatched on Feb. 1. Tourism Dunedin named it Lola. The shortlist also included Rainbow, Lady Gagabatross and Ellen.
Bargain Rates for a C.E.O.?
Bargain Rates for a C.E.O.?
By DEVIN LEONARD
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 2, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/business/04comp.html?th&emc=th
LAST year may have been unnerving for chief executives accustomed to all of the familiar ornaments of corporate life: eight-figure pay packages, corporate jets, memberships in select clubs, and on and on.
As the country settled into the worst recession in decades, the government became unusually involved in corporate pay practices. The Obama administration appointed Kenneth Feinberg — a k a the pay czar — to scrutinize compensation at corporate behemoths like Citigroup, the American International Group, Bank of America, General Motors and Chrysler, all of which taxpayers propped up with billions upon billions of dollars in bailouts.
Mr. Feinberg came up with his own blueprint for compensation boundaries — and noted that its strictures could be applied not only to corporate wards of the state under the Troubled Asset Relief Program but also in myriad other boardrooms.
So if you were the typical American C.E.O., you may have found some of the pay czar’s prescriptions startling. For instance, he thinks you should pay golf club dues out of your own pocket. He also would like you to take less of your pay in cash and more of it in stock. In fact, the White House set a limit on how much cash top executives of the biggest TARP companies could get as part of their annual compensation: $500,000 a year. That sum that may seem princely to the average American worker but, alas, doesn’t buy much for a crowd used to Fifth Avenue triplexes, third and fourth homes, top-drawer health care and lavish private schools for their children.
Mr. Feinberg’s proposed remedies weren’t the only compensation-related issues that might have disturbed an executive’s sleep. The Securities and Exchange Commission ordered companies to disclose more information about compensation, which invariably stirs up shareholders. And the Federal Reserve also announced its own sweeping review of banker pay.
On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, Democratic allies of the White House are mulling reforms that would require public companies to give shareholders an annual “say on pay” vote. While the measure, if enacted, would be nonbinding, it would still force C.E.O.’s to publicly debate at annual meetings all aspects of sumptuous pay packages.
In short, the long-running feud between shareholder advocates and corporations over executive pay will offer an emotional flashpoint as President Obama turns his attention from health care to financial reform.
Business representatives in Washington are pushing back. “We are not taking issue with the pay master’s approach to those companies that are still receiving TARP funds,” says John J. Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives whose board includes highly paid C.E.O.’s. “But to apply that to every public company, we think, is not advisable and out of bounds.”
Even so, shareholder advocates say they see some companies recrafting pay policies to please the government and to get in front of any coming changes.
“Boardrooms correctly read the pay czar’s action as a real signal to corporate America of public dismay over excessive pay,” says Stephen M. Davis, a senior fellow at the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance at Yale. “It was a warning that if they didn’t get their act together that further intervention by the government was perhaps inevitable.”
But it’s probably more accurate to say that companies are sending a mixed message about compensation: we will follow some of Washington’s pay recommendations, but not all of them. At least, that’s the trend in the data in this season’s raft of corporate proxy filings.
Equilar, a compensation research firm in Redwood Shores, Calif., recently prepared a report for The New York Times analyzing the pay of 200 chief executives at 199 public companies with revenue of at least $5.78 billion that filed their proxies by March 26. (Only 199 companies are on the list because Motorola has two co-C.E.O.’s.)
Equilar says the median pay package — the midpoint where half of the compensation packages on that list are lower and half are higher — declined by 13 percent last year, to $7.7 million. The average total pay tumbled by 15 percent, to $9.5 million.
It was the second consecutive year that C.E.O. pay slipped, sending the median compensation package back to about where it was in 2004 and shaving off much of the increase that occurred when the economy went into overdrive and executive pay soared along with it.
Two years ago, C.E.O. compensation dropped because cash bonuses were decimated by the financial crisis. The decline last year can be largely attributed to the hammering of stock and option awards granted early in 2009, when stock prices were at their nadir. As a result, Equilar says, the median values of C.E.O. stock and option awards were down by 19 percent and 28 percent.
Of course, some chief executives have seen the value of their equity grants soar along with the stock market. This angers some shareholder advocates who say that these C.E.O.’s did little to earn their paper wealth. Still, it may be years before executives are able to actually reap the proceeds of those grants, because of vesting requirements.
Mr. Feinberg has made it more than clear that he finds perks like private jets and private clubs to be particularly noxious — and companies have apparently read that memo. According to Equilar, companies collectively cut the median annual perk award by 19 percent, to $170,487. The average fell by 14 percent, to $261,801.
Lawrence J. Ellison of Oracle took home $85 million last year, more than any other C.E.O. at the 199 big companies analyzed.
At the same time, companies in the Equilar survey were reluctant to increase the cash component of their compensation packages. Equilar says the median cash payout rose slightly, by 1 percent, to $3.1 million. The average fell by 5 percent, to $3.8 million. “We’ve seen some companies that switched over to cash because equity was too volatile,” says Aaron Boyd, the research manager of Equilar.
FOR all of these signs that a real reordering of executive compensation may be under way, some analysts wonder whether the Obama administration will abandon its pay crusade.
“We have a long history of episodes like this in depressions and recessions where everybody talks about reform,” says Kevin J. Murphy, a business professor at the University of Southern California. A few years go by, he says, and then you wonder, “What were those reforms again?”
Mr. Murphy says he’s not only skeptical that reforms will be enacted, he is also skeptical that they do any good at all.
But Mr. Feinberg cautions that companies banking on the public’s short attention span do so at their own peril. “There is a tremendous amount of populist outrage and frustration in this,” he warns.
Indeed, there have been fierce exchanges between activist investors and business supporters over a provision in both the House and Senate financial reform bills that could make it easier for shareholders to vote their own directors onto boards.
In February, conservative groups including the Christian Coalition warned Congress that the proposed measures would enable union operatives and animal-rights activists to win board seats.
Shareholder advocates, however, are hopeful that they will prevail. “It looks like the Democrats are holding firm on that,” says Mr. Davis of Yale. “If that’s traded away, there will be enormous disappointment in the investment community.”
IF ever a C.E.O. would have seemed impervious to the administration’s calls for pay reform, it is Lawrence J. Ellison of Oracle, the highest-paid chief executive in the Equilar survey. He made $85 million last year — more than the combined pay of the second- and third-ranked C.E.O.’s, J. Raymond Elliott of Boston Scientific, with $33 million, and Ray R. Irani of Occidental Petroleum, with $31 million. Mr. Ellison took all but $6 million of his pay in stock options.
A billionaire many times over, Mr. Ellison has never been afraid to flaunt his wealth. Yet he made a sacrificial gesture last year that is a sign of the times: this year he plans to decline his $1 million base salary and take just $1 instead. (Oracle declined to comment on Mr. Ellison’s pay.)
Few of the other top-10 C.E.O.’s on the Equilar list are apparently willing to make such concessions. Many of them saw the cash portion of their pay decrease as their bonuses shrank, thanks to the recession.
Mark V. Hurd of Hewlett-Packard, the fourth-highest-paid C.E.O. on the Equilar chart, made $24 million in 2009 — $18 million of which came in cash. William C. Weldon of Johnson & Johnson made $23 million — $15 million of it in cash. Robert A. Iger of Walt Disney made $22 million — $12 million in cash.
As usual, some C.E.O.’s in the Equilar survey seemed to have done more to earn their pay than others. For instance, Samuel J. Palmisano of I.B.M. made $21 million after he delivered a 9 percent net profit increase and helped oversee total shareholder returns of 58 percent. Jeffrey L. Bewkes of Time Warner made $19 million last year as he undid the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger by spinning AOL off as a separate public company. Mr. Bewkes got $14 million of his pay in cash. He might wish he had received more Time Warner shares, though. The total return on his company’s stock was 21 percent in 2009.
There also was a crop of C.E.O.’s who relinquished their cash bonuses or took voluntary pay cuts because of a recession that devastated many customers, employees and shareholders.
Some of those who gave up their pay, however, didn’t seem to have any qualms about taking it later in the year after their boards had a change of heart.
Howard Schultz of Starbucks requested last year that his base salary be reduced from $1.19 million to $6,900 as “a personal contribution to cost-control efforts,” according to a company statement. However, the company later gave him a $1 million “discretionary bonus” that nearly made up for his sacrifice.
“Mr. Schultz’s performance greatly exceeded the board of directors’ expectations,” the company said in a statement.
At Hewlett-Packard, Mr. Hurd took a 20 percent salary cut early last year. But H.P. ended up giving him a $1.18 million discretionary bonus that restored the pay cut, a sum that also included extra cash the board approved to enhance Mr. Hurd’s regular bonus plan.
That left some analysts wondering whether H.P. had weakened the link between bonuses and performance.
“If they didn’t feel the incentive plans they had in place were rewarding this executive well enough, isn’t it about time they redesigned the bonus plan?” asked Paul Hodgson, senior research associate at the Corporate Library, a corporate governance research firm. “This is the third year in a row that H.P. gave its C.E.O. a discretionary bonus. Maybe it’s time for a new compensation committee.”
Under Samuel J. Palmisano last year, I.B.M. had a net profit increase of 9 percent. He was paid $21 million, mostly in options.
Gina Giamanco Tyler, an H.P. spokeswoman, said the company had “an effective pay-for-performance compensation model.”
U.S. Bancorp’s C.E.O., Richard K. Davis, who made $7 million last year, was also the beneficiary of corporate largess. He initially declined his $1 million cash bonus because of his company’s poor results in 2008, the “depressed level” of its stock price and “the general economic performance,” according to a U.S. Bancorp filing.
However, Mr. Davis would not go without the money for long. The bank’s board ended up reversing itself and paying him the bonus after all. Jennifer Wendt, a U.S. Bancorp spokeswoman, said that the directors thought he deserved the money because the bank had a good year and paid back its TARP aid.
AMONG the C.E.O.’s of TARP recipients last year, 12 are on the Equilar list, including Kenneth D. Lewis of Bank of America, Vikram S. Pandit of Citigroup, John G. Stumpf of Wells Fargo, Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Jamie L. Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and Kenneth I. Chenault of American Express.
According to Equilar, the median pay for this group was $6 million in 2009, a 34 percent decrease from 2008. The median stock and options portion of their pay plummeted 94 percent and 92 percent, respectively. But the median cash payout for the group rose 20 percent.
Mr. Lewis, who has stepped down, was the second-lowest-paid C.E.O. on the Equilar list, with $32,171 in cash. The only chief executive who made less was Steven P. Jobs of Apple, who collects a $1 salary and nothing more. (Mr. Jobs, of course, also owns more than a $1 billion worth of Apple stock.)
Mr. Pandit of Citigroup was the third-lowest-paid of the Equilar 200, at $128,751. He announced partway through the year that he would take just a $1 salary for the remainder of the year and no bonus until his bank returned to profitability, which it did not do in 2009. His pay last year was entirely in cash.
Mr. Blankfein, meanwhile, was the survey’s seventh-lowest-paid chief executive. He made $862,657 in cash, which includes $262,657 in perks for things like car expenses and financial counseling.
The highest-paid banker on the list, Mr. Stumpf of Wells Fargo, was paid nearly $19 million. He vaulted past his better-known peers last year by closely following the Obama administration’s compensation blueprint.
Last June, the Treasury Department appointed Mr. Feinberg and issued interim rules for compensation at TARP companies. It mandated a $500,000 salary cap for executives at the largest TARP recipients, saying any additional pay be awarded as long-term restricted stock.
Wells Fargo, which received TARP aid, layered $4.7 million worth of stock on top of Mr. Stumpf’s $900,000 cash base salary, bringing his total salary up to $5.6 million.
“If you want an almost perfect example of unintended consequences, this is it,” says Mr. Hodgson of the Corporate Library.
Wells awarded Mr. Stumpf an additional $13 million in stock, making his total compensation $19 million.
A Wells spokeswoman said Mr. Stumpf deserved his raise, in part because he now presided over a bank that was twice as big as it was the previous year after acquiring Wachovia. Wells repaid its TARP aid in December.
Goldman Sachs, which returned its TARP aid last summer, said late last year that it would pay a “vast majority” of its senior managers’ pay in stock that cannot be sold for five years. The bank can force employees to return pay if they engage in “materially improper risk analysis or failed sufficiently to raise concerns about risks” — a policy known as a clawback. Goldman also said it would have a nonbinding say-on-pay vote at its 2010 annual meeting.
Analysts say that other companies are making similar moves, though some more tepidly than others. Equilar says that the percentage of Fortune 100 firms that disclosed clawbacks last year rose to 73 percent from 64 percent. Some of the largest companies in the nation have also adopted similar say-on-pay provisions.
Few of these initiatives, however, go as far as those at Goldman. Equilar says that most clawbacks occur only if top executives engage in unethical conduct or misdeeds that result in financial misstatements. Some of these recently unveiled say-on-pay initiatives are also weaker than one would expect. Prudential, for example, allows say-on-pay votes only every other year. “We talked to a lot of our institutional investors and pension funds,” said a Prudential spokesman. “They said every year would be a lot of work for them. They said every other year would be adequate.”
CHARLES M. ELSON, a corporate governance professor at the University of Delaware, says such limited measures are just window dressing corporations deploy to keep regulators from imposing tougher reforms. “I’ve always supported clawbacks, but they are almost impossible to enforce,” he says. “Unfortunately, I think say-on-pay is pointless.”
Both the House and the Senate financial reform bills could require public companies to have annual say-on-pay votes. The bills include a “proxy access” rule to make it easier for shareholders to get their own candidates elected to boards.
“We are looking at the first time across the American marketplace at an environment where shareholders will have real authority to hire and fire directors,” says Mr. Davis of Yale. “If companies ignore a vote on say-on-pay, a shareholder majority would have the right to remove the directors who failed to listen.”
Corporate America is dead set against this. The United States Chamber of Commerce says that proxy access would give extreme groups the ability to meddle in broad corporate decisions.
“This is something that isn’t about better corporate governance,” says Thomas Quaadman, the executive director of the chamber’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness. “This is about activists being put at the head of the line.”
Even if enhanced proxy access is eliminated from the bills, the Senate version also includes an amendment sponsored by Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, that would offer a revealing compensation barometer: a requirement that public companies disclose median wage for their workers along with their chief executive’s compensation.
Asked why he thought this was important, Mr. Menendez quoted the Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
By DEVIN LEONARD
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 2, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/business/04comp.html?th&emc=th
LAST year may have been unnerving for chief executives accustomed to all of the familiar ornaments of corporate life: eight-figure pay packages, corporate jets, memberships in select clubs, and on and on.
As the country settled into the worst recession in decades, the government became unusually involved in corporate pay practices. The Obama administration appointed Kenneth Feinberg — a k a the pay czar — to scrutinize compensation at corporate behemoths like Citigroup, the American International Group, Bank of America, General Motors and Chrysler, all of which taxpayers propped up with billions upon billions of dollars in bailouts.
Mr. Feinberg came up with his own blueprint for compensation boundaries — and noted that its strictures could be applied not only to corporate wards of the state under the Troubled Asset Relief Program but also in myriad other boardrooms.
So if you were the typical American C.E.O., you may have found some of the pay czar’s prescriptions startling. For instance, he thinks you should pay golf club dues out of your own pocket. He also would like you to take less of your pay in cash and more of it in stock. In fact, the White House set a limit on how much cash top executives of the biggest TARP companies could get as part of their annual compensation: $500,000 a year. That sum that may seem princely to the average American worker but, alas, doesn’t buy much for a crowd used to Fifth Avenue triplexes, third and fourth homes, top-drawer health care and lavish private schools for their children.
Mr. Feinberg’s proposed remedies weren’t the only compensation-related issues that might have disturbed an executive’s sleep. The Securities and Exchange Commission ordered companies to disclose more information about compensation, which invariably stirs up shareholders. And the Federal Reserve also announced its own sweeping review of banker pay.
On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, Democratic allies of the White House are mulling reforms that would require public companies to give shareholders an annual “say on pay” vote. While the measure, if enacted, would be nonbinding, it would still force C.E.O.’s to publicly debate at annual meetings all aspects of sumptuous pay packages.
In short, the long-running feud between shareholder advocates and corporations over executive pay will offer an emotional flashpoint as President Obama turns his attention from health care to financial reform.
Business representatives in Washington are pushing back. “We are not taking issue with the pay master’s approach to those companies that are still receiving TARP funds,” says John J. Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives whose board includes highly paid C.E.O.’s. “But to apply that to every public company, we think, is not advisable and out of bounds.”
Even so, shareholder advocates say they see some companies recrafting pay policies to please the government and to get in front of any coming changes.
“Boardrooms correctly read the pay czar’s action as a real signal to corporate America of public dismay over excessive pay,” says Stephen M. Davis, a senior fellow at the Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance at Yale. “It was a warning that if they didn’t get their act together that further intervention by the government was perhaps inevitable.”
But it’s probably more accurate to say that companies are sending a mixed message about compensation: we will follow some of Washington’s pay recommendations, but not all of them. At least, that’s the trend in the data in this season’s raft of corporate proxy filings.
Equilar, a compensation research firm in Redwood Shores, Calif., recently prepared a report for The New York Times analyzing the pay of 200 chief executives at 199 public companies with revenue of at least $5.78 billion that filed their proxies by March 26. (Only 199 companies are on the list because Motorola has two co-C.E.O.’s.)
Equilar says the median pay package — the midpoint where half of the compensation packages on that list are lower and half are higher — declined by 13 percent last year, to $7.7 million. The average total pay tumbled by 15 percent, to $9.5 million.
It was the second consecutive year that C.E.O. pay slipped, sending the median compensation package back to about where it was in 2004 and shaving off much of the increase that occurred when the economy went into overdrive and executive pay soared along with it.
Two years ago, C.E.O. compensation dropped because cash bonuses were decimated by the financial crisis. The decline last year can be largely attributed to the hammering of stock and option awards granted early in 2009, when stock prices were at their nadir. As a result, Equilar says, the median values of C.E.O. stock and option awards were down by 19 percent and 28 percent.
Of course, some chief executives have seen the value of their equity grants soar along with the stock market. This angers some shareholder advocates who say that these C.E.O.’s did little to earn their paper wealth. Still, it may be years before executives are able to actually reap the proceeds of those grants, because of vesting requirements.
Mr. Feinberg has made it more than clear that he finds perks like private jets and private clubs to be particularly noxious — and companies have apparently read that memo. According to Equilar, companies collectively cut the median annual perk award by 19 percent, to $170,487. The average fell by 14 percent, to $261,801.
Lawrence J. Ellison of Oracle took home $85 million last year, more than any other C.E.O. at the 199 big companies analyzed.
At the same time, companies in the Equilar survey were reluctant to increase the cash component of their compensation packages. Equilar says the median cash payout rose slightly, by 1 percent, to $3.1 million. The average fell by 5 percent, to $3.8 million. “We’ve seen some companies that switched over to cash because equity was too volatile,” says Aaron Boyd, the research manager of Equilar.
FOR all of these signs that a real reordering of executive compensation may be under way, some analysts wonder whether the Obama administration will abandon its pay crusade.
“We have a long history of episodes like this in depressions and recessions where everybody talks about reform,” says Kevin J. Murphy, a business professor at the University of Southern California. A few years go by, he says, and then you wonder, “What were those reforms again?”
Mr. Murphy says he’s not only skeptical that reforms will be enacted, he is also skeptical that they do any good at all.
But Mr. Feinberg cautions that companies banking on the public’s short attention span do so at their own peril. “There is a tremendous amount of populist outrage and frustration in this,” he warns.
Indeed, there have been fierce exchanges between activist investors and business supporters over a provision in both the House and Senate financial reform bills that could make it easier for shareholders to vote their own directors onto boards.
In February, conservative groups including the Christian Coalition warned Congress that the proposed measures would enable union operatives and animal-rights activists to win board seats.
Shareholder advocates, however, are hopeful that they will prevail. “It looks like the Democrats are holding firm on that,” says Mr. Davis of Yale. “If that’s traded away, there will be enormous disappointment in the investment community.”
IF ever a C.E.O. would have seemed impervious to the administration’s calls for pay reform, it is Lawrence J. Ellison of Oracle, the highest-paid chief executive in the Equilar survey. He made $85 million last year — more than the combined pay of the second- and third-ranked C.E.O.’s, J. Raymond Elliott of Boston Scientific, with $33 million, and Ray R. Irani of Occidental Petroleum, with $31 million. Mr. Ellison took all but $6 million of his pay in stock options.
A billionaire many times over, Mr. Ellison has never been afraid to flaunt his wealth. Yet he made a sacrificial gesture last year that is a sign of the times: this year he plans to decline his $1 million base salary and take just $1 instead. (Oracle declined to comment on Mr. Ellison’s pay.)
Few of the other top-10 C.E.O.’s on the Equilar list are apparently willing to make such concessions. Many of them saw the cash portion of their pay decrease as their bonuses shrank, thanks to the recession.
Mark V. Hurd of Hewlett-Packard, the fourth-highest-paid C.E.O. on the Equilar chart, made $24 million in 2009 — $18 million of which came in cash. William C. Weldon of Johnson & Johnson made $23 million — $15 million of it in cash. Robert A. Iger of Walt Disney made $22 million — $12 million in cash.
As usual, some C.E.O.’s in the Equilar survey seemed to have done more to earn their pay than others. For instance, Samuel J. Palmisano of I.B.M. made $21 million after he delivered a 9 percent net profit increase and helped oversee total shareholder returns of 58 percent. Jeffrey L. Bewkes of Time Warner made $19 million last year as he undid the disastrous AOL-Time Warner merger by spinning AOL off as a separate public company. Mr. Bewkes got $14 million of his pay in cash. He might wish he had received more Time Warner shares, though. The total return on his company’s stock was 21 percent in 2009.
There also was a crop of C.E.O.’s who relinquished their cash bonuses or took voluntary pay cuts because of a recession that devastated many customers, employees and shareholders.
Some of those who gave up their pay, however, didn’t seem to have any qualms about taking it later in the year after their boards had a change of heart.
Howard Schultz of Starbucks requested last year that his base salary be reduced from $1.19 million to $6,900 as “a personal contribution to cost-control efforts,” according to a company statement. However, the company later gave him a $1 million “discretionary bonus” that nearly made up for his sacrifice.
“Mr. Schultz’s performance greatly exceeded the board of directors’ expectations,” the company said in a statement.
At Hewlett-Packard, Mr. Hurd took a 20 percent salary cut early last year. But H.P. ended up giving him a $1.18 million discretionary bonus that restored the pay cut, a sum that also included extra cash the board approved to enhance Mr. Hurd’s regular bonus plan.
That left some analysts wondering whether H.P. had weakened the link between bonuses and performance.
“If they didn’t feel the incentive plans they had in place were rewarding this executive well enough, isn’t it about time they redesigned the bonus plan?” asked Paul Hodgson, senior research associate at the Corporate Library, a corporate governance research firm. “This is the third year in a row that H.P. gave its C.E.O. a discretionary bonus. Maybe it’s time for a new compensation committee.”
Under Samuel J. Palmisano last year, I.B.M. had a net profit increase of 9 percent. He was paid $21 million, mostly in options.
Gina Giamanco Tyler, an H.P. spokeswoman, said the company had “an effective pay-for-performance compensation model.”
U.S. Bancorp’s C.E.O., Richard K. Davis, who made $7 million last year, was also the beneficiary of corporate largess. He initially declined his $1 million cash bonus because of his company’s poor results in 2008, the “depressed level” of its stock price and “the general economic performance,” according to a U.S. Bancorp filing.
However, Mr. Davis would not go without the money for long. The bank’s board ended up reversing itself and paying him the bonus after all. Jennifer Wendt, a U.S. Bancorp spokeswoman, said that the directors thought he deserved the money because the bank had a good year and paid back its TARP aid.
AMONG the C.E.O.’s of TARP recipients last year, 12 are on the Equilar list, including Kenneth D. Lewis of Bank of America, Vikram S. Pandit of Citigroup, John G. Stumpf of Wells Fargo, Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Jamie L. Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and Kenneth I. Chenault of American Express.
According to Equilar, the median pay for this group was $6 million in 2009, a 34 percent decrease from 2008. The median stock and options portion of their pay plummeted 94 percent and 92 percent, respectively. But the median cash payout for the group rose 20 percent.
Mr. Lewis, who has stepped down, was the second-lowest-paid C.E.O. on the Equilar list, with $32,171 in cash. The only chief executive who made less was Steven P. Jobs of Apple, who collects a $1 salary and nothing more. (Mr. Jobs, of course, also owns more than a $1 billion worth of Apple stock.)
Mr. Pandit of Citigroup was the third-lowest-paid of the Equilar 200, at $128,751. He announced partway through the year that he would take just a $1 salary for the remainder of the year and no bonus until his bank returned to profitability, which it did not do in 2009. His pay last year was entirely in cash.
Mr. Blankfein, meanwhile, was the survey’s seventh-lowest-paid chief executive. He made $862,657 in cash, which includes $262,657 in perks for things like car expenses and financial counseling.
The highest-paid banker on the list, Mr. Stumpf of Wells Fargo, was paid nearly $19 million. He vaulted past his better-known peers last year by closely following the Obama administration’s compensation blueprint.
Last June, the Treasury Department appointed Mr. Feinberg and issued interim rules for compensation at TARP companies. It mandated a $500,000 salary cap for executives at the largest TARP recipients, saying any additional pay be awarded as long-term restricted stock.
Wells Fargo, which received TARP aid, layered $4.7 million worth of stock on top of Mr. Stumpf’s $900,000 cash base salary, bringing his total salary up to $5.6 million.
“If you want an almost perfect example of unintended consequences, this is it,” says Mr. Hodgson of the Corporate Library.
Wells awarded Mr. Stumpf an additional $13 million in stock, making his total compensation $19 million.
A Wells spokeswoman said Mr. Stumpf deserved his raise, in part because he now presided over a bank that was twice as big as it was the previous year after acquiring Wachovia. Wells repaid its TARP aid in December.
Goldman Sachs, which returned its TARP aid last summer, said late last year that it would pay a “vast majority” of its senior managers’ pay in stock that cannot be sold for five years. The bank can force employees to return pay if they engage in “materially improper risk analysis or failed sufficiently to raise concerns about risks” — a policy known as a clawback. Goldman also said it would have a nonbinding say-on-pay vote at its 2010 annual meeting.
Analysts say that other companies are making similar moves, though some more tepidly than others. Equilar says that the percentage of Fortune 100 firms that disclosed clawbacks last year rose to 73 percent from 64 percent. Some of the largest companies in the nation have also adopted similar say-on-pay provisions.
Few of these initiatives, however, go as far as those at Goldman. Equilar says that most clawbacks occur only if top executives engage in unethical conduct or misdeeds that result in financial misstatements. Some of these recently unveiled say-on-pay initiatives are also weaker than one would expect. Prudential, for example, allows say-on-pay votes only every other year. “We talked to a lot of our institutional investors and pension funds,” said a Prudential spokesman. “They said every year would be a lot of work for them. They said every other year would be adequate.”
CHARLES M. ELSON, a corporate governance professor at the University of Delaware, says such limited measures are just window dressing corporations deploy to keep regulators from imposing tougher reforms. “I’ve always supported clawbacks, but they are almost impossible to enforce,” he says. “Unfortunately, I think say-on-pay is pointless.”
Both the House and the Senate financial reform bills could require public companies to have annual say-on-pay votes. The bills include a “proxy access” rule to make it easier for shareholders to get their own candidates elected to boards.
“We are looking at the first time across the American marketplace at an environment where shareholders will have real authority to hire and fire directors,” says Mr. Davis of Yale. “If companies ignore a vote on say-on-pay, a shareholder majority would have the right to remove the directors who failed to listen.”
Corporate America is dead set against this. The United States Chamber of Commerce says that proxy access would give extreme groups the ability to meddle in broad corporate decisions.
“This is something that isn’t about better corporate governance,” says Thomas Quaadman, the executive director of the chamber’s Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness. “This is about activists being put at the head of the line.”
Even if enhanced proxy access is eliminated from the bills, the Senate version also includes an amendment sponsored by Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, that would offer a revealing compensation barometer: a requirement that public companies disclose median wage for their workers along with their chief executive’s compensation.
Asked why he thought this was important, Mr. Menendez quoted the Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”
Across the Country, Fans Gather for iPad
Across the Country, Fans Gather for iPad
By BRAD STONE
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/technology/04ipad.html?th&emc=th
SAN FRANCISCO — Apple’s most devoted fans congregated on Saturday morning at stores around the country to pick up their latest object of desire: the eagerly anticipated iPad.
Lines stretched for a few blocks in the morning hours at Apple stores in New York and San Francisco. Blue-shirted Apple employees passed out free snacks in the chilly early air. At 9 a.m., they greeted each buyer entering stores with an applause and fanfare normally reserved for athletes winning medals or championships.
“It’s beyond technology. It’s a culture. It’s a community,” said Rey Gutierrez, a die-hard loyalist with a tattoo of the Apple logo on his left hand, who had waited outside the San Francisco Apple store since 4 a.m. “No other company can drop a device and generate this much energy. Every big brand is envious of what Apple can do.”
Many of the people waiting for the iPad had a vague sense that they were involved in yet another big Apple moment, although they could not precisely say how they would use the tablet computer, which shares features of both laptops and mobile phones.
“I have no idea what he’ll do with it,” said Jessica Panzica, 30, waiting in line at the Apple store in downtown San Francisco for her husband, who could not pick up his iPad because he had a ham-radio class. “I’m sure he’ll use it a lot, whatever it is. He told me I’m not allowed to open it.”
Mathieu Thouvenin, 26, was born the year Apple introduced the Macintosh but predicted that the iPad would be just as revolutionary.
“I think all PCs are ultimately going to be like this,” he said, citing the tablet’s touch-screen capability. “I think I’m going to use the iPad at home on my couch instead of my laptop.”
By all accounts, the lines for the iPad were shorter and more subdued than those three years ago for the iPhone — although this time Apple has allowed people to order the device online and have it shipped to them.
Nevertheless, lines still stretched for blocks at most Apple stores in major cities.
Most Apple fans passed the time in line bonding with one another, and with their devices — iPhones, iPods and Mac laptops. Some dressed up for the occasion, bringing a circuslike atmosphere to the proceedings.
“We’re totally excited. It’s going to change everything,” Tracy Kahney said while her son, Lyle, 9, fidgeted uncomfortably in the cardboard iPad costume she had made for him.
Isaac Henderson, 39, who lives in Manhattan and waited outside the Apple store in the meatpacking district, compared the gathering to the lines for eagerly anticipated science fiction movies. “This is like ‘Star Wars’ for Apple geeks,” he said. “I just hope it’s more rewarding than ‘The Phantom Menace.’ ”
Charles Wolf, an analyst at Needham Research, said he expected that Apple would sell more than 300,000 iPads this weekend. He said the introduction “says more about the role Apple is playing in our culture and little about the ultimate success of the iPad.”
The iPad has been generally well reviewed, although there are features noticeably absent: the ability to run more than one application at a time, for instance, and lack of support for Adobe’s Flash, which means video on many Web sites will not play.
After Apple started handing out iPads to people who had pre-ordered them online, most buyers expressed a certain amount of satisfaction — if not quite with the device, but with the process of getting one.
“I met people all over the world,” said Maria Morales, 51, from San Francisco, adding that it was the first time she had waited in line for a gadget. “It was bonding.”
Jenna Wortham contributed reporting from New York.
By BRAD STONE
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/technology/04ipad.html?th&emc=th
SAN FRANCISCO — Apple’s most devoted fans congregated on Saturday morning at stores around the country to pick up their latest object of desire: the eagerly anticipated iPad.
Lines stretched for a few blocks in the morning hours at Apple stores in New York and San Francisco. Blue-shirted Apple employees passed out free snacks in the chilly early air. At 9 a.m., they greeted each buyer entering stores with an applause and fanfare normally reserved for athletes winning medals or championships.
“It’s beyond technology. It’s a culture. It’s a community,” said Rey Gutierrez, a die-hard loyalist with a tattoo of the Apple logo on his left hand, who had waited outside the San Francisco Apple store since 4 a.m. “No other company can drop a device and generate this much energy. Every big brand is envious of what Apple can do.”
Many of the people waiting for the iPad had a vague sense that they were involved in yet another big Apple moment, although they could not precisely say how they would use the tablet computer, which shares features of both laptops and mobile phones.
“I have no idea what he’ll do with it,” said Jessica Panzica, 30, waiting in line at the Apple store in downtown San Francisco for her husband, who could not pick up his iPad because he had a ham-radio class. “I’m sure he’ll use it a lot, whatever it is. He told me I’m not allowed to open it.”
Mathieu Thouvenin, 26, was born the year Apple introduced the Macintosh but predicted that the iPad would be just as revolutionary.
“I think all PCs are ultimately going to be like this,” he said, citing the tablet’s touch-screen capability. “I think I’m going to use the iPad at home on my couch instead of my laptop.”
By all accounts, the lines for the iPad were shorter and more subdued than those three years ago for the iPhone — although this time Apple has allowed people to order the device online and have it shipped to them.
Nevertheless, lines still stretched for blocks at most Apple stores in major cities.
Most Apple fans passed the time in line bonding with one another, and with their devices — iPhones, iPods and Mac laptops. Some dressed up for the occasion, bringing a circuslike atmosphere to the proceedings.
“We’re totally excited. It’s going to change everything,” Tracy Kahney said while her son, Lyle, 9, fidgeted uncomfortably in the cardboard iPad costume she had made for him.
Isaac Henderson, 39, who lives in Manhattan and waited outside the Apple store in the meatpacking district, compared the gathering to the lines for eagerly anticipated science fiction movies. “This is like ‘Star Wars’ for Apple geeks,” he said. “I just hope it’s more rewarding than ‘The Phantom Menace.’ ”
Charles Wolf, an analyst at Needham Research, said he expected that Apple would sell more than 300,000 iPads this weekend. He said the introduction “says more about the role Apple is playing in our culture and little about the ultimate success of the iPad.”
The iPad has been generally well reviewed, although there are features noticeably absent: the ability to run more than one application at a time, for instance, and lack of support for Adobe’s Flash, which means video on many Web sites will not play.
After Apple started handing out iPads to people who had pre-ordered them online, most buyers expressed a certain amount of satisfaction — if not quite with the device, but with the process of getting one.
“I met people all over the world,” said Maria Morales, 51, from San Francisco, adding that it was the first time she had waited in line for a gadget. “It was bonding.”
Jenna Wortham contributed reporting from New York.
Chicago News Cooperative - For Some Aspiring Political Broadcasters, Breaking the Law Does Pay
Chicago News Cooperative - For Some Aspiring Political Broadcasters, Breaking the Law Does Pay
By BEN GOLDBERGER
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: April 2, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/us/04cncway.html?th&emc=th
When James Laski finished serving his 11-month prison stint on corruption charges in 2008, he knew his political career was over. But the former Chicago city clerk had every reason to believe his rap sheet was no barrier to another coveted, high-profile job: Chicago radio broadcaster.
When Mr. Laski begins his new weeknight show on WGN-AM on April 12, he will become the third convicted or indicted Illinois politician with a regular presence on local radio. Cliff Kelley, convicted in 1987 of accepting bribes while alderman of the 20th Ward, is an integral part of WVON-AM, commanding four hours every weekday afternoon on that African-American-oriented station. Rod R. Blagojevich, the impeached governor whose federal corruption trial is set for June, has a two-hour Sunday show on WLS-AM.
Chicago is not the only place where disgraced politicians have reinvented themselves over the airwaves. But the city is brimming with tainted politicians turned professional talkers.
“I just think that the line between the rogues and the rascals and the pundits and the politicians has always been blurred in Chicago and crossed very easily,” said Andy Shaw, the executive director of the Better Government Association and a longtime local television political reporter. “We always recruit our ex-politicians as commentators on election night, and we don’t seem to differentiate the honest ones from the dishonest ones.”
Chris Robling, a media consultant and former news radio host, said: “There is a thirst after insider awareness” among program directors and listeners. “Who better then someone who was actually so on the inside that he wound up getting his fingers burned and went away for a few years?”
That thinking played some role in 1998 when the Fox affiliate WFLD hired Dan Rostenkowski, the former congressman and ex-convict, said Debra Juarez, the news director at the time.
“On the part of the audience, there’s that factor of ‘there’s a big player and he was brought down and convicted, and now he’s out again and you want to hear what he says,’ ” Ms. Juarez said.
Mr. Laski, who had no professional radio experience before filling in at WGN in June, is counting on his persona as a disgraced former insider to bolster a thin on-air résumé.
“I sat down with the Daleys and the Blagojeviches and the Madigans,” Mr. Laski said. “I’ve been there and done the good and bad. Here’s the thing: It’s time to move forward.”
It’s likely Mr. Laski will not be the last fallen politician to find refuge on-air. “I think that when George Ryan gets out of prison he’s going to have a radio show within a week,” Mr. Shaw said of the former governor. “That’s how it operates.”
This article is part of our expanded Chicago coverage.
Rod R. Blagojevich has a two-hour Sunday radio show on WLS-AM.
The Chicago report features coverage of public affairs, culture, lifestyle and sports in the region and is produced by the Chicago News Cooperative, a non-profit news organization. We invite your comments at info@chicagonewscoop.org.
By BEN GOLDBERGER
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: April 2, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/us/04cncway.html?th&emc=th
When James Laski finished serving his 11-month prison stint on corruption charges in 2008, he knew his political career was over. But the former Chicago city clerk had every reason to believe his rap sheet was no barrier to another coveted, high-profile job: Chicago radio broadcaster.
When Mr. Laski begins his new weeknight show on WGN-AM on April 12, he will become the third convicted or indicted Illinois politician with a regular presence on local radio. Cliff Kelley, convicted in 1987 of accepting bribes while alderman of the 20th Ward, is an integral part of WVON-AM, commanding four hours every weekday afternoon on that African-American-oriented station. Rod R. Blagojevich, the impeached governor whose federal corruption trial is set for June, has a two-hour Sunday show on WLS-AM.
Chicago is not the only place where disgraced politicians have reinvented themselves over the airwaves. But the city is brimming with tainted politicians turned professional talkers.
“I just think that the line between the rogues and the rascals and the pundits and the politicians has always been blurred in Chicago and crossed very easily,” said Andy Shaw, the executive director of the Better Government Association and a longtime local television political reporter. “We always recruit our ex-politicians as commentators on election night, and we don’t seem to differentiate the honest ones from the dishonest ones.”
Chris Robling, a media consultant and former news radio host, said: “There is a thirst after insider awareness” among program directors and listeners. “Who better then someone who was actually so on the inside that he wound up getting his fingers burned and went away for a few years?”
That thinking played some role in 1998 when the Fox affiliate WFLD hired Dan Rostenkowski, the former congressman and ex-convict, said Debra Juarez, the news director at the time.
“On the part of the audience, there’s that factor of ‘there’s a big player and he was brought down and convicted, and now he’s out again and you want to hear what he says,’ ” Ms. Juarez said.
Mr. Laski, who had no professional radio experience before filling in at WGN in June, is counting on his persona as a disgraced former insider to bolster a thin on-air résumé.
“I sat down with the Daleys and the Blagojeviches and the Madigans,” Mr. Laski said. “I’ve been there and done the good and bad. Here’s the thing: It’s time to move forward.”
It’s likely Mr. Laski will not be the last fallen politician to find refuge on-air. “I think that when George Ryan gets out of prison he’s going to have a radio show within a week,” Mr. Shaw said of the former governor. “That’s how it operates.”
This article is part of our expanded Chicago coverage.
Rod R. Blagojevich has a two-hour Sunday radio show on WLS-AM.
The Chicago report features coverage of public affairs, culture, lifestyle and sports in the region and is produced by the Chicago News Cooperative, a non-profit news organization. We invite your comments at info@chicagonewscoop.org.
At 89, Stevens Contemplates Law, and How to Leave It
At 89, Stevens Contemplates Law, and How to Leave It
By ADAM LIPTAK
Copyright by Reuters
Published: April 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/us/04stevens.html?th&emc=th
WASHINGTON — “There are still pros and cons to be considered,” Justice John Paul Stevens said in his Supreme Court chambers on Friday afternoon, reflecting on his reluctance to leave a job he loves after almost 35 years. But his calculus seemed to be weighted toward departure, and he said his decision on the matter would come very soon.
“I do have to fish or cut bait, just for my own personal peace of mind and also in fairness to the process,” he said. “The president and the Senate need plenty of time to fill a vacancy.”
Hints about Justice Stevens’s possible departure started in September, when he confirmed that he had hired only a single law clerk, instead of the usual four, for the term that will start this fall. In occasional public statements since then, Justice Stevens, the leader of the court’s liberal wing, said he had not yet made up his mind. But the White House is bracing for a summertime confirmation battle, the second of the Obama presidency.
Justice Stevens, who will turn 90 this month, said he did not like to give interviews “because it saves an awful lot of time if you don’t.” But he was courtly and candid in reviewing the trajectory of his tenure on the court and in summing up what he had learned about the role of the judge in American life.
Like last year’s selection of Justice Sonia Sotomayor to replace the retiring Justice David H. Souter, this change would be unlikely to remake the court’s ideological balance. But the matter would in some ways have more resonance, if only because of Justice Stevens’s seniority and mastery of the court’s machinery.
Appointed in 1975 by President Gerald R. Ford, Justice Stevens was in those days considered a somewhat idiosyncratic moderate. These days, he is lionized by the left. But Justice Stevens rejected those labels on Friday, saying that his judicial philosophy was a conservative one.
“What really for me marks a conservative judge is one who doesn’t decide more than he has to in order to do his own job,” he said, relaxed in shirt sleeves and his signature bow tie in chambers floodlit by April sunshine. “Our job is to decide cases and resolve controversies. It’s not to write broad rules that may answer society’s questions at large.”
He is known for his fast and prolific writing, and for relying less on his law clerks than some other justices do.
“I write the first draft,” he said. “One of the tests I had for myself as to when I would retire was that if I ever got to the point that I stopped writing the first draft that would be a sign that I was no longer up to the job the way I think it should be done.”
That day, he said, has not yet come. “Everything that’s got my name on it, I wrote the first draft,” Justice Stevens said.
But he did acknowledge that he had a bad morning in January when he dissented from the bench in Citizens United, the blockbuster decision that said corporations may spend freely to support political candidates. He seemed weary and tripped over ordinary words.
“I did stumble in my oral statement,” he said. “I had been up early that morning writing that statement out, and I had played tennis that morning. Maybe I was tired, and of course I felt strongly about it, but that has never affected my ability to articulate orally what I wanted to say before. It was a novel experience.”
Should Justice Stevens step down, the court will lose its last member who served in World War II and is steeped in the values of that era.
“It really was a unique period of time, in the sense that the total country, with very few exceptions, was really united,” Justice Stevens said. “We were all on the same team, wanting the same result. You don’t like to think of war as having anything good about it, but it is something that was a positive experience.”
He was unapologetic in saying that the justices’ backgrounds necessarily shaped their approaches to the law.
“I’ve confessed to many people that I think my personal experience has had an impact on what I’ve done,” he said. “Time and time again, not only for myself but for other people on the court, during discussions of cases you bring up experiences that you are familiar with.”
He said his military service, as a Navy cryptographer, informed his dissent in Texas v. Johnson, a 1989 decision that said the First Amendment protects flag burning. “I know it’s not the popular position, but I’m still totally convinced I was right,” he said. “I still think I was right, but I wouldn’t amend the Constitution or anything like that to straighten it out.”
His views have generally remained stable, he said, while the court has drifted to the right over time. “To the extent I look back at earlier situations,” he said, “I really don’t think I’ve changed all that much.”
Often, he added, the law requires a certain result, as in the court’s 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London, which allowed local governments to use the power of eminent domain to take private property for business development.
“The Kelo case was one of my most unpopular opinions, and that was one where I thought the law really was pretty well settled on the particular point,” he said.
Asked if he would have answered the question presented in the case differently had he instead been a legislator, Justice Stevens said probably yes.
“One of the nice things about this job is that you don’t have to make those decisions,” he added. “Very often you think, in this particular spot I don’t have to be deciding the really hard case about what should be done. Which is one of the reasons why the function is really quite different from what people often assume.”
In the area of capital punishment, though, he said his views had shifted.
“I certainly would not have expected during my first years on the court to have written an opinion like I did in Baze,” he said, referring to Baze v. Rees, the 2008 decision that rejected a challenge to lethal injections. Though Justice Stevens voted with the majority, he wrote that he had come to the conclusion that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment. He went on to say that his conclusion did not justify “a refusal to respect precedents that remain a part of our law.”
He explained Friday why he did not follow the approach of Justices William J. Brennan Jr. and Thurgood Marshall, who adopted a practice of dissenting in every death penalty case.
“I’m still a member of the court, and I still have to work,” Justice Stevens said. “I never really agreed with Justice Brennan and Justice Marshall that your own personal view on the issue should prevent you from participating. You’re still a member of the team, and the team has to confront the problem.”
But that did not mean Justice Stevens, who in 1976 voted to reinstate the death penalty, was satisfied with the court’s capital jurisprudence.
“There are a number of death cases that troubled me,” he said. The Baze opinion, he added, “was really my reaction to the developing jurisprudence, which I think moved in a direction that I didn’t expect and is not correct.”
When the talk turned to balancing the pros and cons of moving on, Justice Stevens said the fact that he was still hard at work spoke volumes.
“It’s a wonderful job,” he said. “That’s perhaps the best evidence of it. I wouldn’t have hung around so long if I didn’t like the job and if I didn’t think I was able to continue to do it.”
On the con side, he said he was starting to feel his age. “I have to notice that I get arthritis in my left knee now and then,” he said. “That wasn’t bothering me before. I’m conscious of changes.”
Those changes have even shown up on the tennis court, he said with no little chagrin. “The game isn’t quite as good as it used to be, I have to confess,” he said.
By ADAM LIPTAK
Copyright by Reuters
Published: April 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/us/04stevens.html?th&emc=th
WASHINGTON — “There are still pros and cons to be considered,” Justice John Paul Stevens said in his Supreme Court chambers on Friday afternoon, reflecting on his reluctance to leave a job he loves after almost 35 years. But his calculus seemed to be weighted toward departure, and he said his decision on the matter would come very soon.
“I do have to fish or cut bait, just for my own personal peace of mind and also in fairness to the process,” he said. “The president and the Senate need plenty of time to fill a vacancy.”
Hints about Justice Stevens’s possible departure started in September, when he confirmed that he had hired only a single law clerk, instead of the usual four, for the term that will start this fall. In occasional public statements since then, Justice Stevens, the leader of the court’s liberal wing, said he had not yet made up his mind. But the White House is bracing for a summertime confirmation battle, the second of the Obama presidency.
Justice Stevens, who will turn 90 this month, said he did not like to give interviews “because it saves an awful lot of time if you don’t.” But he was courtly and candid in reviewing the trajectory of his tenure on the court and in summing up what he had learned about the role of the judge in American life.
Like last year’s selection of Justice Sonia Sotomayor to replace the retiring Justice David H. Souter, this change would be unlikely to remake the court’s ideological balance. But the matter would in some ways have more resonance, if only because of Justice Stevens’s seniority and mastery of the court’s machinery.
Appointed in 1975 by President Gerald R. Ford, Justice Stevens was in those days considered a somewhat idiosyncratic moderate. These days, he is lionized by the left. But Justice Stevens rejected those labels on Friday, saying that his judicial philosophy was a conservative one.
“What really for me marks a conservative judge is one who doesn’t decide more than he has to in order to do his own job,” he said, relaxed in shirt sleeves and his signature bow tie in chambers floodlit by April sunshine. “Our job is to decide cases and resolve controversies. It’s not to write broad rules that may answer society’s questions at large.”
He is known for his fast and prolific writing, and for relying less on his law clerks than some other justices do.
“I write the first draft,” he said. “One of the tests I had for myself as to when I would retire was that if I ever got to the point that I stopped writing the first draft that would be a sign that I was no longer up to the job the way I think it should be done.”
That day, he said, has not yet come. “Everything that’s got my name on it, I wrote the first draft,” Justice Stevens said.
But he did acknowledge that he had a bad morning in January when he dissented from the bench in Citizens United, the blockbuster decision that said corporations may spend freely to support political candidates. He seemed weary and tripped over ordinary words.
“I did stumble in my oral statement,” he said. “I had been up early that morning writing that statement out, and I had played tennis that morning. Maybe I was tired, and of course I felt strongly about it, but that has never affected my ability to articulate orally what I wanted to say before. It was a novel experience.”
Should Justice Stevens step down, the court will lose its last member who served in World War II and is steeped in the values of that era.
“It really was a unique period of time, in the sense that the total country, with very few exceptions, was really united,” Justice Stevens said. “We were all on the same team, wanting the same result. You don’t like to think of war as having anything good about it, but it is something that was a positive experience.”
He was unapologetic in saying that the justices’ backgrounds necessarily shaped their approaches to the law.
“I’ve confessed to many people that I think my personal experience has had an impact on what I’ve done,” he said. “Time and time again, not only for myself but for other people on the court, during discussions of cases you bring up experiences that you are familiar with.”
He said his military service, as a Navy cryptographer, informed his dissent in Texas v. Johnson, a 1989 decision that said the First Amendment protects flag burning. “I know it’s not the popular position, but I’m still totally convinced I was right,” he said. “I still think I was right, but I wouldn’t amend the Constitution or anything like that to straighten it out.”
His views have generally remained stable, he said, while the court has drifted to the right over time. “To the extent I look back at earlier situations,” he said, “I really don’t think I’ve changed all that much.”
Often, he added, the law requires a certain result, as in the court’s 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London, which allowed local governments to use the power of eminent domain to take private property for business development.
“The Kelo case was one of my most unpopular opinions, and that was one where I thought the law really was pretty well settled on the particular point,” he said.
Asked if he would have answered the question presented in the case differently had he instead been a legislator, Justice Stevens said probably yes.
“One of the nice things about this job is that you don’t have to make those decisions,” he added. “Very often you think, in this particular spot I don’t have to be deciding the really hard case about what should be done. Which is one of the reasons why the function is really quite different from what people often assume.”
In the area of capital punishment, though, he said his views had shifted.
“I certainly would not have expected during my first years on the court to have written an opinion like I did in Baze,” he said, referring to Baze v. Rees, the 2008 decision that rejected a challenge to lethal injections. Though Justice Stevens voted with the majority, he wrote that he had come to the conclusion that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment. He went on to say that his conclusion did not justify “a refusal to respect precedents that remain a part of our law.”
He explained Friday why he did not follow the approach of Justices William J. Brennan Jr. and Thurgood Marshall, who adopted a practice of dissenting in every death penalty case.
“I’m still a member of the court, and I still have to work,” Justice Stevens said. “I never really agreed with Justice Brennan and Justice Marshall that your own personal view on the issue should prevent you from participating. You’re still a member of the team, and the team has to confront the problem.”
But that did not mean Justice Stevens, who in 1976 voted to reinstate the death penalty, was satisfied with the court’s capital jurisprudence.
“There are a number of death cases that troubled me,” he said. The Baze opinion, he added, “was really my reaction to the developing jurisprudence, which I think moved in a direction that I didn’t expect and is not correct.”
When the talk turned to balancing the pros and cons of moving on, Justice Stevens said the fact that he was still hard at work spoke volumes.
“It’s a wonderful job,” he said. “That’s perhaps the best evidence of it. I wouldn’t have hung around so long if I didn’t like the job and if I didn’t think I was able to continue to do it.”
On the con side, he said he was starting to feel his age. “I have to notice that I get arthritis in my left knee now and then,” he said. “That wasn’t bothering me before. I’m conscious of changes.”
Those changes have even shown up on the tennis court, he said with no little chagrin. “The game isn’t quite as good as it used to be, I have to confess,” he said.
Criticism of Chávez Stifled by Arrests
Criticism of Chávez Stifled by Arrests
By SIMON ROMERO
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/world/americas/04venez.html?th&emc=th
LOS TEQUES, Venezuela — When Judge María Lourdes Afiuni issued a ruling in December that irked President Hugo Chávez, he did little to contain his outrage. The president, contending on national television that she would have been put before a firing squad in earlier times, sent his secret intelligence police to arrest her.
Then the agents took her to the overcrowded women’s prison in this city of slums near Caracas. They put her in a cell near more than 20 inmates whom Judge Afiuni had sentenced on charges like murder and drug smuggling.
“I’ve received threats from inmates telling me they will burn me alive because they see me as a symbol of the system that put them in prison,” said Judge Afiuni, 46, in her prison cell. “I’m in this hell because I had the temerity to do my job as a judge in a way that didn’t please Chávez.”
Since Judge Afiuni’s imprisonment, a dizzying sequence of other high-profile arrests has taken place, pointing to Mr. Chávez’s recent use of his security and intelligence apparatus to quash challenges to his grip on the country’s political institutions. The arrests come at a time of spreading public ire over an economy hobbled by electricity shortages and soaring inflation.
Senior officials in Mr. Chávez’s government here, including Attorney General Luisa Ortega, say the most recent arrests were necessary to suppress conspiracies or to prosecute people whose comments were deemed offensive to Mr. Chávez. In Judge Afiuni’s case, Attorney General Ortega said the judge had illegally freed another high-profile prisoner, the businessman Eligio Cedeño.
In March, intelligence agents arrested Oswaldo Álvarez Paz, a former presidential candidate, charging him with conspiracy after he said in televised remarks that Venezuela had become a haven for drug trafficking; he also supported a Spanish indictment asserting that officials here had helped Basque separatists train on Venezuelan soil.
Only days later, agents arrested Guillermo Zuloaga, the owner of the opposition television network Globovisión, after he criticized the government’s efforts to shut down media outlets that challenged the president. After an outcry by rights groups, Mr. Zuloaga was released on the condition that he could not travel outside the country.
Next, agents arrested Wilmer Azuaje, an opposition lawmaker, on charges of insulting and striking a police official during a heated discussion. Mr. Azuaje had in the past revealed corruption claims against Mr. Chávez’s siblings. Like Mr. Zuloaga, Mr. Azuaje was released, but the Supreme Court forbade him to discuss his arrest with the media.
The arrests have taken aim at some of Mr. Chávez’s most prominent critics ahead of legislative elections in September that put control of the National Assembly in play, and they illustrate Mr. Chávez’s attempts to tighten control over institutions like the judiciary.
Judge Afiuni, previously an obscure jurist, quickly rose to prominence when she freed Mr. Cedeño, a businessman jailed on charges of circumventing currency controls. The imprisonment of Mr. Cedeño, who had previously financed opposition politicians, was explicitly criticized last year by a panel of United Nations legal experts after his pretrial detention exceeded the limits set by Venezuelan law.
Judge Afiuni contended that she was following United Nations guidance when she released Mr. Cedeño, who subsequently fled to the United States. But Mr. Chávez immediately claimed that she had been bribed to release Mr. Cedeño, demanding that she be jailed for 30 years, even if new laws were needed to keep her in prison that long.
“The corruption charges are false, and prosecutors know that by looking at all of my banking records,” Judge Afiuni said. “But the damage to me has been done.”
Prosecutors overseeing Judge Afiuni’s case did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Criticism of her imprisonment from fellow judges in Venezuela has also been relatively muted, a reaction that is not entirely surprising because Mr. Chávez and his loyalists in the National Assembly stripped the Supreme Court of its autonomy in 2004.
Outside Venezuela, criticism of her arrest has been more vocal. United Nations legal experts called for her immediate release. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights said her arrest came within a political system already under stress because of a lack of judicial independence. Independent human rights group have assailed Mr. Chávez’s government over the arrest.
“It is not the sort of thing that happens in a functioning democracy, in which judicial institutions offer safeguards for rule of law,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director for Human Rights Watch.
Still, there appear to be relatively few political prisoners in Venezuelan jails, legal experts here say. Twenty to 30 Venezuelans, including Judge Afiuni, are now imprisoned here because of their political activity or for reasons connected to publicly contradicting Mr. Chávez’s wishes, said Rocío San Miguel, a legal scholar here who leads a nongovernmental group that monitors Venezuelan security.
The high-profile prisoners also include Raúl Isaías Baduel, a former defense minister, and Franklin Brito, a biologist arrested at around the same time as Judge Afiuni and put under guard in a military hospital after refusing to end a hunger strike over the government’s handling of the seizure of his farmland by squatters.
While Judge Afiuni’s case has raised concern over the erosion of judicial independence, the most recent arrests are stoking fears about freedom of expression.
“The government is fraudulently inventing conspiracies, assassination plots and national emergencies,” said Mr. Álvarez Paz, the former presidential candidate, who was charged with conspiracy after his televised remarks. He is now being detained in a holding cell at the headquarters of the intelligence police. He responded to written questions submitted through his lawyer. “It is doing so out of nervousness over the precarious decline in the president’s credibility at home and abroad,” he said.
Judge Afiuni said she followed news of the other arrests from a small television in her cell that received a state network signal. She also gets updates from her 17-year-old daughter, who visits twice a week. Otherwise, she remains in her cell and reads, most recently a biography of the Dalai Lama, fearful of venturing into other areas of the prison.
One respite from her life in jail, she said, came when the rehearsal sounds from a prison orchestra of inmates traveled past the bars of her cell. She said its rendition of Vivaldi could move her close to tears. “Just when I cannot stand it any longer here,” she said, “the music lets me escape from reality a little and remember that this nightmare will end someday.”
María Eugenia Díaz contributed reporting.
By SIMON ROMERO
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: April 3, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/world/americas/04venez.html?th&emc=th
LOS TEQUES, Venezuela — When Judge María Lourdes Afiuni issued a ruling in December that irked President Hugo Chávez, he did little to contain his outrage. The president, contending on national television that she would have been put before a firing squad in earlier times, sent his secret intelligence police to arrest her.
Then the agents took her to the overcrowded women’s prison in this city of slums near Caracas. They put her in a cell near more than 20 inmates whom Judge Afiuni had sentenced on charges like murder and drug smuggling.
“I’ve received threats from inmates telling me they will burn me alive because they see me as a symbol of the system that put them in prison,” said Judge Afiuni, 46, in her prison cell. “I’m in this hell because I had the temerity to do my job as a judge in a way that didn’t please Chávez.”
Since Judge Afiuni’s imprisonment, a dizzying sequence of other high-profile arrests has taken place, pointing to Mr. Chávez’s recent use of his security and intelligence apparatus to quash challenges to his grip on the country’s political institutions. The arrests come at a time of spreading public ire over an economy hobbled by electricity shortages and soaring inflation.
Senior officials in Mr. Chávez’s government here, including Attorney General Luisa Ortega, say the most recent arrests were necessary to suppress conspiracies or to prosecute people whose comments were deemed offensive to Mr. Chávez. In Judge Afiuni’s case, Attorney General Ortega said the judge had illegally freed another high-profile prisoner, the businessman Eligio Cedeño.
In March, intelligence agents arrested Oswaldo Álvarez Paz, a former presidential candidate, charging him with conspiracy after he said in televised remarks that Venezuela had become a haven for drug trafficking; he also supported a Spanish indictment asserting that officials here had helped Basque separatists train on Venezuelan soil.
Only days later, agents arrested Guillermo Zuloaga, the owner of the opposition television network Globovisión, after he criticized the government’s efforts to shut down media outlets that challenged the president. After an outcry by rights groups, Mr. Zuloaga was released on the condition that he could not travel outside the country.
Next, agents arrested Wilmer Azuaje, an opposition lawmaker, on charges of insulting and striking a police official during a heated discussion. Mr. Azuaje had in the past revealed corruption claims against Mr. Chávez’s siblings. Like Mr. Zuloaga, Mr. Azuaje was released, but the Supreme Court forbade him to discuss his arrest with the media.
The arrests have taken aim at some of Mr. Chávez’s most prominent critics ahead of legislative elections in September that put control of the National Assembly in play, and they illustrate Mr. Chávez’s attempts to tighten control over institutions like the judiciary.
Judge Afiuni, previously an obscure jurist, quickly rose to prominence when she freed Mr. Cedeño, a businessman jailed on charges of circumventing currency controls. The imprisonment of Mr. Cedeño, who had previously financed opposition politicians, was explicitly criticized last year by a panel of United Nations legal experts after his pretrial detention exceeded the limits set by Venezuelan law.
Judge Afiuni contended that she was following United Nations guidance when she released Mr. Cedeño, who subsequently fled to the United States. But Mr. Chávez immediately claimed that she had been bribed to release Mr. Cedeño, demanding that she be jailed for 30 years, even if new laws were needed to keep her in prison that long.
“The corruption charges are false, and prosecutors know that by looking at all of my banking records,” Judge Afiuni said. “But the damage to me has been done.”
Prosecutors overseeing Judge Afiuni’s case did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Criticism of her imprisonment from fellow judges in Venezuela has also been relatively muted, a reaction that is not entirely surprising because Mr. Chávez and his loyalists in the National Assembly stripped the Supreme Court of its autonomy in 2004.
Outside Venezuela, criticism of her arrest has been more vocal. United Nations legal experts called for her immediate release. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights said her arrest came within a political system already under stress because of a lack of judicial independence. Independent human rights group have assailed Mr. Chávez’s government over the arrest.
“It is not the sort of thing that happens in a functioning democracy, in which judicial institutions offer safeguards for rule of law,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director for Human Rights Watch.
Still, there appear to be relatively few political prisoners in Venezuelan jails, legal experts here say. Twenty to 30 Venezuelans, including Judge Afiuni, are now imprisoned here because of their political activity or for reasons connected to publicly contradicting Mr. Chávez’s wishes, said Rocío San Miguel, a legal scholar here who leads a nongovernmental group that monitors Venezuelan security.
The high-profile prisoners also include Raúl Isaías Baduel, a former defense minister, and Franklin Brito, a biologist arrested at around the same time as Judge Afiuni and put under guard in a military hospital after refusing to end a hunger strike over the government’s handling of the seizure of his farmland by squatters.
While Judge Afiuni’s case has raised concern over the erosion of judicial independence, the most recent arrests are stoking fears about freedom of expression.
“The government is fraudulently inventing conspiracies, assassination plots and national emergencies,” said Mr. Álvarez Paz, the former presidential candidate, who was charged with conspiracy after his televised remarks. He is now being detained in a holding cell at the headquarters of the intelligence police. He responded to written questions submitted through his lawyer. “It is doing so out of nervousness over the precarious decline in the president’s credibility at home and abroad,” he said.
Judge Afiuni said she followed news of the other arrests from a small television in her cell that received a state network signal. She also gets updates from her 17-year-old daughter, who visits twice a week. Otherwise, she remains in her cell and reads, most recently a biography of the Dalai Lama, fearful of venturing into other areas of the prison.
One respite from her life in jail, she said, came when the rehearsal sounds from a prison orchestra of inmates traveled past the bars of her cell. She said its rendition of Vivaldi could move her close to tears. “Just when I cannot stand it any longer here,” she said, “the music lets me escape from reality a little and remember that this nightmare will end someday.”
María Eugenia Díaz contributed reporting.
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