Featured Articles from the New York Times

If the members of the American medical establishment were to have a collective find-yourself-standing-naked-in-Times-Square-type nightmare, this might be it. They spend 30 years ridiculing Robert Atkins, author of the phenomenally-best-selling "Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution" and "Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution," accusing the Manhattan doctor of quackery and fraud, only to discover that the unrepentant Atkins was right all along. Or maybe it's this: they find that their very own dietary recommendations -- eat less fat and more carbohydrates -- are the cause of the rampaging epidemic of obesity in America.

HOMEOWNERS who have been thinking about converting their oil heating systems to natural gas recently found a reason to stop thinking and start acting when heating oil prices rose earlier this month to more than $2.60 a gallon in some areas. While prices have since fallen to under $1.50 a gallon, natural gas suppliers say that the demand for oil-to-gas conversions has significantly increased. One of the area's largest natural gas providers, Keyspan Energy -- the parent of Brooklyn Union, which supplies natural gas to homes in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island -- recently reported that it had signed up 1,492 new gas customers in January, up from 962 for the same month last year.

Alexander Gates, a geology professor at Rutgers-Newark, is co-author of "The Encyclopedia of Earthquakes and Volcanoes," which will be published by Facts on File in July. He has been leading a four-year effort to remap an area known as the Sloatsburg Quadrangle, a 5-by-7-mile tract near Mahwah that crosses into New York State. The Ramapo Fault, which runs through it, was responsible for a big earthquake in 1884, and Dr. Gates warns that a recurrence is overdue. He recently talked about his findings.

The Governor of the Mexican state that borders Arizona is collaborating with one of the world's most powerful drug traffickers, creating a haven for smugglers who transport vast quantities of narcotics into the United States, according to American officials and intelligence. Officials said this conclusion was based on a wealth of evidence, including "highly reliable" informers' reports that the Governor, Manlio Fabio Beltrones Rivera, took part in meetings in which leading traffickers paid high-level politicians who were protecting their operations.

WHEN Robert Penn Warren, the poet, novelist and critic, arrived at Yale in 1927 to pursue his doctoral studies, he lasted in New Haven for just a few months. In 1928, having moved on to Oxford, he wrote to a friend, "What I really wanted was to get in an environment where men were actually doing creative writing, but Yale is not the place for that, I learned too late. " The evidence, however, suggests otherwise. Over the last 300 years, many of America's greatest writers have been Yale alumni.

Building owners and tenants can at the click of a mouse (and without charge) determine whether there are outstanding Housing Maintenance Code violations on a particular residential building in New York City. By visiting the Department of Housing Preservation and Development's Web site, www.nyc.gov/hpd, following instructions and typing in a street address, "any interested members of the public will be able to see violations on privately owned residential buildings, citywide," said Jerilyn Perine, the city's commissioner of housing preservation and development.

Every year about this time, many Americans come down with what they think is a cold that seems to hang on and on. In fact, they are allergic to the pollens of spring. While the August-to-October ragweed season gets more attention, early-season and midsummer pollens can be every bit as devastating and sometimes more so for those who are sensitive to them. Tree pollens are already at an early-spring peak in the Southeast, where allergists say this is one of the worst seasons ever.

Thomas Banyacya, who spent half a century on a tireless and often thankless Hopi spiritual mission to save the planet from the ravages of modern materialism and greed, died on Feb. 6 at a hospital in Keane Canyon, Ariz., about 40 miles from his home in Kykotsmovi on the Hopi reservation. He was 89 and the last of four messengers named by Hopi elders in 1948 to warn the world of impending doom. The 15,000 or so Hopis are a small nation, but their sense of burden is great. According to a 900-year-old religious tradition, the Great Spirit Maasau'u, Guardian of the Earth, assigned them the duty of preserving the natural balance of the world and entrusted them with a series of ominous prophecies warning of specific threats and providing guidance on how to avoid them.

WHEN a car gets old and rusty you replace it. When a shirt gets stained and yellow you retire it. And when a carpet gets worn and shabby, you toss it out and get a new one. But what do you do when the above conditions apply to an 800-pound hunk of porcelain in your bathroom? "Did you ever try to get a bathtub into an elevator?" said Richard Toder, executive director of T/S Associates, a mechanical-systems consulting company in Manhattan. Mr. Toder, a licensed plumber who has waltzed more than a few tubs out of tight corners, said that in addition to the logistical difficulties involved in hauling a cast-iron clunker out of a house or an apartment, replacing an existing fixture can also result in unexpected expenses when floor or walltiles are disturbed or broken or when a fragile old plumbing system must be replaced and brought up to code.

The airline industry is cutting its lowest discount fares more widely, deeply and earlier than it normally does at the end of the summer, a time when travel usually falls off and the industry puts in some lower fares to attract passengers. Yesterday American Airlines capped a series of cuts in domestic fares begun by USAir on Sunday and matched by other major carriers. American reduced its lowest discount fares by as much as 28 percent on all domestic routes. Typical savings for travelers will range from $60 to $100, but on some routes the reductions are more substantial.

The 4 1/2-year-old son of the rock guitarist Eric Clapton was killed yesterday morning when he fell out an open bedroom window on the 53d floor of a Manhattan apartment building. The boy, Conor, who was dressed in red pajamas and slippers, landed on the roof of a four-story building next to Galleria Condominiums, a 57-story building where the boy was staying with his mother, the police said. They said the window, about 6 feet high and 4 feet wide, was left open after it was cleaned by a housekeeper.

ON one of my first writing gigs in the late 1960's, I was sent out on assignment with a photographer who told me that there are just four basic cliches of portrait photography. If it's a woman, he explained, pose her in front of a body of water or a tree. Men are easier. Just stick them in front of a bookshelf, or pose them in the classic lounge lizard chin-in-the-hand position. A stroll through any bookshop raises the suspicion that very little progress has been made in the world of big-time portrait photography cliches over the past 25 years -- at least when it comes to author photos.

Want to know Victoria's Secret? I'll tell you. It might be especially interesting to men shopping for Valentine's Day gifts, like those widely promoted push-up bras. You know them from the ads showing skinny models with spherical breasts that appear to float in skimpy lace cups. With their shoulder straps thin as ribbon and narrow back bands, the cleavage-baring bras resemble two clam-shell halves looped together with string (similar to what the heroine wears in "The Little Mermaid")

To prowl the wealthy neighborhoods here in the Beverly Hills of Japan, where $5 million ranch-style homes peek from behind stone walls, is to see that it was not just luck that determined who lived and who died in the devastating earthquake last week. Money also played a role. While nature was democratic, in that the tremblor rattled rich neighborhoods as well as poor ones, its consequences were not. Frequently, it was the poorer people's homes that collapsed and buried them in rubble.

HUMBUGGERY AND MANIPULATION The Art of Leadership. By F. G. Bailey. 187 pp. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Cloth, $27.50. Paper, $8.95. After calling all leaders villains and liars, F. G. Bailey, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, seems to expect the public to fight back. But why? Isn't this the season to attack politicians? Aren't we the people busy enough sniping at this officeholder for having an inflated image and that candidate for making hollow promises?

In a whitewashed cell in the Pankrac prison here, the man generally recognized as one of his nation's greatest poets sits behind a scarred formica table, wearing the prison uniform of faded purple sweatsuit and slip-on shoes. High up, a slit of wet sky is visible through the bars of a small window. His crime: to challenge the one-party rule of a once-Communist country, Uzbekistan. His fate: to sit in the same jail where the writer Vaclav Havel was once detained by the Communist police, a political prisoner in the country Mr. Havel now rules.