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Around the Nation
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Around the Nation
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The severity of the problem, reaching Native Americans of all ages, backgrounds and income levels, surprised even the Justice Department researchers who released the study yesterday. Native Americans said the numbers should prompt a redoubling of efforts to identify the root causes.
"It's a double-edged sword. People don't want to be stereotyped as violent - that's not part of who we are - but statistics like this might also encourage people to take steps toward intervention," said Anna Pasqua, a Native American who coordinates a domestic violence program with the Inter-Tribal Council of California in Sacramento.
Alcohol abuse, tensions with non-Native Americans, poor law enforcement services and other factors may all play a part in fueling the high rates of violent crime identified in the study, Native American leaders said.
A wave of worsening crime and social ills on reservations in recent years has drawn stepped-up attention from federal policy-makers.
But the study documents the range and extent of the problem, researchers said, and it details several particularly troubling twists, such as the frequency of assaults by non-Native Americans and the extent of alcohol abuse by Native American offenders.
"We now know that American Indians experience a much greater exposure to violence than other race groups," Lawrence A. Greenfeld of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, co-author of the report, said in an interview.
"I was very surprised," he said. "The common wisdom was that blacks experience the highest exposure to violence. And when we released the (crime) survey results year after year, that was the result. This adds a new dimension to our understanding of the problem."
American Indians number about 2.3 million in the United States, or less than 1 percent of the population, with about a quarter thought to live on reservations.
Justice Department statisticians said that they never before had broken out rates of crime among American Indians because the statistical sample was too small. But in response to numerous queries about the extent of the problem, the department decided to review five years worth of data, looking at 150,000 incidents of violence a year and other crimes among American Indians who live on and off reservations.
Still, it wasn't enough to prevent 550 flights from being canceled.
"We're just glad they are coming back and we hope by the end of the week to be in business as usual here," American spokeperson Sonja Whitemon said.
She said the airline could be 100 percent operational by tomorrow.
The pilots were accused of calling in sick to protest salaries being paid to pilots at Reno Air, an airline that American recently bought.
U.S. District Judge Joe Kendall ordered the job action to cease on Wednesday, and on Saturday accused union officials of not doing enough to encourage pilots to return to work.
Kendall scheduled a Wednesday hearing to determine how much to fine the union and two union leaders, whom he found in contempt of court.
He said the fine could be in the millions of dollars.
Nearly 2,500 of the airline's 9,400 pilots remained out sick Friday.
Whitemon said well under 1,000 pilots were out yesterday, as about 40 pilots per hour called to take themselves off of the sick list since Kendall's ruling.
Meanwhile, the union insisted it had done all it could to get the pilots back on the job.
"We're taking his order seriously," union president Rich LaVoy said yesterday of the judge's ruling.
More than half a million travelers have been left at the gate because of dispute about how quickly American should integrate the Reno Air pilots into its own pay scale. Negotiations on that issue are scheduled to restart this afternoon.
Despite the continued cancellations, the nation's airports were calmer on Presidents Day with many passengers prepared for delays.
In Miami, Jim Rectanwald, an American Airlines mechanic, was among hundreds of passengers at Miami International Airport still trying to get home.
"My boss told me I'd better find a way back one way or another," said Rectanwald, who was mulling whether to buy a ticket on a Delta flight.
Rectanwald, who works at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, estimated he'd already spent $1,000 for hotel rooms, rental cars and other expenses during his forced wait.
"This was all so premature and could've been worked out," he said.
In the study, released yesterday, women who had suffered from bulimia and recovered were more affected psychologically than other women by being deprived of tryptophan, which plays an indirect role in appetite regulation.
Tryptophan, an amino acid that occurs naturally in many foods, is used by the body to make serotonin, a mood- and appetite-regulating chemical in the brain.
Compared with normal women, the recovered bulimics reported bigger dips in mood, greater worries about body image and more fear of losing control of eating after being deprived of dietary tryptophan for about 17 hours, researchers said.
The study, published in the February issue of the American Medical Association's Archives of General Psychiatry, involved 10 recovered bulimics and 12 normal women.
Subjects were given identical-looking fruit drinks and snacks in the study, some with tryptophan and some without. They were not told which was which.
"These findings suggest that lowered brain serotonin function can trigger some of the clinical features of bulimia nervosa in individuals vulnerable to the disorder," said researchers led by Katharine Smith of the University of Oxford, England.
An expert not involved in the study said it adds to growing evidence that bulimia, a disorder in which sufferers typically alternate between binge eating and starving or purging, is biologically rooted and seems to have something to do with the system's inability to regulate serotonin.
Walter Kaye of the University of Pittsburgh, said he and his colleagues last year reported finding abnormal levels of a serotonin-related chemical in the spinal fluid of actively bulimic women.
"What this (new study) is saying ... is these disturbances persist after people recover - and more likely are there before people develop the disorder - and these may be the kind of vulnerabilities that create eating disorders in the first place," Kaye said in a telephone interview Friday.
02-15-99
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