Most news stories depict sixth graders as violent criminals, sex addicts, drug abusers, computer hackers or fashion-conscious shopaholics. But this morning's New York Times, after conducting "round-table discussions over the past six months with 221 sixth graders" at 21 schools in 11 states and the District of Columbia, brings in the front-page news that what these children really are is, well, nerds. "As a Muslim school in Atlanta, just as at a Jewish school in Las Vegas, preteenage overachievers sweat even fractional fluctuations in grade-point average," the story says. One student, in Las Vegas, "has been using the Web to compare Brigham Young University in Utah with a college in Hawaii." Another, in Atlanta, logs onto a web site "several days a week" to answer practice SAT questions. Where did the Times find these children? And was there any discounting for the usual sixth-grader practice of telling adults what the sixth-grader thinks the adults want to hear? We haven't interviewed 221 sixth graders, and we may be overly cynical. But we'd bet that for each 12-year old sweating over "fractional fluctuations in grade-point average" and running home after school to practice for the SAT, there are at least a few others who are spending their time experimenting with tobacco and using their computers not for SAT practice but for playing video games.

Late: Under the headline "Iraqis ask U.S. to Do More to Oust Saddam," a story in the international section reports on a meeting last Monday between Vice President Gore and Iraqi opponents to Saddam Hussein. The story also reported on a hearing about Iraq policy that was held last Wednesday before a congressional subcommittee headed by Senator Brownback. Why did it take the Times until today, Monday, to report news that happened last Monday and Wednesday? Other papers had no such delay; The Wall Street Journal last week devoted a full column to the news.

Batty: For some unfathomable reason, the Times seems to find the bottom of its editorial column an appropriate place to publish the random ruminations of someone who lives in the boondocks. The regular feature appears under the heading "The Rural Life." Today it is about bats and slugs.

Perhaps one of the single most ridiculous statements ever to be made in print is contained in the cover story of this Sunday's New York Times Magazine. "Government spending causes volunteering," the article quotes an economist as contending.

Think about this statement for a moment and you'll realize, if you haven't already, just how absurd it is; private charity and altruistic volunteerism have in fact existed since biblical times, long before the notion of "government spending." It's a measure of just where this magazine article is coming from that the economist's statement is quoted in the Times without a hint of irony, as a kind of authoritative buttressing of the argument being made by the author.

The cover line touts the article as an explanation of "why volunteerism doesn't work." The text of the article takes one example -- the author's efforts to help some of her poor former students -- and makes the failings of her efforts into a claim that only the government, not private individuals, can help the poor. "What my kids really need, I can't give them: better housing, less crowded schools, access to affordable health care, a less punitive juvenile justice system, and for their parents, better child care (so they can work without leaving their kids unattended) and a living wage," the author writes.

In truth, it is possible to glean from the facts contained in the article another possible reason the author's former students are in such dire straits. That reason has little to do with the degree of crowding in the schools or the degree of punitiveness in the juvenile justice system and much to do with the students' fathers, or their lack of them. One student's father "has struggled with drugs" and "started stealing from the family." The father of a second student "had recently been released from jail" and soon thereafter "stole every item in the apartment." A third student lives "with his mother and his younger brother." A fourth student's parents have died, and he "was being reared by a disabled grandmother."

Why the absent fathers? Well, there's no way to tell for sure, but it's worth noting -- the Times Magazine doesn't -- that these children were born at a time when the government's welfare policy incentivized single motherhood by paying fatherless families more in government aid than those with able-bodied males. They were also born at a time when attempts to enforce child-support payments from so-called "deadbeat dads" were far less developed than they are now.

Two final absurdities in this magazine article: The first is the author's attempt to extrapolate from her own difficulties the conclusion that all volunteer-based programs aren't as good as government ones. She doesn't even consider the work done by the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, by YMCAs and YWCAs, by Boys Clubs and Girls Clubs, by Alcoholics Anonymous. All of those groups have established records of success by building on years of collective experience, unlike the author, who improvised her own program of weekend activities for children.

The second is the author's references to "reductions in government aid to the poor" and to "Reagan-era cutbacks in social spending," which have been continued, the article claims, "by the current Democratic administration." These "cutbacks" are entirely imaginary. As welfare expert Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation put it in a 1996 paper: "Total welfare spending was $199 billion in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was elected president. By 1988, his last year in office, welfare spending reached $230 billion...Ronald Reagan did not reduce welfare spending; he merely slowed its explosive growth rate." Measuring welfare spending another way, two other Heritage experts writing in a different policy paper describe the situation in the past decade: "despite the administration's commitment to 'end welfare as we know it,' inflation-adjusted federal spending for means-tested entitlements grew from $101.8 billion in FY 1990 to $184.9 billion in FY 1999, an increase of 81.6 percent in less than one decade." The "FY" refers to "fiscal year."

More Mythical Reductions: The chimerical cutbacks in welfare spending aren't the only nonexistent reductions the Times is offering up this morning. An article on the front page of the Sunday Styles section reports that more physicians are seeking publicity for themselves because they are "faced with shrinking incomes in the age of managed care."

Well, the news hasn't apparently reached the editors at the Times, but, in fact, physicians' incomes are "shrinking" at about the rate that welfare spending experienced "cutbacks" during the Reagan administration: That is, not at all. As The Washington Post reported in December of 1998, "Despite the advent of managed care, the growth of doctors' income has far outstripped that of the typical American worker in recent years, according to data published by the American Medical Association and the U.S. Bureau of the Census. The Kaiser Family Foundation analysis shows that doctors' net income grew by nearly 80 percent from 1985 to 1996, a period in which the median income for all Americans grew by just over 40 percent." More recent data reported in the trade magazine Managed Care shows that doctors with more than 50 percent of their patients in managed care plans actually experienced greater increases in their income than did those who operated on a fee-for-service basis.

More Loveable Criminals: As if the June 21 arts section dispatch about the death row exhibit wasn't enough, the Times national report today offers up another installment in the newspaper's informal series depicting convicted felons as joyful, loving family men. In an article on a visitation program for inmates at a Youngstown, Ohio prison, the Times dwells on images of the convicts "free to exchange hugs with their children." One prisoner and his son are described "lolling and smiling, the two might as well have been fishing on a lake." While we are told that some of the inmates were convicted of "assault," we don't hear about the details of the crimes or get to hear what the victims of the crimes think about these new visitation privileges.

In general, corrections officials try to avoid re-hashing in the press the details of a prisoner's crime -- it's considered bad for rehabilitation, because it can reinforce the image of the inmate as an inherently evil person and create a culture within the prison of bragging about the gory details of crimes. Still, in fairness to the victims of the crimes and to their families, it seems that the Times story could have used a phrase or two depicting these inmates as something other than simply loving fathers.

Improvement? Get this, from an article in the Week in Review section on the prevalence of skimpy clothing on women this summer: "It's a shame that plunging necklines and ascending midriffs have become identified with pornographic fantasies, because they do reflect an improved reality. Women of all sizes, shapes and ages wear the tie-backs and halters once seen only on the young and slim, partly thanks to better self-image and the increased acceptance of different body types. Designers have even made tube tops for the visibly pregnant."

Well, this may the point at which taste diverges from fashion, and smartertimes.com, which usually devotes itself to graver public policy concerns than trends in womenswear, realizes it's stepping onto dangerous ground here. We'll stipulate that, by us, pregnant women get a pass to wear whatever they want. Still, we thought there was a consensus among civilized New Yorkers that women beyond a certain size and age are better off avoiding "tie-backs," "halters" and "tube tops," just as men beyond a certain size and age ought to forgo muscle shirts and skin-tight Lycra bicycle shorts. The Times apparently considers the end of these taboos to be "an improved reality." We're not entirely convinced.

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An article on the front of the metro section of this morning's New York Times describes the growth of commercial activity in Harlem. Under the headline "New Cinema and New Hope in Harlem," the article reports that one soon-to-be-developed retail site "is cater-cornered to a Pathmark -- Harlem's first full-service supermarket in three decades -- which has flourished since it opened in April 1999."

Well, you could get into some definitional questions about what constitutes "full-service," but anyone who lives in Harlem knows that there were supermarkets there before 1999. The ombudsman of The Washington Post, E.R. Shipp, devoted part of her column in May of 1999 to debunking a similar claim that had appeared earlier that month in The Washington Post. She wrote: "The article said, inaccurately, that Harlem had recently acquired its first supermarket. This came as a surprise to Harlemites past and present -- of which I am one. I regularly shop at the Fairway in my section of Harlem; others prefer such supermarkets as Associated and C-Town."

Indeed, the Fairway has been at 133rd St. and the Hudson River waterfront since 1996; directories show an Associated Food Supermarket on East 116th St. and C Town Supermarkets on St. Nicholas Ave. and on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard. If The Washington Post, an out-of-town paper, was able to grasp this point on the second try, you'd think that the Times -- which, after all, is based in New York -- would do better.

Fireworks Dud: Under the headline "City Officials Tell Revelers, Leave Fireworks to Experts," a story on page B2 of today's New York editions of The New York Times predictably parrots the government line on pyrotechnics. Leave aside, for a moment, the article's failure to include any opposing points of view. (The Wall Street Journal got ahead of this Independence Day perennial with an editorial in Friday's paper that said, "Put it this way. Every year we have propane tanks blow up. But does the government tell us we should leave barbecuing to the professionals and get our ribs from Tony Roma's?")

No, what's really illogical about the Times story is its use of statistics. There's a scientific-looking graph alongside the story showing a steep decline in the number of cases of fireworks seized by city police and fire departments. The article says officials say the numbers "show that the crackdown has discouraged people from bringing fireworks into the city." That's ridiculous. The numbers don't show anything of the sort. They may show that the fireworks smugglers have gotten more clever at hiding their wares. They may show that the police have gotten less clever at capturing cases of roman candles, sparklers and the like. But there's no reason to believe that the amount of fireworks seized by police is an accurate proxy for the amount of fireworks that are being brought into the city. Consider what would happen if you applied that analysis to the trade in illegal drugs. As it is, police and drug enforcement agents tout seizures of large quantities of drugs as successes. According to the Times-fireworks theory of crime statistics, a large seizure would be bad news for police, a sign that the crackdown on narcotics has failed to "discourage" people from bringing drugs into the city.

The other statistic city officials tout -- and the Times passes along uncritically -- is that the number of fireworks-related injuries "has gone down with the increased enforcement efforts." But the Wall Street Journal editorial reports that "the 10 states with absolute bans on fireworks accounted for 41%" of all reported fireworks-related accidents in 1995. Now, it's possible that the 10 states with the largest populations just happen to all have absolute bans on fireworks. But you kind of wish that the Times reporter had read the Friday Wall Street Journal editorial and grappled with it rather than simply passing along the party line from city officials.

The one statistic that would really tell you something about the supply of fireworks in New York is their price. Assuming that the demand is relatively steady from year to year, if the price goes up, it would be evidence that the police effort to restrict supply is having an effect. But there's no information in the Times story about fireworks prices.

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The city and state of New York have spent $24 million to hire a company to call up poor New Yorkers and urge them to sign up for health insurance plans and primary care physicians. The company has hired persons who speak 18 languages, including, The New York Times reports this morning, Urdu and Haitian Creole. The company has forged alliances with about 50 community groups to help in its task, the Times reports. And it has gotten 81 percent of persons to choose an insurance plan voluntarily, far exceeding the 60 percent guideline in the company's contract, the Times reports. So, naturally, the reaction from the Times is a story stripped across the top of the front of the Metro section amplifying complaints from the hard-left Legal Aid Society that the company has sometimes screwed up. "Company Enrolling Poor in Heath Care Plans Is Criticized," the headline says.

The article doesn't name a single poor person who has gotten bad treatment from the company. It does, however, cite "a 63-year-old Russian-speaking man with diabetes and other medical complications who was repeatedly sent information in English, which he could not understand, had his medical insurance briefly canceled and then was automatically assigned to a doctor's office where no one spoke Russian." It also cites "a 62-year-old Spanish speaking woman with degenerative joint disease" who "had to delay surgery after complications that resulted from her not being able to read forms" that the company "had sent her in English, even though she had requested them in Spanish."

Immigrants to America, and to other countries, for that matter, have always had to surmount language barriers. It seems as though the company that the city and state hired has tried to make reasonable efforts to accommodate these language problems and has been reasonably successful. So why give such prominent attention in the Times to a few horror stories, and why blame the company for an age-old problem, the language difficulties that immigrants face in a new land?

The Answer: The answer to that question is suggested by another item in today's Times, an editorial on "Privatization and Failing Schools." The editorial makes for the Times what is a giant departure from to its preferred big-government stance: It leaves the door open to the idea of hiring private companies to run some failing New York City schools. Don't get too excited, though. The Times isn't exactly leading the way here: the schools chancellor and the head of the state's United Federation of Teachers have already made it clear that they are open to the idea. And catch the Times's caveat: "The evidence suggests that any privatization effort should begin slowly, with just a few schools and with close scrutiny from city and state education officials. Companies that succeed by objective criteria -- using the same resources as the public schools -- should be allowed to continue. Those that fail should not."

This is breathtaking in two ways.

First is the insistence that no additional resources be given to the students in the schools that would be run privately. That would defeat the whole point. The very idea of privatization is to give students more resources. In the case of schools run by non-profits, it's the additional volunteer muscle, money and social capital of a committed group of parents or volunteers or the Catholic Church. Telling the church or the parent volunteers who undertake the responsibility to run a school that they aren't allowed to put any more money or "resources" in than the government puts into its schools is just telling them you want to prevent them from succeeding. God forbid some student gets a little bit better school than another student: It would be horrible, according to the Times's logic -- the newspaper's message is apparently that it's okay if the schools are bad, just as long as they are all equally bad.

The "same resources" argument also would have the effect of stalling the entrance into the market of for-profit education companies. Such companies often subsidize their first few schools in a market as "loss leaders," providing such schools with additional resources from their own private corporate capital in order to build a brand and a record of success. The Times doesn't want to allow this; the "same resources" phrase seems to suggest requiring the private companies to operate their schools using only the same per-student fee that the public schools do. But the public schools have a huge cost advantage related to volume that the for-profit education companies, at least at the outset, won't have. The for-profit companies, for instance, have far fewer students over which to spread the costs of things such as curriculum development. Again, the "same resources" provision is setting up a standard that would prevent privately run schools from succeeding.

The other way that the Times's position is stunning, though, is in its insistence that the newly privatized schools should not be allowed to continue if they fail. Makes sense -- but why doesn't the Times apply the same standard to government-run public schools? The Times may claim it does support shutting down bad individual government-run public schools, but in fact such "shut downs" are pretty much farces: the "shut-down" school often reopens immediately on the same site under the same overall public government control. Here you get a sense of the Times's double standard, holding business and even non-profits to a higher bar of performance than it holds governments to, whether the issue is education or helping poor immigrants get doctors and health insurance.

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In a full-throated editorial titled "An End to Secret Campaign Funds," the Times today urges what in fact amounts to an end to the free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. "The Senate needs to act quickly, since every day of delay guarantees that more truckloads of secret money will be harvested by the slush fund organizations," the editorial says. The Times describes the bill as "requiring disclosure of secret slush funds."

And what is one of the groups behind one of these nefarious "secret slush funds" that the Times wants so badly to regulate? It is -- get ready -- the Sierra Club.

Now, Smartertimes is fully willing to acknowledge that ads from the Sierra Club could have a corrosive effect on the outcome of an election, but we're willing to take the risk of letting such ads run unrestricted on the theory that more speech is better. The funding for the ads shouldn't have to be reported to the federal government on cumbersome disclosure forms, as the Times wants. This is America. If the Sierra Club wants to buy ads before an election or if the polluting corporations want to buy ads or if the Times itself wants to publish editorials, there's no reason the Times should deride it as a "secret slush fund" or the government should seek to restrict it or regulate it. It's free speech in a democracy. Imposing stricter regulations on political speech in the months before an election, as the bill backed by the Times does, would dynamite a huge loophole through the very First Amendment that also guarantees freedom of the press to The Times and other newspapers.

More Missile Defense: An article in the international section today reports that "A group of more than 40 American scholars on China and former diplomats is urging President Clinton to delay a decision on whether to build a national missile defense."

A group letter like this is the sort of publicity stunt that often doesn't tell you very much about the merits of a particular issue; it would probably be easy enough to gather 40 "scholars and former diplomats" to sign a letter urging the president to decide immediately, without a delay.

The Times tells us that the signatures were gathered by a group called the Council for a Livable World, "a private group in Washington that lobbies for nuclear disarmament." The Times doesn't tell us, but the group's web site does, that the Council for a Livable World also lobbies for "deep cuts" in American military spending, against NATO enlargement, and for more use of the United Nations in international conflict resolution. In other words, policies that would have the effect of decreasing American influence throughout the world -- and decreasing with it the chances for the spread of freedom and democracy.

The same story in the Times claims flatly that a proposed missile defense system "would violate the Antiballistic Missile Treaty signed with the Soviet Union in 1972." But the chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, Jesse Helms, and some legal experts say that that treaty is no longer valid because it was signed with the Soviet Union, which no longer exists. You can't violate a treaty that is signed with a power that no longer exists, the theory goes. The Times story doesn't even take this objection into account.

Iranian 'Moderate': A story about Iran that appears in the international section today refers to "President Muhammad Khatami, a moderate cleric who has promoted the rule of law and freedom of expression." Only by the warped standards of Iran, or of the New York Times, could Khatami be considered a moderate. He denies Israel's right to exist. When students marched in the streets of Tehran a year ago protesting for freedom, he backed the brutal crackdown on them. Better the story would call him "more moderate" or "a so-called moderate" or report that he has promoted the rule of law and freedom of expression so long as they don't threaten his own regime or take place among Israeli Jews.

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The international section of this morning's New York Times carries a dispatch from Moscow reporting that Russian parliamentary leaders are urging the president of Belarus to make sure that the elections scheduled for the fall in Belarus are free and fair. The story goes on for a while in this vein, quoting from a Russian letter appealing to the president of Belarus to grant all parties equal access to the state-run press. Nowhere in the story is there even a hint of irony about the fact that Russia is lecturing anyone about how to run a free election. This is Russia, remember, where President Yeltsin's decision to step down before his term ended had the effect of handpicking Vladimir Putin as his successor, and where President Putin's henchmen have launched a fierce crackdown on what semblance of a free press there is. Sure, Belarus may be worse than Russia when it comes to democracy and press freedom, but still, Russia is in no position to lecture anyone on these issues. That's a point that the Times story doesn't make.

More on Gun Control: A Times editorial this morning on New York State's decision to sue gun manufacturers for creating a public nuisance says the suit doesn't go far enough. The Times wants the state to seek recovery of financial damages from the gun companies, a step the Times says would be "a good way of putting extra pressure on other gun makers to negotiate a deal" similar to a settlement reached between Smith & Wesson and the Clinton administration. But even left-liberals like Robert Reich, President Clinton's first labor secretary, have been voicing doubts recently about whether government civil suits against companies making legal products are a wise tactic for making policy. In its lead editorial on gasoline prices and emissions, the Times says that balancing the price and environmental effects of gas regulations "is a matter for Congress to decide and should not be driven by short-term supply imbalances." Why then, isn't gun control a matter for Congress, or the state legislature, to decide, and not for the courts? Probably because the Times knows that if it had to rely on the Congress or state legislature rather than the courts, it would have little chance to achieve the result it wants: crippling the gun industry the same way it did the tobacco industry. If Congress wants to debate banning handguns or regulating their sale, fine. It may confront Second Amendment issues. But relying on the courts to act in cases where there is no will in the legislatures sets up a dangerous pattern. Remember, we're not talking about desegregation here or some other case where the courts need to act to protect a constitutionally protected minority from having its rights trampled by the majority. We're talking about an attempt to use the courts to regulate an industry that makes legal products.

A story in the national section about Governor George W. Bush's position on immigration bashes the Republicans as anti-immigrant. "The point was to distinguish him from the more strident Republican immigration policies of yore," the article says. "The Bush campaign has been working to live down the reputation the party gained in 1996 when some prominent Republicans, including Pete Wilson, then the governor of California, backed Proposition 187 in California to deny medical and education services to children of illegal immigrants."

Unfortunately for immigrants and for companies struggling to find workers in today's tight labor market, the Democrats have been anti-immigrant, too. Catering to labor unions fearful of downward wage pressure, blacks who don't want more competition for jobs and environmental groups who think there are too many people in America already, there are plenty of Democrats who want to reduce levels of legal immigration to America. The Clinton-Gore administration regularly sends its Coast Guard to turn back boats of immigrants from Haiti and Cuba who are seeking freedom and a better life on our shores. Senator Feinstein of California, a Democrat, has called for a national identity card and increases in the border patrol to keep out illegal immigrants; Senator Boxer, another Democrat from California, urged the construction of a border fence with Mexico, according to an account by Ron Unz in the November 1999 issue of Commentary. But according to the Times account today, it's just the Republicans who are "strident" on the immigration issue.

Radical Environmentalists: Catch this from an editorial in today's Times about a bill in Congress that would let government buy more land for the purposes of "conservation": "The coastal provision, meanwhile, is flawed by loose language that could actually allow states to build the kind of infrastructure projects like roads and port facilities that ruined the coastlines in the first place. This is exactly what the bill should not allow." Oh yes, those roads and port facilities that ruined the coastlines. Like the port at New York, without which the very metropolis the Times is based in wouldn't probably have ever become more than a village. Or the FDR Drive, West Side Highway and Belt Parkway, without which the newspaper's readers would stand little chance of getting to work each morning. "Ruined the coastlines," they did. Oh.

Hillary on the Iran Jews: A story in the metro section about Chelsea Clinton's appearance with her mother on the campaign trail describes Malcolm Hoenlein, who was also at the campaign event, as the "conservative and influential Jewish leader" who is executive vice chairman of the "Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations," The correct name of the group is the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The article offers no evidence that he is "conservative"; I know him from my days at the Forward, and only by the Times's warped standard could he be considered a conservative. The article lets Mrs. Clinton off with a quote calling the trial of 13 Jews in Iran on espionage charges a "miscarriage of justice." But with all the space devoted to Chelsea, the article doesn't have room, apparently, to seriously question Mrs. Clinton's views on whether she agrees with her husband's decision to relax American sanctions on Iranian carpets, pistachios and caviar while the 13 Jews are jailed. Or whether she would criticize the president for failing to get the World Bank to stop funding multimillion dollar projects in Iran while the show trial of the 13 Jews continues.

Improvement on 'Sharanksy': The lead item in Saturday's Smartertimes was devoted to the problems the Times has in spelling correctly the name of Israel's interior minister. Saturday's story misspelled it four times. It looks like things have improved slightly. Today's front-page story on the minister, whose name is Natan Sharansky, manages to spell his name correctly in the headline. This time, the name is misspelled as "Sharanksy" only twice in the story. That's a 50 percent reduction in the number of misspellings compared to Saturday's article. Still, the fact that one of today's misspellings is on the front page means that the copy editors over on West 43rd Street still have some more work to do on the Sharansky issue.

Anderson Cottage: The Times today runs a correction of the map of Washington D.C. that it ran yesterday alongside an article on President Lincoln's retreat, Anderson Cottage. Smartertimes pointed out the error yesterday morning.

The Times returns this morning to an attempt to write intelligently about crime and policing by using the technique of interviewing lots of unsavory characters about how they feel they are being treated by the police. The last time it tried this, it found that the New York Police Department was trying to impose the values of "Mayberry" on a city with a healthy tolerance for a little vice: that report was dissected convincingly twice, the first time by John Podhoretz in the New York Post, then more recently by Arch Puddington in the June issue of Commentary.

Now the Times is back on the trail with a front-page article by five reporters, interviewing, it tells us, "about 200 people" -- "young gang members and tired ex-cons" as well as "prostitutes" and "scrawny heroin addicts," who claim that, no, the police haven't stopped hassling them. To its credit, this time around the Times includes a sentence acknowledging the fact that some elderly persons and homeowners may actually be glad that the police aren't backing off. But the rest of the story, besides the strange reliance on the testimony of criminals and drug addicts, still betrays a misunderstanding of some basic concepts.

For instance, the article makes much of the fact that arrest statistics are up, and interprets it as a sign that police are not retreating. But measuring police performance by the number of arrests is using a failed model. The goal of good policing shouldn't be to make lots of arrests; it should be to reduce crime. A rise in arrests can be a sign of an increase in criminal activity. There's lots of police activity short of making an arrest: telling a crowd of youths gathered on a street corner to move along, asking the hosts of an unruly house party to please lower the volume of the stereo, walking the full beat while assigned to foot patrol rather than hiding out for hours in the safety of a convenience store. A retreat in police activity would be seen as much in these kinds of practices as in arrest statistics, and a retreat in these sorts of practices could well lead to an increase in arrest statistics of the sort the article reports.

The article also sites "fewer crimes" as a sign that police are not in retreat. Well, the article reports that in the 113th precinct in Queens, "serious crimes are up about 6 percent," and that city-wide, there has been a "puzzling rise in murders." Crime victimization statistics are notoriously unreliable, except for homicide stats, which are pretty much incontrovertible; it's hard to hide a dead body or someone's disappearance.

The Times story doesn't, however, quantify the increase in the murder statistics. For that you have to go to an opinion piece by George Kelling in last week's Wall Street Journal. Come to think of it, Professor Kelling, who teaches at Rutgers, would have been a good person for the Times to consult for this story on whether the police are in retreat. But of course, why would the Times want to ring up an academic expert? It has its own ready favorite sources for stories on police and crime patterns: those "gang members," "prostitutes" and "scrawny heroin addicts."

Wreckonings: Somehow, the spellcheckers didn't catch the word "Midwesternrefinerstouseethanolwouldn't," which was rendered as one word in Paul Krugman's "reckonings" column on today's Op-Ed page. If the consolidation is intentional, the meaning is lost on this reader.

The Magazine: Today's Times magazine. Page 15: Interview with artist who was once "married to the Italian porn star Cicciolina and making paintings and sculptures that showed you copulating in every which position." Page 20: Article about sperm banks in which we learn that "Danish donors" are "permitted to sire as many as 25 offspring." Page 36: article about Pakistani religious school in which the writer reports that students there were convinced "that Westerners engage in sex with anything, anywhere, all the time." The writer also reports he was "asked to describe the dominant masturbation style of Americans." (Maybe he means "predominant.") Pages 38 to 45: Forum discussing issues confronting actresses considering whether to do nude scenes. This is a pretty typical Sunday. Enough said.

(Note: Smartertimes is in Washington D.C. this morning and operating off the Washington Final edition; page numbers and story placement may vary from edition to edition.)

Israel's interior minister, Natan Sharansky, is, by virture of his history as a Soviet dissident and his subsequent successful political career in the Jewish state, one of the most well-known leaders in Israel. Today's New York Times manages to misspell his name as "Sharanksy" four times in one story. The name is spelled correctly in the initial reference and in a photo cutline and twice in the text of the story, but the other references transpose the "s" and the "k." The article with the error runs on page A5 of New York editions.

More Name Trouble: Another article in the international section reports on a technical screw-up at the Times' web site. The error had the effect of disclosing the names of about 24 Iranians involved in a CIA-backed coup in Iran that took place in 1953. The article tells Times readers that the names are now available on "a Web site about international security," but it doesn't name the site. The Times says the international security site had obtained the names from the Times web site, on which "a computer programming error allowed the names to briefly flash on the screen of a slow-running computer."

The first paragraph of the article about the snafu puts an unduly positive spin on the Times's role in the matter. It says: "A Web site about international security has published a list of names from a Central Intelligence Agency document that The New York Times had deleted when it originally posted the report on its own Web site." As the article makes clear lower down, however, The Times did NOT delete the names when it originally posted the document. It may have intended to delete the names; it may have attempted to delete the names but failed to hire a computer staff that was up to the task; it may have deleted the names for those readers not using a "slow-running computer." But if it had in fact deleted the names, the newspaper wouldn't be writing this story about how the names had seeped into the public domain.

The final embarrassment in the same story is that it names the Shah of Iran who took power in the 1953 coup as "Mohammed Riza Pahlevi." The more common spelling of the middle name is Reza; that is the spelling that the Times itself used a while ago in its extensive front-page story reporting that it had obtained the CIA document that its now causing the big fuss. It's unclear why the Times would choose to change its spelling of the Shah's name now.

Bigfoot political reporter R.W. "Johnny" Apple Jr. has a travel piece about Los Angeles on the front of today's weekend section, page E29 in New York editions. Maybe Mr. Apple is scouting out restaurants in preparation for the Democratic convention there later this summer. What's remarkable is that Mr. Apple gets away with using language to refer to women that a less senior reporter writing for another section of the paper would find hard to get by the copy desk. He writes of L.A. that "Splendors remain -- and not just the chicks on Melrose Avenue and the biceps boys on the beach at Venice." "Chicks"? Even with the balancing addition of the biceps boys, the word jars.

Rent Control, Out of Control: On page B3 of the Metro section, we get a sober account of a hearing at which something called the "New York City Rent Guidelines Board" approved a 4 percent increase for one year leases, a 6 percent increase for two-year leases, and a $15 surcharge on all rents below $500. While the story devotes plenty of attention to tenants protesting the increases, there's no suggestion that there's anyone out there who thinks there's something weird about, in America, having a government panel decide how much private landlords can charge tenants in rent. We don't have such panels to decide, say, how much department stores can increase clothing prices or how much supermarkets can increase food costs. In fact, some cities, including Cambridge, Mass., have gotten rid of rent controls in recent years, creating vast improvements in neighborhoods that were once slums. Even the Times's own columnist, Paul Krugman, took the newspaper's coverage to task recently for its failure to understand the deleterious effects of rent regulation laws. It doesn't seem like whoever edited today's story on the meeting of the "Rent Guidelines Board" paid much attention to Krugman's column.

Missile Defense Politics: In a lengthy front-page piece on missile defense, two Times reporters come in with the scoop that when dealing with missile defense, "both the administration and its Republican rivals have long been motivated by domestic political calculations as well as by strategic concerns." Now there's a shock: politicians and government officials in a democracy being motivated by what their constituents want them to do. Seems unobjectionable, except that the piece reports that President Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, denied that political considerations played any role. A better way for Mr. Berger to have dealt with these reporters might have been to say, sure, political considerations played a role, that's how policy is made in democracies.

Teamster Power: Speaking of political considerations playing a role in policymaking, today's award for burying the lead goes to a paragraph in a story about the success of Ralph Nader's presidential campaign. Mr. Nader met yesterday with the president of the Teamsters union, James P. Hoffa. About midway through the article, which is itself stuck inside the national section, we get the news that "Gore advisers said they had moved aggressively behind the scenes to try to keep Mr. Hoffa from endorsing Mr. Nader, to the point where they had directed projects through federal agencies that would use Teamsters." Well, as the "Missile Defense Politics" item makes clear, we're all for political considerations being taken into account in policymaking. But it still seems worthy of a headline and a front-page story if Gore campaign aides are acknowledging they intervened with the government to channel taxpayer money to a union whose endorsement Mr. Gore is still trying to seek. At the very least, it might be a topic for Congressional hearings. And memo to the Gore campaign: whoever the unnamed "advisers" are that leaked this info should get a lesson in keeping their mouths shut.

The Metro Matters column on the front of the metro section of today's New York editions of the Times reports that "The State legislature goes into its session closer today, a day-plus of frenzied deal-making." The column goes on to say that the lawmakers will try to reach agreement on a hate crimes law and other criminal justice measures, and predicts that "the hate crimes bill will finally become law (unless the two chambers fail to resolve a technical squabble over authorship)." In case we don't get the point, there's a news story on page B8 reporting from Albany that "state lawmakers will convene here Thursday" and that "much of the important business does not get done until the last frenzied days." This news article reports that the lawmakers will discuss hate crimes and, yep, the same criminal justice matters that the column on the metro front tells us about. Why two similar stories on the same frenzy? This way the Times can hedge slightly on the likelihood that that hate crimes bill will pass: The story from Albany reports that "The issue of hate crimes, where there is no real disagreement, has become mired in ego-driven squabbling, and while a deal still seems likely, it is far from certain."

No Credit: One of the ways the Times creates its aura of impressiveness is by failing to credit other newspapers that break stories before it does. It was The Wall Street Journal, for instance, that brought to front-page prominence the issue of insurance companies overcharging blacks. The Times fronts a story about the issue today above the fold, with no mention of the Journal's groundbreaking coverage. A mention of the Journal in an earlier small Times story on the topic was relegated to the inside of the Times' business section. The Times plays the same game on another story today with a brief on page B4 of its metro section about Rep. Rick Lazio's tax returns. It writes "The New York Times reported on Friday that Mr. Lazio has made a 600 percent profit on stock he bought in 1997 in Quick & Reilly, a brokerage controlled by some of his campaign contributors." Well, the Times story on Friday actually credited Newsday, a Long Island tabloid, for breaking the story. But now that it's next week and a brief, the Times gives itself credit.

Divine Divinity: A story on page A3 about Syria's minority Alawite sect reports that its members "hold that Ali, the son in law of the Prophet Muhammad, is a divine." I think the word is "divinity"; my Webster's New World dictionary says that the word divine, used as a noun, means a clergyman or theologian.

Abridging Free Speech: In its lead editorial, the Times seems to throw its weight behind a measure in the House of Representatives that would impose disclosure requirements "on groups that spend $10,000 or more per year on ads that mention a candidate 90 days before a general election or 60 days before a primary." It cautions the lawmakers against changing the bill to do anything "destructive of the constitutional rights of organizations involved in political activities." But the law the Times apparently backs is destructive of exactly that. The Times itself spends more than $10,000 in the days leading up to elections on printing and distributing editorials endorsing candidates. It is protected by the same First Amendment language: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press." If Congress -- as the Times wants it to -- passes a law subjecting political speech to stricter controls than other kinds of speech, it's the beginning of an erosion of the First Amendment protections that the Times and other newspapers would eventually come to regret. Of course, there's nothing in the Times editorial about the freedom of speech or of the press. The only Constitutional right the Times editorial mentions explicitly is "the constitutional right to privacy of advocacy organizations." Oh yeah, the right to privacy -- that's the one that's not actually in the Constitution, but that the Times likes because it can be interpreted to allow an absolute constitutional right to all abortions.

An Orthodox religious party in Israel called Shas is threatening to quit Prime Minister Barak's government unless it gets more government money, free of the usual government rules, for a school system it runs in Israel. The Times opposes school vouchers in America, so, even given the differences between the American and Israeli systems, you might expect a Times editorial to oppose the attempt at a Shas shakedown. You would be wrong. In today's editorial on "Israel's Political Crisis," the Times writes that both Mr. Barak and Shas "need to find ways to bridge the remaining gaps and keep Shas inside the Barak coalition." This is at least the second time Shas has attempted such a shakedown, and at least the second time The Times has urged Mr. Barak to cave in. If the pattern holds, by the time a final agreement is reached between Israel and the Arabs, students in Shas schools will have facilities as posh as those at Andover and Exeter. We don't see why a peace deal between Israel and the Arabs is so important to America that we need to be urging Mr. Barak to cave in to this sort of political hostage-taking. One scrap of argument the Times offers in favor of Mr. Barak's caving in is that "Shas's constituency, mainly working class Jews whose families came to Israel from other Middle Eastern countries, is a large and important one. Only in recent years has it begun to be fairly represented in the Israeli political system." This is ridiculous. Israel has been a democracy since it was founded in 1948, and anyone who wants to vote is "fairly represented." Many of these same voters helped elect Menachem Begin as prime minister in the late 1970s. It is true that Shas has gained seats in Israel's parliament under a newly implemented electoral system that allows for direct election of the prime minister, but it hardly follows that the old system was unfair, any more than America's two-party system is unfair. Or maybe, in elections as in funding for private education, the Times editorialists hold Israel to a different standard than they do America.

An Intimate View of the Death House: The guilt of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as atomic spies for the Soviet Union has now been established beyond a doubt by Soviet and American archival documents. Their actions helped an evil empire that oppressed millions of its own citizens, denying them freedom of press and of religion, sending dissenters to prison camps in the Gulag or murdering them after show trials. So, naturally, a Times feature on the front of today's Arts section portrays the Rosenbergs as loving parents who wrote sappy, adoring letters to their children and to each other. The story is about a new exhibit about Death Row at New York's Sing Sing prison. If you read past the jump, you can get a hint of some of the brutal crimes the prisoners were convicted of, but the story is generally, in Times fashion, more sympathetic to the criminals than to the crime victims. (The exception to this general rule, we will see, is when the crime takes place in Central Park or victimizes a group the Times thinks deserves special protection, such as gays or wealthy white women.) The victims of the Rosenbergs' crimes don't merit even a passing mention in the Times story.

So it looks as though the city is about to cave in to The New York Times Company's demands for a tax break to help subsidize the erection of a new 40-story headquarters tower for the newspaper near Times Square. Buried on page B3 of the New York editions of today's Times is the news that the newspaper "is expected to sign an agreement this week" under which the city "is expected to provide a series of tax breaks." The Times had reported on February 19 that it was threatening to move hundreds of jobs to Edison, N.J. "unless it obtained tax breaks." There's no information in today's story about the size of the tax breaks, but the February story said the Times "told city officials that it was willing to make annual payments of about one-third of the city's current property tax rate." Well, it's nice to see that our friends on W. 43rd St. are finally coming over to the view that the tax burden on New Yorkers is too high, joining the consensus that includes a broad range of politicians, from Mayor Giuliani to City Council Speaker Peter Vallone. In our view, though, it's better to spread any tax cuts around equitably to the individual taxpayers who need them most. If any ordinary taxpayer showed up at the IRS on April 15 and announced he was "willing" to pay only a third of the taxes he owed, he'd be laughed out of the office. Why should the Sulzbergers be treated any differently? Tax breaks doled out on a per-project basis to big business amount to corporate welfare. Of those in need of welfare, The Times Company and its controlling family, the Sulzbergers, would have to be pretty low on anybody's list. The Times Company last year posted operating profits of $586.7 million. Last year's authorized biography of the Sulzbergers, "The Trust," detailed the family's extravagant lifestyle -- at barbecues on the family's 277-acre Connecticut estate, a manservant would stand at attention holding the hamburger patties on a silver platter as Arthur Ochs Sulzberger prepared to place them on the grill. City Hall should see the proposed Sulzberger subsidy for what it is. The best words to describe it are the ones that the Times's own editorial used a few months ago to dismiss the flat tax. It called it "a bald attempt to give the most affluent Americans a free ride."

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Special Interests: Here's a gem from a brief account in today's national section reporting on the end of the political partnership between Patrick Buchanan and Lenora Fulani: "Still, their collaboration underscored certain shared views, including opposition to big government and special interests." Huh? Pat Buchanan, who wants to outlaw abortion, to impose protectionist tariffs on imported goods and to build a fence to keep Mexican immigrants out of America, is against big government? And Ms. Fulani, who, the previous paragraph tells us, helped Mr. Buchanan expand the Reform Party's base to include "blacks, Hispanics, gays, even Communists," is against special interests? For that matter, is there any politician who says he is for special interests? What the reporter is trying to say is that Mr. Buchanan and Ms. Fulani have both offended Jewish groups with criticism of Israel. But the article doesn't make any mention of Jews or anti-Semitism. It just assumes when readers see "special interests" they'll think of Jews and not "blacks, Hispanics, gays, even Communists," who after all are, in Timespeak, not "special interests" but "minorities."