From fork-admin@xent.com Thu Oct 3 12:55:31 2002 Return-Path: Delivered-To: yyyy@localhost.example.com Received: from localhost (jalapeno [127.0.0.1]) by jmason.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B9D2616F70 for ; Thu, 3 Oct 2002 12:53:43 +0100 (IST) Received: from jalapeno [127.0.0.1] by localhost with IMAP (fetchmail-5.9.0) for jm@localhost (single-drop); Thu, 03 Oct 2002 12:53:43 +0100 (IST) Received: from xent.com ([64.161.22.236]) by dogma.slashnull.org (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g92MwHK00398 for ; Wed, 2 Oct 2002 23:58:18 +0100 Received: from lair.xent.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by xent.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 14C98294178; Wed, 2 Oct 2002 15:58:03 -0700 (PDT) Delivered-To: fork@example.com Received: from ms4.lga2.nytimes.com (ms4.lga2.nytimes.com [64.15.247.148]) by xent.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id B280429409C for ; Wed, 2 Oct 2002 15:57:44 -0700 (PDT) Received: from email4.lga2.nytimes.com (email4 [10.0.0.169]) by ms4.lga2.nytimes.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5F4A85A4A7 for ; Wed, 2 Oct 2002 19:02:07 -0400 (EDT) Received: by email4.lga2.nytimes.com (Postfix, from userid 202) id AFE7EC403; Wed, 2 Oct 2002 18:51:11 -0400 (EDT) Reply-To: khare@alumni.caltech.edu From: khare@alumni.caltech.edu To: fork@example.com Subject: NYTimes.com Article: Stop Those Presses! Blonds, It Seems, Will Survive After All Message-Id: <20021002225111.AFE7EC403@email4.lga2.nytimes.com> Sender: fork-admin@xent.com Errors-To: fork-admin@xent.com X-Beenthere: fork@example.com X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.11 Precedence: bulk List-Help: List-Post: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: Friends of Rohit Khare List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 18:51:11 -0400 (EDT) X-Spam-Status: No, hits=-0.2 required=5.0 tests=AWL,KNOWN_MAILING_LIST,NO_REAL_NAME version=2.50-cvs X-Spam-Level: This article from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by khare@alumni.caltech.edu. Excellent evidence of the herd. Just imagine if the anonymous noise injected into our world newsphere (noosphere?) was, say, a fraudulent story that a stock accounting scandal had been accused and the evildoers were shorting. Oh, wait, that happened. An unemployed Orange County student took down Emulex... Enjoy! Rohit khare@alumni.caltech.edu Stop Those Presses! Blonds, It Seems, Will Survive After All October 2, 2002 By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN Apparently it fell into the category "too good to check." Last Friday, several British newspapers reported that the World Health Organization had found in a study that blonds would become extinct within 200 years, because blondness was caused by a recessive gene that was dying out. The reports were repeated on Friday by anchors for the ABC News program "Good Morning America," and on Saturday by CNN. There was only one problem, the health organization said in a statement yesterday that it never reported that blonds would become extinct, and it had never done a study on the subject. "W.H.O. has no knowledge of how these news reports originated," said the organization, an agency of the United Nations based in Geneva, "but would like to stress that we have no opinion of the future existence of blonds." All the news reports, in Britain and the United States, cited a study from the World Health Organization - "a blonde-shell study," as The Daily Star of London put it. But none reported any scientific details from the study or the names of the scientists who conducted it. On "Good Morning America," Charles Gibson began a conversation with his co-anchor, Diane Sawyer, by saying: "There's a study from the World Health Organization, this is for real, that blonds are an endangered species. Women and men with blond hair, eyebrows and blue eyes, natural blonds, they say will vanish from the face of the earth within 200 years, because it is not as strong a gene as brunets." Ms. Sawyer said she was "somewhat of a natural blonde." Jeffrey Schneider, a spokesman for ABC News, said the anchors got the information from an ABC producer in London who said he had read it in a British newspaper. In London, The Sun and The Express both reported that unnamed scientists said blonds would survive longest in Scandinavia, where they are most concentrated, and expected the last true blond to hail from Finland. The British accounts were replete with the views of bleached blonds who said hairdressers would never allow blondness to become extinct, and doctors who said that rare genes would pop up to keep natural blonds from becoming an endangered species. Journalists in London said last night that the source of the reports was probably one of several European news agencies that are used by the British press, but it remained unclear which one. Tim Hall, a night news editor at The Daily Mail, said the report was probably distributed by The Press Association, Britain's domestic news agency. "Several papers picked it up," he said. But Charlotte Gapper, night editor at The Press Association, said that although it had considered running the report on Sept. 27, it had decided not to after talking to the World Health Organization. "We didn't do that story because we made an inquiry to the World Health Organization first," she said. "They told us that report was two years old, and had been covered at the time. They said it had been picked up again that day by a German news agency." She added that she did not know which agency the organization was referring to. Dr. Ray White, a geneticist at the University of California at San Francisco, said that the disappearance of a gene for blond hair "sounds patently incorrect." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/02/health/02BLON.html?ex=1034599071&ei=1&en=3a0e4f0b2b251593 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact onlinesales@nytimes.com or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help@nytimes.com. Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company