You Are Here: In Israel, a Soccer Game Reflects a Divide

在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。
在 ServiceModel 客户端配置部分中，找不到引用协定“TranslatorService.LanguageService”的默认终结点元素。这可能是因为未找到应用程序的配置文件，或者是因为客户端元素中找不到与此协定匹配的终结点元素。

And the team that Sakhnin has to beat to survive is the one they hate the most, Beitar Jerusalem, which has been associated with right-wing politics in Israel for decades and may be the only first-division club never to have an Arab player on its roster.

As the crowd presses toward the gates, I find myself next to a tall and slim bearded man named Ali, who made the long drive here from Tamra. He’s visibly anxious and speaking quite loudly. Sakhnin doesn’t merely represent a city, he tells me, but an entire sector of the population.

“It’s just a game,” I say, trying to calm things down.

“For you, maybe,” Ali responds, “because you’re a Jew. But for us, soccer is the only place we’re equal in this stinking country. If Sakhnin gets thrown out of first division, then they’ll be taking that away from us, too.”

Beitar’s jerseys say “Stop Racism,” but everyone knows that the slogan is there only because the team is trying to lighten the penalty imposed by the Israel Soccer Association for the constant anti-Arab chanting of Beitar’s hardcore fans, called “La Familia.” (“Muhammad is a homosexual” is a favorite cheer.) The bad blood between the two teams has caused many of their matches to end in rock--throwing brawls.

My friend Uzi finds a scalper near the police barrier and asks him for tickets. The scalper looks stressed out, too. As I dig around in my pocket for money, he presses me: “Come on! Come on!”

“Cool it, bro,” Uzi tells him. “What’s the big rush?”

Uzi isn’t into soccer at all. He only came with me because my wife asked him to. She was afraid I would get hurt here. As I hand the scalper the money and take the tickets from him, he keeps shouting: “Come on! Come on!” And then we understand why. The Sakhnin fans have pressed up against the police barriers and finally broken through, and a wave of red shirts and scarves is surging forward toward the field, carrying Uzi and me along with it. The ushers are squashed against the walls, unable to do security checks on the fans rushing past.

Doha Stadium is fit to hold 8,500 people, but there are far more than that here today, almost all of them stuffed into the Sakhnin side. There are only about 100 people in the Beitar section; half of them are fans and the other half are policemen there to prevent clashes.

The game begins, and the first yellow card comes out almost immediately. Two minutes later, the sprinklers somehow come on, soaking the players on the field. At halftime, there is no score, but the Sakhnin fans never stop cheering.

They cheer for the Sakhnin players in Arabic and curse the Beitar players and the referees in Hebrew, so they’ll understand the slurs. When a Beitar player is injured, they chant: “He’s dead, he’s dead!” The rest of the time, they scream, “War” and “Beitar’s a whore.” And when they get tired of that, they switch to “Cops are whores,” in no small part because 11 years ago, during the October riots, two young Sakhnin residents were shot to death by security forces, and the shooters were not, in many people’s view, properly punished.

With every passing minute, as Sakhnin is unable to score, its side sinks deeper into gloom. When the fans in the eastern stands unfurl a huge banner showing the team name and a drawing of the Al Aqsa Mosque, it manages to draw a few calls of “Allah hu akbar,” but the feeling is that God is not on their side today.

With less than 10 minutes to play, the match looks sure to end in a draw, and Uzi signals that we should start walking toward the exit. Neither one of us wants to be among the thousands of hopeless fans and hundreds of jumpy policemen when Sakhnin gets demoted to second division.

As we leave the stadium, we hear it: a collective shout coming from thousands of mouths, followed by the sound of firecrackers. On the car radio, we hear that Sakhnin has scored in the 85th minute, winning 1-0, and that a few fans were injured during the celebration.

Tomorrow doctors will say that a fan will lose his sight in one eye. The police will claim a firecracker was responsible. The Sakhnin fans will say it was a plastic bullet. In an interview from the hospital, the fan promises he will be at the opening game next year.

Etgar Keret’s latest book is “The Girl on the Fridge."

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Bacterial Ecosystems Divide People Into 3 Groups, Scientists Say

Blood type, meet bug type.

“It’s an important advance,” said Rob Knight, a biologist at the University of Colorado, who was not involved in the research. “It’s the first indication that human gut ecosystems may fall into distinct types.”

The researchers, led by Peer Bork of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, found no link between what they called enterotypes and the ethnic background of the European, American and Japanese subjects they studied.

Nor could they find a connection to sex, weight, health or age. They are now exploring other explanations. One possibility is that the guts, or intestines, of infants are randomly colonized by different pioneering species of microbes.

The microbes alter the gut so that only certain species can follow them.

Whatever the cause of the different enterotypes, they may end up having discrete effects on people’s health. Gut microbes aid in food digestion and synthesize vitamins, using enzymes our own cells cannot make.

Dr. Bork and his colleagues have found that each of the types makes a unique balance of these enzymes. Enterotype 1 produces more enzymes for making vitamin B7 (also known as biotin), for example, and Enterotype 2 more enzymes for vitamin B1 (thiamine).

The discovery of the blood types A, B, AB and O had a major effect on how doctors practice medicine. They could limit the chances that a patient’s body would reject a blood transfusion by making sure the donated blood was of a matching type. The discovery of enterotypes could someday lead to medical applications of its own, but they would be far down the road.

“Some things are pretty obvious already,” Dr. Bork said. Doctors might be able to tailor diets or drug prescriptions to suit people’s enterotypes, for example.

Or, he speculated, doctors might be able to use enterotypes to find alternatives to antibiotics, which are becoming increasingly ineffective. Instead of trying to wipe out disease-causing bacteria that have disrupted the ecological balance of the gut, they could try to provide reinforcements for the good bacteria. “You’d try to restore the type you had before,” he said.

Dr. Bork notes that more testing is necessary. Researchers will need to search for enterotypes in people from African, Chinese and other ethnic origins. He also notes that so far, all the subjects come from industrial nations, and thus eat similar foods. “This is a shortcoming,” he said. “We don’t have remote villages.”

The discovery of enterotypes follows on years of work mapping the diversity of microbes in the human body — the human microbiome, as it is known. The difficulty of the task has been staggering. Each person shelters about 100 trillion microbes.

(For comparison, the human body is made up of only around 10 trillion cells.) But scientists cannot rear a vast majority of these bacteria in their labs to identify them and learn their characteristics.

As genetics developed, scientists learned how to study the microbiome by analyzing its DNA. Scientists extracted DNA fragments from people’s skin, saliva and stool. They learned how to recognize and discard human DNA, so that they were left with genes from the microbiome. They searched through the remaining DNA for all the variants of a specific gene and compared them with known species. In some cases, the variants proved to be from familiar bacteria, like E. coli. In other cases, the gene belonged to a species new to science.

These studies offered glimpses of a diversity akin to a rain forest’s. Different regions of the body were home to different combinations of species. From one person to another, scientists found more tremendous variety. Many of the species that lived in one person’s mouth, for example, were missing from another’s.

Scientists wondered if deeper studies would reveal a unity to human microbiomes. Over the past few years, researchers have identified the genomes — the complete catalog of genes — of hundreds of microbe species that live in humans. Now they can compare any gene they find with these reference genomes.

They can identify the gene’s function, and identify which genus of bacteria the microbe belongs to. And by tallying all the genes they find, the scientists can estimate how abundant each type of bacteria is.

In the recent work, Dr. Bork and his team carried out an analysis of the gut microbes in 22 people from Denmark, France, Italy and Spain. Some of their subjects were healthy, while others were obese or suffered from intestinal disorders like Crohn’s disease. Dr. Bork and his colleagues searched for fragments of DNA corresponding to the genomes of 1,511 different species of bacteria. The researchers combined their results with previous studies of 13 Japanese individuals and 4 Americans.

The scientists then searched for patterns. “We didn’t have any hypothesis,” Dr. Bork said. “Anything that came out would be new.”

Still, Dr. Bork was startled by the result of the study: all the microbiomes fell neatly into three distinct groups.

And, as Dr. Bork and his colleagues reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature, each of the three enterotypes was composed of a different balance of species. People with type 1, for example, had high levels of bacteria called Bacteroides. In type 2, on the other hand, Bacteroides were relatively rare, while the genus Prevotella was unusually common.

“You can cut the data in lots of different ways, and you still get these three clusters,” Dr. Bork said.

Dr. Bork and his colleagues found confirmation of the three enterotypes when they turned to other microbiome surveys, and the groups continue to hold up now that they have expanded their own study to 400 people.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 20, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of microbes relative to the number of cells in the human body. Each person shelters about 100 trillion microbes, not 10 trillion, and is made up of about 10 trillion cells, not one million.?

Correction: April 23, 2011

A headline on Thursday with an article about the discovery by a group of scientists that people can be classified by the bacteria in their digestive systems misstated the conclusions of the researchers. They reported finding three ecosystems, each involving a multitude of bacteria species, in the human gut — not just three types of bacteria.

 

Bacteria Divide People Into 3 Types, Scientists Say

 

Blood type, meet bug type.

“It’s an important advance,” said Rob Knight, a biologist at the University of Colorado, who was not involved in the research. “It’s the first indication that human gut ecosystems may fall into distinct types.”

The researchers, led by Peer Bork of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, found no link between what they called enterotypes and the ethnic background of the European, American and Japanese subjects they studied.

Nor could they find a connection to sex, weight, health or age. They are now exploring other explanations. One possibility is that the guts, or intestines, of infants are randomly colonized by different pioneering species of microbes.

The microbes alter the gut so that only certain species can follow them.

Whatever the cause of the different enterotypes, they may end up having discrete effects on people’s health. Gut microbes aid in food digestion and synthesize vitamins, using enzymes our own cells cannot make.

Dr. Bork and his colleagues have found that each of the types makes a unique balance of these enzymes. Enterotype 1 produces more enzymes for making vitamin B7 (also known as biotin), for example, and Enterotype 2 more enzymes for vitamin B1 (thiamine).

The discovery of the blood types A, B, AB and O had a major effect on how doctors practice medicine. They could limit the chances that a patient’s body would reject a blood transfusion by making sure the donated blood was of a matching type. The discovery of enterotypes could someday lead to medical applications of its own, but they would be far down the road.

“Some things are pretty obvious already,” Dr. Bork said. Doctors might be able to tailor diets or drug prescriptions to suit people’s enterotypes, for example.

Or, he speculated, doctors might be able to use enterotypes to find alternatives to antibiotics, which are becoming increasingly ineffective. Instead of trying to wipe out disease-causing bacteria that have disrupted the ecological balance of the gut, they could try to provide reinforcements for the good bacteria. “You’d try to restore the type you had before,” he said.

Dr. Bork notes that more testing is necessary. Researchers will need to search for enterotypes in people from African, Chinese and other ethnic origins. He also notes that so far, all the subjects come from industrial nations, and thus eat similar foods. “This is a shortcoming,” he said. “We don’t have remote villages.”

The discovery of enterotypes follows on years of work mapping the diversity of microbes in the human body — the human microbiome, as it is known. The difficulty of the task has been staggering. Each person shelters about 100 trillion microbes.

(For comparison, the human body is made up of only around 10 trillion cells.) But scientists cannot rear a vast majority of these bacteria in their labs to identify them and learn their characteristics.

As genetics developed, scientists learned how to study the microbiome by analyzing its DNA. Scientists extracted DNA fragments from people’s skin, saliva and stool. They learned how to recognize and discard human DNA, so that they were left with genes from the microbiome. They searched through the remaining DNA for all the variants of a specific gene and compared them with known species. In some cases, the variants proved to be from familiar bacteria, like E. coli. In other cases, the gene belonged to a species new to science.

These studies offered glimpses of a diversity akin to a rain forest’s. Different regions of the body were home to different combinations of species. From one person to another, scientists found more tremendous variety. Many of the species that lived in one person’s mouth, for example, were missing from another’s.

Scientists wondered if deeper studies would reveal a unity to human microbiomes. Over the past few years, researchers have identified the genomes — the complete catalog of genes — of hundreds of microbe species that live in humans. Now they can compare any gene they find with these reference genomes.

They can identify the gene’s function, and identify which genus of bacteria the microbe belongs to. And by tallying all the genes they find, the scientists can estimate how abundant each type of bacteria is.

In the recent work, Dr. Bork and his team carried out an analysis of the gut microbes in 22 people from Denmark, France, Italy and Spain. Some of their subjects were healthy, while others were obese or suffered from intestinal disorders like Crohn’s disease. Dr. Bork and his colleagues searched for fragments of DNA corresponding to the genomes of 1,511 different species of bacteria. The researchers combined their results with previous studies of 13 Japanese individuals and 4 Americans.

The scientists then searched for patterns. “We didn’t have any hypothesis,” Dr. Bork said. “Anything that came out would be new.”

Still, Dr. Bork was startled by the result of the study: all the microbiomes fell neatly into three distinct groups.

And, as Dr. Bork and his colleagues reported on Wednesday in the journal Nature, each of the three enterotypes was composed of a different balance of species. People with type 1, for example, had high levels of bacteria called Bacteroides. In type 2, on the other hand, Bacteroides were relatively rare, while the genus Prevotella was unusually common.

“You can cut the data in lots of different ways, and you still get these three clusters,” Dr. Bork said.

Dr. Bork and his colleagues found confirmation of the three enterotypes when they turned to other microbiome surveys, and the groups continue to hold up now that they have expanded their own study to 400 people.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 20, 2011

An earlier version of this article misstated the number of microbes relative to the number of cells in the human body. Each person shelters about 100 trillion microbes, not 10 trillion, and is made up of about 10 trillion cells, not one million.?

 

Well: Sexism Charges Divide Surgeons’ Organization

 

A Valentine’s Day editorial in the official newspaper of the American College of Surgeons has set off a firestorm of controversy that has divided the largest professional organization of surgeons in the country and raised questions about the current leadership and its attitudes toward women and gay and lesbian members.

The editorial, written by Dr. Lazar J. Greenfield, an emeritus professor of surgery at the University of Michigan School of Medicine and president-elect of the American College of Surgeons, extols the mood-enhancing effects of semen on women. It begins with a reference to the mating behaviors of fruit flies, then goes on to discuss studies on the menstrual cycles of heterosexual and lesbian women who live together. Citing the research of evolutionary psychologists at the State University of New York, it describes how female college students who had been exposed to semen were less depressed than their peers who had not, concluding: “So there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.”

This month, in response to complaints, the editorial was retracted and pulled from the group’s Web site, and Dr. Greenfield was asked to step down from his position as editor in chief of the surgeon’s newspaper. But criticisms continue to mount.

“I was aghast,” said Dr. Colleen Brophy, a professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, and a member of the organization for over 20 years. Dr. Brophy, who served as chairwoman of its surgical research committee, publicly resigned from the College on Thursday. “I’ve gone back and reviewed the science, and it’s erroneous,” she said. “But I’m resigning from the college not so much because of the editorial but because of the leadership’s response to it.”

The organization has more than 75,000 members (I am one). Roughly 10 percent are women. There are five women on the organization’s 22-member governing board; this month, they issued a letter requesting that Dr. Greenfield step down as president-elect. The entire board is set to vote on the issue on Sunday.

Dr. Greenfield has not issued a formal statement and could not be reached for comment, but in an e-mail to his colleagues in response to the criticism, he wrote that his editorial “was considered by the Women in Surgery Committee and the Association of Women Surgeons as demeaning to women. Despite my apologies, they brought the issue to the Board of Regents.”

Dr. L. D. Britt, the current president of the organization and chairman of surgery at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, also did not respond to requests for comment. But at a surgical meeting this month, he invoked the experience of “oppressed” South Africans who chose “reconciliation,” adding, “If someone is truly apologetic, we have to consider that.”

While women now make up almost half of all entering medical school classes in the United States, fewer than a third choose to go into surgery, in part because of a perceived male bias, negative attitudes of surgeons and a lack of female mentors. Once in practice, studies have shown, well over half of all women surgeons report feeling demeaned, and nearly a third say they have been the objects of inappropriate sexist remarks or advances.

Dr. Greenfield has had what many believe is an exemplary career not only as a surgeon but also as a longtime mentor and advocate of women in surgery. He is the editor of one of the major textbooks of surgery and the inventor of the Greenfield Filter, a device that has been used in hundreds of thousands of patients to prevent life-threatening blood clots from entering the lung. And Dr. Greenfield has been a mentor to countless surgeons, many of them women, while serving as chairman of surgery first at Virginia Commonwealth University and then at the University of Michigan.

“He has always been above reproach,” said Dr. Mary T. Hawn, an associate professor of surgery at the University of Alabama School of Medicine in Birmingham, who worked as a medical student, surgeon-in-training and faculty member under Dr. Greenfield. “Our understanding was that he went out of his way to recruit women on the trainee and faculty level.”

Dr. Diane M. Simeone, a professor of surgery at the University of Michigan who was a co-author of a recent article on barriers faced by women in academic surgery, agrees. “There still is a lot of gender bias in surgery, and I have seen it myself on multiple fronts,” she said. “That was never evident from Dr. Greenfield. I think it’s important to know that this is one event and to weigh it against a long career where he has always been completely above board and a role model for supporting women in surgery.”

It is less clear what attitudes Dr. Greenfield or other leaders of the organization have toward the college’s gay and lesbian members. “I think race and religion have made a lot more progress in the college than women, and particularly gay women or men,” Dr. Brophy said. “This is probably the first time I’ve ever seen the word ‘lesbian’ used in a piece or associated with the college. Ever.”

For some, the controversy is less a matter of Dr. Greenfield’s fate as president-elect and more a reflection of what some see as a deep disconnect between the old guard and its respect of hierarchy and professional omerta, and a newer generation of surgeons and leaders who embrace a culture of transparency in the age of the Internet.

Many surgeons chose not to comment on the matter, for fear of professional repercussions, but one said, “It’s frankly been heartbreaking for all of us.”

“There are all these men and women out there who are afraid to say something,” said Dr. Barbara Lee Bass, chairwoman of surgery at the Methodist Hospital in Houston, who recently served on the college’s governing board. “It reveals that there is still this intimidation and fearfulness, and that’s what troubles me most.”

“I’m not sure some of the old guard see this as the watershed moment it is,” she continued. Referring to the college’s role as a standard bearer for surgeons and an advocacy organization for patient care and patient safety, she added: “It’s not so much about Dr. Greenfield anymore. It’s about the spine of our organization and the principles by which the organization governs itself.”