Letters to the Editor

(2 of 2)

I am pessimistic about peace between the Palestinians and Israel. The Palestinians have been betrayed by their leaders as well as the heads of neighboring Arab nations. They have been lied to and told they could destroy Israel by continual enmity, by sniping attacks, by suicide missions. They have even been persuaded to sacrifice their children in order to win sympathy in the media.
DAVID CARVER
San Jose, Calif.

The Next Best Weapon

You reported that a Japanese madman stabbed eight schoolchildren in a suburb of Osaka [WORLD, June 18]. Some will argue that if knives were illegal in Japan (a country with a long history of swords and such), this awful attack wouldn't have happened. It's pretty absurd to claim that if knives and blades were made illegal now, this sort of killing would not happen in the future, but haven't we heard something like that before?
KURT MAUSERT
Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Driven to Extinction?

Scientists are speculating that primitive people alone may have been responsible for the disappearance of more than 100 species of large animals like the woolly mammoth, hunted mainly for food [SCIENCE, June 18]. Stone Age hunters didn't have to use "pointy sticks" to kill the megafauna. They might well have employed the techniques of pre-Columbian hunters in North America who killed large numbers of bison by herding them over cliffs. The Stone Age megafauna may have quite literally been "driven to extinction."
JOSEPH J. CARVAJAL
Brevard, N.C.

Your article "Who Killed Woolly?" inspired me to read Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. He believes that the overkill hypothesis best accounts for the mass extermination of megafauna in Australia, New Guinea, Madagascar and North America, where species were suddenly confronted by able human hunters. Diamond points out that it would have been unlikely for these giant creatures to survive countless climatic catastrophes over tens of millions of years and then succumb to environmental changes in a wide variety of habitats just after the first humans arrived. I only hope that modern research can help us learn from our prehistoric mistakes before it's too late for other species.
DARREN MCKELLEP
Oslo

Casting Call

Re your item on Nicole Kidman's playing the role of Virginia Woolf in a new film [PEOPLE, June 18]: Ridiculous! What's next, Jennifer Lopez as Emily Dickinson? Or Roseanne as Gertrude Stein?
SARAH BROWN
Evanston, Ill.

Corrections

Our story about the newly released documents in the Timothy McVeigh case [NATION, May 21] mistakenly said an FBI sketch of John Doe No. 2 was based on images captured by a surveillance camera in a bank near the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Okla. In fact, the sketch was based on an FBI interview with the man who rented to McVeigh the Ryder truck used in the bombing.

In our report on the disintegrating corporate relationship between Firestone and Ford [BUSINESS, June 4], we ran a photo of the 1947 wedding of Martha Firestone and William Clay Ford. In the photo, one bridesmaid was identified as Mrs. Walter B. Ford (niece of the groom) and one groomsman was identified as Walter B. Ford (nephew of the groom). Mrs. Walter B. Ford is not the groom's niece but his sister, and Walter B. Ford is not the groom's nephew but his brother-in-law.