North America

Ingrid Mattson, a professor of Islamic studies at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, was the first woman, the first North American and the first convert to be elected president of the Islamic Society of North America, an umbrella group of student and religious groups across the United States and Canada. She took office last August and has been busy since attempting to explain her faith to Americans suspicious of Islamic fundamentalism in the post-Sept. 11 era and to women who question Islam's teachings on the role of women in society.

Halliburton Co., the world's second-largest oilfield services provider, will move Chief Executive Officer David Lesar to a new corporate headquarters in Dubai to help the company expand in the Middle East and Asia. The move is part of an effort to shift business outside North America, which provided 55 percent of Halliburton's profit last quarter, and to court national oil companies that pump most of the oil in the Middle East. The company will keep a corporate office in Houston, where it has its headquarters today, the company said in a statement.

ST. PIERRE AND MIQUELON, France -- This tiny outpost of the Old World boasts that it will be the first place in the New World to officially ring in the next millennium -- a claim that rankles with its only neighbor, the Canadian province of Newfoundland.Newfoundland has staked exclusive claim to the millennial honor and is hoping to attract celebrants from across North America for a waterfront bash in the historic port city of St. John's.But denizens of St. Pierre, 12 miles off Newfoundland's Burin Peninsula, insist that the continent's new age will start on their wind-scoured remnant of the once-vast empire known as New France.

SOUTHFIELD, Mich. -- Lear Corp., the world's biggest maker of car seats, announced yesterday that it will cut about 2,800 jobs, or nearly 5 percent of its 60,000 workers, as it closes 18 plants in a previously disclosed plan to reduce costs in North America and Europe.Lear will take a pretax charge of about $133 million, or $1.37 a share, in the fourth quarter, which is expected to result in a loss for the quarter, analysts said. About $85 million of the charge will be in cash.The charge is greater than Lear's initial estimate of about $125 million.

The glory days of the roller coaster are back.This summer, 34 new roller coasters are opening across North America, the most in a single year since the Great Depression. One in particular is grabbing attention: a classic wooden roller coaster at Adventure World in Largo.Called ROAR, the ride incorporates elements from the most popular and scary roller coasters of the 1920s, considered the golden age of coasters.More to the point, ROAR careens over Southern yellow pine trees at 50 mph, crosses over itself 20 times, plunges into a 133-degree right turn, makes six reversals and rockets through a roofed section of track, all in 50 seconds.

The last of the transoceanic legs in the Whitbread Round the World Race is among the shortest, but it also is tactically challenging -- 3,390 nautical miles of the North Atlantic, where gales and calms, fog and possibly even ice in the sea are to be found between North America and Europe.On Sunday afternoon the Whitbread fleet will start Leg 8 just north of the Bay Bridge, work south through the Chesapeake Bay, turn north around Cape Charles and head offshore into the Gulf Stream.The Gulf Stream, a swift, warm-water current, flows north-northeast along the east coast of North America and deflects more easterly as it approaches the Grand Banks off Newfoundland.

WESTBOROUGH, Mass. -- Staples Inc. and Office Depot Inc. said yesterday that they have agreed with a Federal Trade Commission request to extend the antitrust review in Staples' proposed $4.5 billion purchase of Office Depot.The Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period, which was to expire Feb. 25, was pushed back to March 5.That will give the office-supply retailers time to gather additional information the FTC requested, Staples said in a statement.The FTC is talking with other companies to see if they are interested in buying stores that might be sold in order for the transaction to get antitrust approval.

The first Americans came here from Asia about 11,500 years ago. All the old textbooks said so.They were a Mongoloid people who came on foot, tracking Ice Age game. They crossed the "land bridge" that joined Siberia and Alaska when glaciation lowered sea levels and exposed the broad shelf between the continents.But now new discoveries, and new techniques for dating archaeological sites and tracing human lineages, have raised big new questions. They suggest a far more complex and intriguing story of man's arrival in the New World.

WILMINGTON, Del. -- General Motors Corp. Chairman John Smith Jr. says the automaker expects its annual sales outside North America to increase 50 percent in 10 years to 4.5 million vehicles, reflecting a booming global auto market.Speaking to shareholders at GM's annual meeting yesterday, Smith also said the company wants to mend relations with the United Auto Workers.The union has resisted GM's plans to cut costs by moving work to outside suppliers.Analysts said the world's largest automaker wants to squeeze more profit per vehicle sold in North America, where sales are expected to grow 1 percent to 2 percent this decade.

"Fields of Battle: The Wars for North America," by John Keegan. 338 pages. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $30.The settlement of North America, John Keegan remarks early on in "Fields of Battle," is "the most stupendous achievement of military as well as human history." Keegan's book is a remarkable achievement as well - a warm and wise and witty volume that offers delight as well as instruction.Synthesizing a huge mass of material, ranging easily across continents and through centuries, he offers a compelling narrative that will be intelligible to the general reader and informative to the specialist.

Fall is fading, days are shorter and parts of Maryland are already seeing snow. That all means it's time to think about booking winter trips to ski country. The question, of course, is where to go. North America offers coast-to-coast regional options for vacationers yearning to slide down slopes. Each offers its own distinct advantages and disadvantages. With that in mind, here's a quick pro and con look at some of the continent's more renowned winter sports destinations. Mid-Atlantic/Southeast The region: : A surprisingly large number of ski areas dot the mountain regions of Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

M ike Shriver in Linthicum wonders what became of a 2002 project called Enlighten Maryland. Participants had maps of the constellation Orion and circled the stars they could see on a clear February night. A total of 1,100 reports were processed into a map of Maryland light pollution. That map proved disappointing. But there's a good, zoomable dark-sky map for North America at baltimoresun.com/pollution

Lumps of desiccated feces, dug from a cave in Oregon and stored in plastic bags on a shelf in a science lab, now have some scientists convinced that humans have been in North America for 1,000 years longer than previously thought. The find turned out to be the oldest directly-dated evidence of human habitation in North America - a 14,300-year- old piece of the puzzle of when we arrived in the New World. Researchers say the clumps, known as coprolites, were left by Native Americans who were in the region at least 1,000 years before prehistoric tribes known as Clovis people began using their famous spear points to hunt game and carve tools.

Monster Worldwide Inc. Shares climbed $1.97 to $29.82. Even though growth slowed in North America, the operator of job site Monster.com posted a 15 percent higher quarterly profit on sales abroad.

Is Ford finally shifting out of reverse? The nation's No. 2 automaker yesterday reported a $750 million net profit for the second quarter, although North American operations remained in the red. It was Ford's first quarterly profit in almost two years and defied Wall Street's expectations of another steep loss. Cost cutting, increased sales of higher-profit vehicles and strong results in overseas markets contributed to the surprise profit, although Ford also reported improvement in its core North American operations.

DEARBORN, Mich. -- Ford Motor Co. narrowed its first-quarter loss after eliminating thousands of jobs and cutting millions of dollars in spending, but the company's chief executive acknowledged yesterday that "we still have a long way to go to turn around this business." It was the seventh consecutive quarterly loss for Ford, which continues to grapple with a vehicle lineup dominated by slower-selling trucks. And the company's losses increased in North America, where it has steadily lost market share.

Ingrid Mattson, a professor of Islamic studies at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, was the first woman, the first North American and the first convert to be elected president of the Islamic Society of North America, an umbrella group of student and religious groups across the United States and Canada. She took office last August and has been busy since attempting to explain her faith to Americans suspicious of Islamic fundamentalism in the post-Sept. 11 era and to women who question Islam's teachings on the role of women in society.

Halliburton Co., the world's second-largest oilfield services provider, will move Chief Executive Officer David Lesar to a new corporate headquarters in Dubai to help the company expand in the Middle East and Asia. The move is part of an effort to shift business outside North America, which provided 55 percent of Halliburton's profit last quarter, and to court national oil companies that pump most of the oil in the Middle East. The company will keep a corporate office in Houston, where it has its headquarters today, the company said in a statement.

Having one or more older brothers boosts the likelihood of a boy growing up to be gay - an effect not of social factors, but of biological events that occur in their mother's womb, according to a study published today. In an analysis of 905 men and their siblings, Canadian psychologist Anthony Bogaert found no evidence that social interactions among family members play any role in determining whether a man is gay or straight. The only significant factor was the number of times a mother had previously given birth to boys, according to the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

DETROIT -- Asserting that he's the right man to lead General Motors Corp., Chief Executive Officer G. Richard Wagoner Jr. said yesterday that recent accounting errors under federal scrutiny have been an embarrassment and some people have been disciplined for it, but that nobody could run the company better than he is running it. Wagoner, who won a vote of confidence from the GM board of directors Monday, said bringing in an outsider to run the automaker would...