Mohammed Atta, the 33-year-old who likely flew American Airlines flight 11, and his cousin, Marvan Al-Shehhi, 23, who was on American Airlines Flight 175, lived in a $500-a-month apartment in Hamburg’s Harburg neighborhood, according to the Bild Zeitung newspaper. The two men left Germany in March 2001 for Florida, where they enrolled in flight classes at Huffman Aviation in the Gulf Coast town of Venice. German commandos reportedly stormed eight apartments in Hamburg and arrested one suspect after being tipped off by the FBI Wednesday night.

Atta and Al-Shehhi were enrolled as electrical engineering students at Hamburg-Harburg Technical University, and a third suspect who perished in the Pennsylvania crash is also believed to have studied there. Neighbors quoted on German public television said the suspects lived fairly “anonymously” in their Hamburg neighborhood.

Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile explicitly named as a suspect Thursday by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, is believed to have ties to operatives in the Hamburg area. But so far officials have been unable to nail down a firm connection between the terrorist mastermind and the men suspected of attacking the U.S.

Even before news broke about Hamburg’s apparent role in the events leading up to this week’s calamitous developments in New York and Washington, the talk in Europe has mostly been of solidarity with the United States. There’s a sense here that what happened in the U.S. was an attack against all of humanity and that no one will be safe in the United States, Europe or anywhere else until the terrorist threat is eliminated.

In fact, some are calling it an attack on Europe, since many European nationals also perished in the destruction. More than 100 Britons have been confirmed dead, and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw estimates the number could rise to the “middle hundreds.” Four Germans have been confirmed dead, and the German Foreign Ministry has registered hundreds of missing persons since the tragedy.

People all across Europe had reacted to the news with often dramatic expressions of grief. Thousands have turned up at U.S. embassies to pay their respects. Government leaders have urged people all across Europe to observe three minutes of silence Friday in honor of the thousands who perished on Tuesday.

Flags have been at half-mast at the Reichstag and other federal buildings since shortly after the horrific news hit. Thousands of grief-stricken Germans attended special masses. Even the first night of Berlin’s version of Oktoberfest was called off — and the main event in Munich may also be canceled. The sense of shock may fade in the coming days, but it’s doubtful that a reinvigorated sense of solidarity with the United States will.

The fences protecting the blocks surrounding the American Embassy here have been transformed into impromptu memorials, with people laying flowers, candles and cards in front of them. Hundreds waited in line to sign the embassy’s official book of condolences.

Some demonstrators carried signs begging the United States not to launch World War III in retaliation. Another pleaded with the U.S. not to take “rash steps.” But largely the demonstrators and their signs seemed to be offering unconditional support for America and its victims.

That sentiment has been echoed by European government ministers, most dramatically at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where officials have for the first time invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, saying they are prepared to view this attack on the United States as an attack on all of NATO. The action was taken partly because NATO hopes to be involved with the inevitable military retaliation, so it can help define its terms. But it’s also clear that President Bush already has more international support behind him than even his father did in assembling his Gulf War coalition. The sense across Europe is that this is a time for closing ranks swiftly and unmistakably.

“This is an act of solidarity,” NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson said. “It’s a reaffirmation of a solemn treaty commitment which these countries have entered into.”

Of course, Bush could squander that support by overreacting. And some observers caution that even Article 5 doesn’t commit specific states to get involved with a U.S. military response. On Thursday, Defense Minister Rudolph Scharping noted that the NATO vote does not mandate that Germany undertake any military action. The U.S. must decide whether it will take retaliatory steps, he said, and Germany can then decide whether it wants to help or not.

But it all represents a dizzying turnaround from the turbulence in U.S.-European relations that had generated so much press attention in the first months of the Bush administration. Just six months ago, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder visited the White House and found his first face-to-face meeting with Bush so disappointing, he reportedly told people he thought the U.S. president had trouble remembering his name, according to Maureen Dowd in the New York Times.

That was the same day that Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, setting in motion months of difficult dealings between Europe and the United States. The split over global-warming policy culminated in July with the European agreement in Bonn, Germany, to go ahead with the Kyoto process, even without the U.S.

This week, that was all forgotten — at least for the time being — along with European worries about Bush’s mania for missile defense. Like Tony Blair, Schroeder could hardly have been a more steadfast, even passionate, ally in the wake of the attacks Tuesday. Visibly shaken, Schroeder told the German parliament Wednesday that the terrorist attack was “a declaration of war against the entire civilized world,” earning a unanimous show of applause from different political parties.

A day later, Schroeder powerfully invoked history: “When it came to defending the freedom of Berlin, John F. Kennedy said ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ It was the expression of an unbelievable solidarity. Today I think Germany has an occasion to return this solidarity.”

Just as a reminder of where this is all heading, the new U.S. ambassador, former Indiana Senator Dan Coats, was sworn in Wednesday — 10 days ahead of schedule. Considering that Berlin has been without a full-fledged U.S. ambassador for most of the last year, once John Kornblum announced his plan to step down, it seemed a potent reminder of the need for closer U.S.-German relations as this most unclassifiable of wars unfolds.

Germany and the rest of Europe have often felt that President Bush takes them for granted, but that’s all out the window now. And Bush is trying to mend his ways. Suddenly he’s calling Schroeder on the phone to confer, something he has pointedly not done at key junctures in the recent past.

Europe and the United States, it appears, may have little choice but to maintain the close relationship they have had for decades, even if a more assertive Europe grows into a more pronounced role.

And for now, the German people are standing behind Americans, as are the citizens of the rest of Europe and most of the world. At times that support has been poignant. In Berlin, many locals have tearfully recalled the Berlin Airlift that kept this city alive in 1948.

At the makeshift memorial set up outside the U.S. Embassy, a postcard of the World Trade Center was taped to a flower and set against the cyclone fence. “We are so sad and shocked. — Olgo and Elmo Kraft, Berlin,” the card read. Another, from an elementary school in Berlin stated: “We will pray for the lost souls in this tragedy.”

Germany’s most important politicians and thousands of citizens converged on Berlin Cathedral Wednesday morning to mourn the losses. The cathedral was so packed that hundreds had to stand at the plaza outside.

As Peter Struck, a Social Democrat parliamentary leader, said simply: “Today we are all Americans.”

A scan of recent royal relationship catastrophes reveals what a nightmare life has become for crown princes, the world’s most eligible bachelors. For every wedding day special on network television, there seem to be dozens more varnish-removing exposés in the tabloids spotlighting every royal misstep — be it sexual or financial — which is making it downright difficult for the next in line for the throne to make it from “Will you marry me” to “I do.” The torture starts almost from the first date. If the monarchs had their way, the poor princes would lead lonely, celibate lives or wind up with handpicked fiancies bred for the icy confines of proper royal life.

Royals have always been the subject of more interest than your average Ben Affleck or Julia Roberts on the fickle public’s fascination scale. “We are totally obsessed with the way royals lead their lives and the way they marry,” says Marco Houston, editor of Royalty magazine. “It must be very hard for a young prince to deal with the sexual and financial scrutiny.”

Ever since the days when King Edward abdicated the throne in the name of love to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson, the world has absorbed tales of royal courtship, marriage and breakups with insatiable appetite. In the 1970s, the collapse of Princess Margaret’s marriage to Anthony Armstrong-Jones captivated a global audience, as did the tragic deaths of Princess Grace of Monaco, in 1982, and Princess Diana in 1997.

Marco Houston’s father, Bob, who founded Royalty and has observed media coverage of kings, queens and their spawn for decades, chalks it up to sleazier media tactics in a landscape where the likes of Rupert Murdoch rule. “There used to be a deference in the way the media covered the royals,” he says. “Following the breakdown of the marriage of Charles and Diana, all bets were off. There’s this feeding frenzy mentality that’s become the modus operandi for tabloids. They are the voice of the people, which is crap. They only report on royal events these days when there’s a smell of scandal hanging about the air. They don’t even talk about the serious aspects of royalty anymore.”

Instead, they feature articles on, say, Princess Diana’s penchant for colonic irrigation or, more recently, the royal massacre in Nepal, which, according to most reports, was triggered by deranged Nepalese Crown Prince Dipendra’s parents’ refusal to permit him to marry the woman of his choice.

Longtime American expatriate Barbara Adams, a charismatic figure, 40-year resident of Kathmandu and an observer of the royal family, knows better than most how tangled royal relationships can get. She’s no stranger to controversy herself — Adams’ affair with a Nepalese royal has long been rumored to have been the source material for Han Suyin’s 1959 novel “The Mountain Is Young.” Adams, now in her 60s, lives in Long Island, N.Y., and has observed the tragedy in Nepal with much interest. “It’s been a terrible struggle for Prince Dipendra,” she says. “They wanted to choose his wife, and they never would have been happy with who he had chosen.”

But there was little scrutiny of Dipendra’s relationship by the media. That’s in stark contrast to his counterparts in Western Europe, where Holland’s Crown Prince Willem-Alexander and Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon have been dragged across the coals on their way to the altar. These days, young princes are the hottest players in the sizzling royal reality soaps and it seems no prince can get the role right.

Before he became engaged, Crown Prince Willem-Alexander, heir to the Dutch throne, was a playboy and a partier. He earned the moniker “Prince Pils” for his beer-swilling talents at the University of Leiden. Then Argentine aristocrat and Deutsche Bank executive Maxima Zorreguieta came along and tamed him. The glamorous brunette won the hearts of Queen Beatrix and her successor to rule the House of Orange. But when it was reported that Zorreguieta’s father was connected to Argentina’s oppressive Videla regime of the ’70s and ’80s — a period when more than 30,000 dissidents were murdered or disappeared — a near-constitutional crisis erupted in Holland, a country where Parliament must give the future king’s fiancie its blessing.

Zorreguieta had virtually no chance of further reforming Willem-Alexander or helping him to breed a future heir to the throne if she did not take extraordinary steps to distance herself from her parents. “Disappearances, torture and killing have left great scars on the society in Argentina,” Zorreguieta told her future countrymen at her first public appearance at The Hague in March. “I renounce the regime. I have learned about the importance of democracy and human rights.” She also learned Dutch, became a naturalized citizen of her adopted land and told her parents she’d rather not have them at her wedding later this year. The extraordinarily popular Queen Beatrix also came to Zorreguieta’s public defense in order to save the planned marriage.

For Mette-Marit Tjessem Hoiby, fiancie to Norway’s strapping Crown Prince Haakon, the issue was the father of her 3-year-old child — the man had been convicted of cocaine possession. Haakon and Hoiby, a Gwyneth Paltrow clone, have been celebrated in spreads in the glossy society fanzine “Hello!” But the media had a field day with reports of her previous boyfriend’s drug history and her own penchant for frequenting house parties where drugs were exchanged freely. Though the prince and Hoiby were engaged last December and got married last weekend, the scrutiny was embarrassing for the couple, and for the royal family. In a twisted bit of irony, the same media that ran through Hoiby’s past with a fine-toothed comb feted the couple’s August wedding with double-truck spreads in magazines and four-hour television coverage.

Until Prince Edward met Sophie Rhys-Jones, all tabloid bets were that he was gay. “I am not gay,” Edward famously told London’s Daily Mirror newspaper following reports that he had had a “touching” relationship with the male lead of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. But apparently Rhys-Jones wasn’t good enough for the British press either. The 36-year-old countess’ reputation was stained when she made disparaging remarks about the royal family and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in an effort to secure business from a News of the World reporter who had disguised himself as a posh Arab sheik.

Tapes of her conversation were eventually released and dubbed “Sophiegate.” Most embarrassingly, in an effort to circumvent publication of the tapes, Rhys-Jones agreed to an interview with the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid, in which she offered, unsolicited, “My Edward is not gay.” After another publication printed portions of the tape’s contents, the News of the World went ahead with full publication — an embarrassment for the palace, Prince Edward and Rhys-Jones, who at the time was working in public relations.

Then there’s the unfortunate matchmaking that can break a prince or a princess. The textbook example was the supposed fairy tale marriage between Prince Charles and Diana Spencer. In Charles’ marital failure, biographer Penny Junor, author of the bestselling “Charles: Victim or Villain,” sees a link to the classic problem of modern crown princes. “There is no doubt that the Prince of Wales was put in an impossible position, and I suspect that his son William will find life even tougher. The intrusion of media means that any kind of normal courtship with a girl is out of the question. If Charles was seen with a girl, she immediately found herself on the front page of every newspaper, and if he was seen with her two or three times, they would dig up friends, long-lost cousins, nannies, old boyfriends, anyone with the faintest connection to interview about her. This sent the right sort of girls running, and attracted the wrong sort of girls.” (Girls, perhaps, like Koo Stark. Did ever an heir foul up more than Charles’ younger brother Andrew when he struck up a relationship with Stark, who starred in such soft-core skin flicks as “The Awakening of Emily,” which featured the 17-year-old in a lesbian shower scene?) “And because the media is so much more brazen today than it was when Charles was William’s age, it will be infinitely worse for him,” Junor says.

At the same time, today’s princes may be paving the way for William. Good luck finding a suitable virgin his age in the U.K. as his father was forced to do. Ironically, the recent royal eruptions in Holland and Norway, where the princes were publicly humiliated but were ultimately successful in convincing their compatriots to stand behind their choice of fiancies, may make life easier for the next generation of royals like Prince William. Concludes Royalty’s Bob Houston: “The straitjacket on many of the men has loosened and will loosen considerably.”

Inside the City Hall, Pannier and Baldow, both 36, exchanged vows before family, friends and reporters. “We exchanged rings symbolically five years ago,” says Pannier, “but this is the real thing.”

And so, even as special-interest groups continue to lobby for the introduction of a constitutional amendment that would ban same-sex marriages in the United States, Berlin is in the grip of gay wedding fever. Appointments at the city’s wedding registry offices are already booked up through the first two weeks of August; so intense is the interest in gay marriage that employees at the office stopped counting the number of people calling for appointments after the number exceeded 250.

The Pannier and Baldow nuptials were the ceremonial apex for a city that has been reveling in all things gay for weeks now. In June, acting Mayor Klaus Wowereit of the ruling SPD Party (the Social Democrats) introduced a new phrase into the German lexicon by outing himself and announcing to the world: “I’m gay, and that’s a good thing.” Earlier this week, the Green Party threw a bash for Berlin’s gays and lesbians to celebrate the civil union victory.

In a statement released Wednesday, Wowereit announced: “The [civil union] law doesn’t fulfill everyone’s needs, but it’s a great step forward. It should cause something that was never abnormal to be recognized as normal everywhere in Germany.” His sentiments were shared by Claudia Roth, leader of the Green Party, which was instrumental in pushing the law through the Bundestag. “Something in Germany had to change, and that’s a good thing — things will become more open, more tolerant, and [Germany] will become more European,” she told reporters.

The Green Party’s next move will be to introduce legislation meant to pave the way for same-sex couples to adopt children. But it’s going to be an uphill battle. The Constitutional Court decision that legalized same-sex unions in Germany, and the legislation that followed, do not include provisions that would permit homosexuals to adopt. In a fashion similar to Vermont’s “civil union” law, the registered partnership measure in Germany skirts the prickly issue of what might come after “marriage” in these newly legal unions.

Basically, the new civil union law offers gay and lesbian partners the right to sign up for health insurance with their spouses. It also offers same-sex couples the right to register their partnerships — in most cases at the same registration offices where heterosexuals seek wedding applications. (The new law also requires that a couple seeking to dissolve the partnership must do so in court.) Finally, the law extends immigration rights to same-sex partners who are not German citizens.

But opponents say that like any compromise legislation, the German gay civil union law is flawed, granting gay couples fewer rights than those enjoyed by heterosexual couples. For example, gay couples will still lack many of the tax benefits bestowed on heterosexuals who marry.

And there is no guarantee that gay “marriage” will be an option any time soon in certain areas of the country. Bavaria, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania and Hesse are delaying implementation of the new federal law because they have not yet passed their own versions of the law, which gives German states wide latitude in how they allow gays to register their partnerships. The process by which couples may apply differs from state to state — in most, they can obtain a license from the wedding registry office, but in some, they must pay a visit to the local notary’s office. (By sending gays to a notary’s office, critics argue, certain states and communities are trying to push gays as far away as possible from the places where traditional marriages are registered.)

In fact, as Berliners celebrated their pioneering gay unions, dozens turned out in Munich to protest the Bavarian government’s steadfast refusal to enact the law. Bavaria, along with Saxony, unsuccessfully appealed in July for an injunction against the law. The states argued that same-sex civil unions would endanger the institution of marriage between a man and a woman. Bavarians must wait until the state legislature implements the law in the fall before they can register their partnerships.

Yet despite the official foot-dragging in these states, support for gay marriage is strong in Germany. A national poll conducted last Friday showed 60 percent of the country supporting gay civil unions that are equal to heterosexual marriage. At least 55 percent said they didn’t believe gay marriages would have a negative impact on families. Germans may well have been influenced by European neighbors with civil union laws already on the books. Denmark, France, Sweden, Norway, Iceland and the Netherlands already have same-sex civil union laws (as does the U.S. state of Vermont, which celebrated the first anniversary of its gay civil union law in July). Holland is the only country that allows full-fledged gay marriages.

Those who showed up in the Schvneberg area to protest the weakness of the new law vowed to fight any remaining injustices in the measure. Carrying a banner that read “All or nothing,” student members of the socialist PDS Party sought to raise awareness of the fact that, while representing a great social advance in Germany, so-called gay marriage is still a long way from having equal footing with heterosexual couplings.

“We are here because this new law is not enough,” said 20-year-old Nura Sch|ttpelz, a Free University of Berlin political science student. “Everybody should have the right to marry. Everybody should be allowed to have or adopt children, build a family and be equal. The homosexuals are not really allowed to marry — this is really a civil union. They should have the same rights that everybody else has,” she said.

But even the steady complaints of disgruntled demonstrators could not put a damper on the festivities here. Hartwin and Karl-Heinz, who refused to give their last names to the media, showed up in white suits and were the second couple to be issued civil union status. The two men, now in their 60s, have been partners for more than 36 years.

“It’s really simple,” said Hartwin. “As we say in Germany: It’s better to kill two birds with one stone. Because of the efforts of several German political parties, we didn’t get the second half of what we wanted, but we hope that it will come in the future. Above all, we want our marriage to be a symbol. For the past year, more or less, we’ve been trying to get married. As you can see, we did it on the first day.”

But the joy of Hartwin and his partner is bittersweet. “It’s still not enough — we want the tax and legal advantages,” he says. “We’re now over 60 and won’t be adopting any children, but we would have liked to have been able to do it 20 years ago.”

PhRMA is the association that looks out for the interests of industry giants like Pfizer and Merck on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. What the Times failed to report is that Sullivan has used his own Web site, as well as his posts at the New York Times Magazine and the New Republic to repeatedly — and controversially – defend the pharmaceutical industry against criticism over its role in the global AIDS pandemic.

The controversy over Sullivan’s site sponsor was short-lived: After reporters from Salon and other news organizations made calls to Sullivan’s editors, as well as to journalism experts, about the ethics of a journalist being personally sponsored by an industry he frequently defends, Sullivan announced he would return the $7,500 annual sponsorship. But the larger question raised by the flap isn’t likely to go away: How can a one-person “me-zine” develop ethical standards that allow it to accept the kind of advertising and sponsorships that go to corporate media monoliths, without the conflict of interest taint that naturally goes along with a journalist getting the personal backing of a controversial patron?

Loren Ghiglione, the newly installed dean at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, told Salon: ” If there is an appearance of a conflict of interest, then Sullivan — and the media that run him — ought to be concerned. They can choose to find someone else to write on pharmaceutical topics, identify whatever relationship he has with pharmaceuticals (including recipient of major advertising) to put readers on notice, etc.”

And that’s precisely the approach his editors at the New Republic and the New York Times Wednesday said they would adopt.

In an e-mail message, Peter Beinart, editor of the the New Republic, where Sullivan writes the prestigious and widely read TRB column, wrote: “Andrew did not consult with me before making this decision. And should he write about the pharmaceutical industry for TNR, he will disclose the relationship.”

New York Times spokesman Toby Usnik also issued a statement to Salon on behalf of the New York Times Magazine (editor Adam Moss helped craft the statement) and the newspaper. “We would expect that if Mr. Sullivan were undertaking an article about the pharmaceutical industry for The Times that he would be obliged to disclose such a relationship with his sponsors to the editors and discuss the potential ramifications,” the statement read. “Ramifications could include passing on the assignment or, depending on the then current circumstances, disclosing the information to the readers. This is because Mr. Sullivan, like other New York Times freelancers, is required by contract to “avoid conflicts of interests or the appearance of conflict” in accepting assignments for The Times.”

Late Wednesday afternoon, Sullivan (who has also written for Salon) e-mailed to inform Salon he had decided to return the money and pull the plug on the sponsorship.

Sullivan had initially moved quickly to spin the issue after the Times story originally appeared, making shrewd use of his own Web site to respond before any media critics had a chance to. “The usual suspects from the far left have emailed me outraged that this website has accepted a small sponsorship from PHRMA,” Sullivan wrote Wednesday morning. “It behooves me to say I see absolutely no problems with it. In fact, I am extremely proud to get some support from a great industry that has saved my and countless other people’s lives, despite a massive attempt to penalize them for their work.” He then went on to describe criticism from his readers as “paranoid hooey” and to claim that “the real worry of those who want to attack the free market in pharmaceuticals is that I might have been a teensy bit effective in my arguments — and that these arguments might even have some merit. The usual suspects want to silence the opposition.”

But by late Wednesday, Sullivan had added an entry, again attacking potential critics (including Salon) while also, eventually, confirming that he would drop the sponsorship. Sullivan conceded: “[I]nevitably, it’s andrewsullivan.com, which makes the appearance of a conflict of interest almost unavoidable.” He continued, “It doesn’t help matters that my first sponsors are the target of leftist hatred and demonization, and that they are embroiled in a public controversy I intend to keep writing about. … But I don’t want to have every argument I make about the importance of pharmaceutical research to be undermined by the lie that I have been bought and paid for.”

Sullivan then explained that his site is maintained and managed by fantascope.com, the parent company for andrewsullivan.com, and that there is a strict wall between the editorial and financial arms of the business. But given that the primary property of andrewsullivan.com is Andrew Sullivan, that’s akin to Martha Stewart disavowing herself from a business decision made by Martha Stewart Living or the line of K-Mart housewares named after her. In a later e-mail, Sullivan dismissed the characterization. “As to the Martha Stewart point, I don’t think she thinks that every ad contract her magazine gets is a personal pay-off. It’s a business. Does Mort Zuckerman [publisher of U.S. News and World Report and the New York Daily News] or Marty Peretz [owner of the New Republic] treat advertising in their magazines as personal remuneration? I doubt it. Loads of people own media outlets. But those media outlets are not synonymous with them.

“This is a completely new issue because this is a completely new phenomenon: me-zines. They’re both a magazine and a person. In some ways, andrewsullivan.com is a broadcast company. I own it but it isn’t me. Yet its brand is me. … I wish I were Martha Stewart. But then I guess many gay men feel that way,” he quipped.

Still, Sullivan goes further in distancing himself from the PhRMA deal by pointing out that his webmaster negotiates all business deals — and that webmaster Robert Cameron disclosed the deal to the New York Times “before it was even completed.” He also told Salon that the money would only have gone toward the maintenance of the site. “A salary is a long way off,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Sullivan, who is HIV positive, is undergoing treatment with the anti-retroviral cocktail drugs that have been at the core of the access-to-drugs controversy in Sub-Saharan Africa and other developing regions. He has long praised the pharmaceutical industry in print, but had he not dropped the PhRMA sponsorship, and had he continued to rally behind the industry on his Web site, it would have been increasingly difficult for him to argue that he wasn’t, in fact, a paid pharma flack.

This isn’t the first time Sullivan has been criticized for his writings about AIDS and gay issues. Sullivan became the subject of the chattering classes in May after a New York gay publication accused Sullivan of soliciting unprotected gay sex on the Internet, and argued that his sexual proclivities seemed to contradict the preachiness of his widely respected writings on gay themes. To his critics, Sullivan had crossed the line and committed hypocrisy at a time when, according to the latest Centers for Disease Control reports, HIV infection rates are on the rise among young gay men in the U.S. To their critics, it was an egregious violation of Sullivan’s privacy.

But it’s Sullivan’s writing on the global AIDS crisis and his open bias in favor of the pharmaceutical industry that has been a lightning rod for criticism. The New York Times Magazine published an essay by Sullivan last October in which he wrote: “Here’s an unfashionable romance: I love America’s pharmaceutical companies,” he wrote. “I asked my pharmacist the other day to tote up my annual bill (which my insurance mercifully pays): $15,600, easily more than I pay separately for housing, food, travel or clothes,” he wrote. “Whether we like it or not, these private entities have our lives in their hands. And we can either be grown-ups and acknowledge this or be infantile and scapegoat them. They’re not ‘powerful forces,’ penalizing America’s ‘working families.’ They’re entrepreneurs trying to make money by saving lives. By and large, they succeed in both. Every morning I wake up and feel fine, I’m thankful that they do.”

The piece prompted the Village Voice’s Cynthia Cotts to write, “Shilling for the drug industry in the Times is the equivalent of giving a blow job in Macy’s window, and Sullivan left nothing to the imagination,” and pointed out an unfortunate juxtaposition in the magazine. “Given the synergy between his viewpoint and the industry’s, could it have been a coincidence that Sullivan’s essay appeared in the same issue of the Times Magazine as a 17-page ad supplement from PhRMA?” Moss, however, told Cotts that Sullivan’s “Pro Pharma” column, and the PhRMA ad were “totally unrelated.”

In March, Sullivan wrote on his Web site: “If you listen to some activists, the answer to the world’s AIDS crisis is simple. Just break international patent laws, rip off the drug companies, shower the Third World with protease inhibitors and all will be well. I wish it were that simple.”

Of course, the pharmaceutical companies have been at the center of the campaign to stop compulsory licensing of patented drugs in developing nations. A case in point is the recent lawsuit mounted by the pharmaceutical industry in South Africa, where a law had been passed that would have permitted the generic manufacture of patented drugs in a health crisis and the importation of branded drugs from countries where they are sold at cheaper prices. The pharmaceutical companies dropped the suit after the South African government pledged to inform the industry before issuing any licenses or conducting so-called parallel imports. There’s little wonder that activists from the “far left” — or journalists, for that matter — would question how a journalist could accept a sponsorship from an industry in a global controversy that he regularly champions and maintain credibility.

Still, Sullivan doesn’t see any inherent conflict of interest in the sponsorship — nor, he said, was he persuaded by the statements of his New York Times and New Republic editors to terminate the relationship. “The statements … were not the basis of my decision,” he wrote. “I intended to add such a disclosure if I were to write anything on the subject in the future. The basis of my decision is as I said on the site. I didn’t want to have to deal with people dismissing my views as bought and paid for. It’s important for me to address this issue in the future without that kind of ammunition from my critics. It would get in the way of work.”

He added: “It’s not a conflict of interest in any meaningful sense. My views on this subject have been quite clear and well-known for years. The idea that I’d changed my views on financial grounds is simply nuts. I’ve criticized and praised these companies before. I think even my worst enemies would concede I’m sincere on this. By far a bigger conflict of interest is the fact that these companies have saved my life. But under the rules of journalism, that is irrelevant. But a few bucks to pay expenses is regarded as horrifying.”

His solution? Continue the hunt for sponsors, but maybe with slightly higher standards. “If you know of any company that would be willing to sponsor this site, with a minimum sponsorship of $10,000 … We need financial support,” he wrote in a post on his site last night, before adding, “and we’d prefer it from companies which are not directly involved in major controversy.”

“I must say that, for once, controversial issues were not covered in a blanket of diplomatic language,” said Pieter Piot, executive director of the United Nations AIDS program (UNAIDS). “The issues were discussed explicitly.” Or, as Gudmund Hernes, director and coordinator of AIDS activities for the U.N. agency UNESCO, put it: “If anyone told me 30 years ago that the General Assembly would talk about condoms, I would have said that it was impossible.”

The drafting of the declaration proved to be the most contentious challenge of the summit, and ended with major modifications of the text that proved unpopular with some countries, which had wanted language that was decisively pro-gay rights and franker in its description of intravenous-drug use and prostitution. Still, argued U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the declaration ultimately proved “progressive.” For example, it calls for nondiscriminatory access to “condoms, microbicides, lubricants, sterile injecting equipment, drugs including anti-retroviral therapy” and more. Sterile injecting equipment, of course, could be read as an allusion to clean needles for intravenous-drug users.

Much ado had been made at the opening of the meeting about a fight between conservative religious blocs led by Islamic nations and the Vatican and socially liberal countries led by the European Union and Canada over whether the declaration should explicitly make reference to homosexuals, intravenous-drug users and sex workers — language that reportedly was included in a draft version of the document created by UNAIDS. That battle, along with disagreement over human rights guidelines for dealing with the HIV/AIDS crisis, led to a rift that prolonged negotiations until 3 a.m., and held up approval of the declaration until the final day of the meeting.

The United States, according to foreign press accounts, joined the Vatican and the Islamic nations in arguing against inclusion of the language. The exclusion of such language would be consistent with previous positions taken by President Bush, from a comment made during the presidential debates that he doesn’t believe in “special rights” for gays to a statement last month in which he said that he would not acknowledge June as Gay Pride Month because, as a spokesman said, Bush does not believe in “politicizing people’s sexual orientation.” Generally speaking, Bush seems to eschew any legal or official recognition of gays and lesbians.

When asked whether the United States played a role in modifying the declaration, John Sandage, a State Department lawyer who was a chief U.S. negotiator, told Salon: “We were comfortable with references to gay men in the document. We had difficulties with the way it was worded, and we wanted to find a text that could get the support of everybody because we thought it was important that the world speak with one voice. So we had flexibility on the choice of words. But we didn’t have any difficulty acknowledging that gay men are a vulnerable group.”

Sandage declined to specify what language created obstacles, but when asked whether it was the term “men to men sex” (a term others report caused major controversy in the draft negotiations) the U.S. had objected to, Sandage said: “It wasn’t that we were uncomfortable with it, it was that other member countries were uncomfortable with it and we wanted to be sure we could find a text that everybody would support.” The compromise language alludes to gays, drug users and sex workers (“sexual practices, drug using behavior, livelihood”) in a section calling for programs that address the groups most vulnerable to HIV infection.

Though all member nations ultimately agreed on the declaration, the cultural differences that arose were apparent in speeches given before the General Assembly by some Islamic nations, including Saudi Arabia, Iran and Libya.

Iranian Deputy Minister of Health Ali-Akbar Sayyari admonished delegates not to forget the “moral aspect involved” in HIV infection and attributed “irresponsible sexual behavior” to the rapid spread of the disease. Saudi Arabian Deputy Minister of Health Youssouf Al-Masruwah, meanwhile, said his country would support the U.N.’s effort to eradicate AIDS, provided that the international strategies are “in conformity with the teachings of Islam.” Libyan Ambassador to the U.N. Abuzed Omar Dorda took it one step further: “Homosexuality is one of the main causes of this disease. In fact, God sent the prophet Lot with a clear message preventing such practices and banning them.”

In a related fracas, Karyn Kaplan, head of the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, the only gay and lesbian nongovernmental organization invited to speak at the meeting (as a participant in a round-table panel on AIDS and human rights), had her invitation temporarily rescinded after Islamic nations objected to her organization’s presence. Kaplan’s name was restored to the speaking roster after Argentina, Canada, Norway and the European Union introduced a resolution in the General Assembly calling for her inclusion that was approved by a 62-0 vote, with 30 countries abstaining and many more not participating in an effort to prevent a quorum.

The vote itself was significant, says Scott Long, project director for IGLHRC. “This was the first time a gay and lesbian issue has ever been debated on the floor of the General Assembly. It’s a precedent that will have serious impact on the way vulnerable groups and marginalized groups and outsiders from all parts of society can get involved in the U.N.”

But Long also criticized the final U.N. declaration, which excluded the human rights guidelines for dealing with the AIDS crisis that had been negotiated at a 1996 meeting of UNAIDS and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, and made specific references to gays, and particularly the need to decriminalize homosexuality and repeal sodomy laws. “Egypt, Pakistan, Malaysia and other Organization of the Islamic Conference member nations didn’t want specific commitment on human rights they would be held accountable to,” he said. “It’s disgraceful. Everyone knows that HIV is enabled by human rights violations.”

It’s clear U.N. leaders were concerned that the clash with Islamic nations would obscure the positive developments and pledges of commitment at the conference. “At the end of the day, all the disputes over wording will seem trivial. This is truly a historic moment in the epidemic,” UNAIDS senior policy advisor Julia Cleves told reporters Tuesday. And at a press briefing on Wednesday, Annan told reporters, “In the last three days, some painful differences have been brought into the open. But like AIDS itself, these differences need to be confronted head-on, not swept under the carpet. What is important is that after today we shall have a document setting up a clear battle plan for the war against HIV/AIDS with clear goals and a clear timeline.” Annan also said that the declaration sets “standards against which people can measure their own performance, that the average citizen can use to challenge their governments.”

War metaphors like Annan’s were popular during the conference. During his remarks before the General Assembly on Monday, Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke of “no enemy in war more insidious or vicious than AIDS. An enemy that poses a clear and present danger to the world. The war against AIDS has no front lines. We must wage it on every front.” By contrast, AIDS activists with organizations like ACT-UP and the Health GAP Coalition were hawking Holocaust metaphors, characterizing the reluctance of some member nations to support anti-retroviral drug treatments and prevention efforts as promoting “genocide.”

Like many battle plans, the final declaration adopted by U.N. member states included the ambitious goals one might expect in a major theater of war. Its most ambitious agenda item calls for a 25 percent reduction in HIV prevalence among young men and women between 15 and 24 by 2005. It also calls for countries to take steps to empower women by “promotion and protection” of their “full enjoyment of all human rights” and to reduce their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS by eliminating risk factors such as discrimination, violence, trafficking of women, sexual abuse and “customary practices,” an allusion to the female circumcision or “female genital mutilation” that is performed as a ritual in some African and Islamic nations.

Borrowing a line from the Spice Girls, who have charmed many an African leader, Annan said of the gender provisions: “It has been said that ‘girl power’ is Africa’s own vaccine against HIV, and that should be true for the whole world.” Ex-Ginger Spice and former U.N. goodwill ambassador Geri Halliwell couldn’t have said it better.

The declaration also states that by 2005 member states should provide access to sterile supplies for drug users, female and male condoms and clean blood supplies to help prevent the spread of the disease. And the many groups demanding debt relief and poverty eradication as a key weapon in fighting AIDS should be pleased with the declaration’s language urging developed countries to observe the pledge they made to the Organization of Economic and Development Cooperation nearly 30 years ago to spend 0.7 percent of their gross national product on development assistance to developing nations.

The declaration includes a provision calling for governments to “strengthen healthcare systems and address factors affecting the provision of HIV-related drugs, including anti-retroviral drugs” by 2003 — a move that pleased the many nongovernmental organizations that demanded provisions for treatment of those already infected with HIV. (On Tuesday, activist groups ACT-UP and OxFam staged a brief protest in the basement of the U.N. headquarters calling for increased access to anti-retroviral and other anti-AIDS drugs.)

“The declaration puts treatment firmly on the map,” said Anne-Valerie Kanina of Doctors Without Borders’ “Access to Essential Medicines” campaign. “It confirms that there can be no choice between prevention and treatment; they are mutually reinforcing.”

Even U.S. officials — who had been critical of anti-retroviral drugs because, they argued, Africans do not have the infrastructure or requisite sense of time to properly administer the right dosages (possibly leading to variant strains of the HIV virus) — seem to have done a turnaround on the subject. And that was despite the presence of U.N. delegation member Henry McKinnell, CEO of pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and chairman of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.

Less than a month ago, U.S. Agency for International Development administrator Andrew Natsios roused AIDS activists when he told the Boston Globe that U.S. contributions to the U.N.’s global AIDS fund should not be used to treat those who are currently HIV positive because Africans “don’t know what Western time is” and because of the “lack of infrastructure, lack of doctors, lack of clinics, lack of electricity.” It was a terrible entrance for Natsios, and he backed away from those comments in an interview with the Associated Press this week. “I visited with the [Congressional] Black Caucus and I apologized,” he told the wire service. “I used extemporaneous language. It came out the wrong way and it certainly upset people and I recognize that.” And this week, U.S. officials confirmed that the U.N. AIDS fund would support the distribution of anti-retroviral drugs in areas where it is feasible.

Although neither the text nor any of the pledges in it is legally binding, UNAIDS executive director Piot described the “Declaration of Commitment” as an “instrument of accountability.” The structure of the AIDS fund has not yet been determined, and many NGOs and other observers viewed the creation of a new U.N. bureaucracy with skepticism, which Annan and other officials tried to tackle head-on. Annan said that to build momentum behind the superfund, which aims to raise $7 billion to $10 billion for a global anti-AIDS war chest, the participation of nongovernmental organizations and the private sector (including pharmaceutical companies) is essential.

Annan also addressed long-standing criticisms of the all too often slow-moving U.N. bureaucracy when he laid out the early parameters of the fund for reporters. He stated that there would be a small and nimble board composed of representatives from governments, NGOs and the private sector and a scientific panel to determine the most effective and sound methods of dealing with the AIDS crisis. Countries would apply directly to the fund with proposals, and the money would likely be managed using the infrastructure of the World Bank. Donors to the fund — both public and private — would be permitted to place conditions on the expenditure of their funds, a provision that many believe will help spur donations from groups that might otherwise decline to participate. Annan said the secretariat responsible for the day-to-day administration of the fund would be small, and that monitoring systems would be put in place to ensure that donor money was spent appropriately. Annan said he planned to appoint a transition team to begin working out the technical details within two weeks.

The model for the superfund, he said, would be the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, a successful and nimble U.N. program that distributes vaccines.

Some question the need for a new U.N. bureaucracy to deal with the AIDS crisis. In her speech before the General Assembly, Britain’s international development secretary, Clare Short, told member nations, “It is my strongly held view that we waste too much time and energy in U.N. conferences and special sessions. We use up enormous energy in arguing at great length over texts that provide few, if any, follow-up mechanisms or assurances that governments and U.N. agencies will carry forward the declarations that are agreed to. Poor countries have to commit ministers, officials and resources to participating in a U.N. talking shop, when such people are needed to tackle the desperate problem HIV/AIDS poses at home.”

Short’s criticisms were shared by Carole Collins, the HIV/AIDS director of Britain’s Christian AID. “There were lots of raised expectations; people were hopeful about the fund,” she said. “But we now know that there’s only been a small amount of money pledged and that trying to administer it [will be difficult] … When you ask them how they will create these boards, they say they’ve referred them to working groups that haven’t been established yet. It’s going to be very problematic. The lack of reference to community strengths was a serious omission.” Collins also said that despite Annan’s support for community-based programs, they had only been paid lip service in the declaration.

Collins has a point on the financing of the fund. Annan has said that $7 billion to $10 billion is required to seriously address the HIV/AIDS crisis, but by the end of the day Wednesday, the U.N. had managed to get only $500 million worth of pledges from countries — and some of them would not specify whether the money would go to general AIDS expenditures or to programs funded by the U.N. AIDS superfund. So far, the financing of the fund has been an unmitigated disaster.

But that could change. Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives reached an agreement Wednesday to spend as much as $1.36 billion during the next fiscal year to fight AIDS globally. As much as $750 million of that could be used for multilateral aid, including the U.N. AIDS superfund. The amount agreed on was significantly higher than the annual AIDS expenditure of $480 million pledged by the Bush administration, via Colin Powell, on Monday.