July 28, 2003

Interview with Loral Space and Communications chairman and chief executive Bernard L Schwartz, 77, on his struggle to preserve Loral's prominence in troubled satellite business as company tries to reorganized under bankruptcy protection; photos (M)

Joyce Purnick column on obstacles facing Bloomberg administration as it seeks to bring basic public toilets to New York City as part of coordinated 'street furniture' that would also include newsstands, kiosks and bus shelters that would carry ads to pay for installation and maintenance and generate revenue for city treasury (M)

Ticket scalpers at Bruce Springsteen concerts at Giant Stadium are forced to slash prices below face value because holding 10 concerts at stadium means there are 550,000 tickets to sell; some fans recall paying $700 or even $1,500 for last-minute tickets at past Springsteen shows in smaller halls; photo (M)

Senegalese immigrants in New York flock to Harlem to welcome visiting Sheik Mourtada Mbake, aging spiritual leader of Mourides, Sufi Muslim brotherhood, who travels to far-flung Mouride outposts every year; he will visit Mouride colonies that have grown up in New York, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Los Angeles and Washington, DC; profile of Senegalese is changing; beginning as street vendors, many now are entrepreneurs; pioneers among Senegalese Mourides were single men living in cheap shared rooms and sending money home, especially to city of Touba, capital of Mouride life; in Harlem, Mourides will hold their annual parade; several Mouride colonies in US have raised or are raising money to buy their own community centers and mosques; photos (L)

Unwanted commercial e-mail, or spam, cheap and easy to send, has become bane of Internet, used prodigiously by all sorts of companies and individuals; spammers pay as litte as 0.025 cents to send e-mail message; computing costs for recipients, or their Internet providers, to process each message are similarly tiny, but add up rapidly because billioms of spam messages are sent daily; even greater are costs of trying to block spam, catch spammers and undo damage they cause recipients; Ferris Research estimates cost of spam at $10 billion in United States this year; Radicati Group puts worldwide cost at $20.5 billion; graphs; photo (M)