By Richard Morin
Thursday, March 23, 2006; A02

The ugly wave of anti-Arab feelings immediately after Sept. 11, 2001, may have been responsible for a sharp increase in the incidence of premature and low-birth-weight babies born to women of Arab descent in the United States in the months that followed the terrorist attacks.

The evidence is circumstantial but compelling, epidemiologist Diane S. Lauderdale of the University of Chicago says in the latest issue of Demography.

Other researchers studying black women previously have found that stress caused by discrimination boosted production of certain hormones to levels harmful to a developing fetus. To find out whether anti-Arab feelings after 9/11 produced a similar effect in expectant Arab or Arab American mothers, Lauderdale turned to birth records collected from 2000 to 2002 in California, where reported hate crimes tripled after the terrorist strikes, mostly because of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim incidents.

Lauderdale identified more than 15,000 mothers with distinctive Arab last names. She found that those women who gave birth six months after 9/11 were 34 percent more likely have a low-birth-weight baby than those who gave birth in the same six-month period a year earlier. Post-9/11 babies also were 50 percent more likely to be born prematurely.

She also found that babies with distinctively Arab first names as well as last names -- suggesting that their parents were either more recent arrivals or less assimilated -- were twice as likely to be underweight after 9/11.

Significantly, there was no change in the rate of either premature births or low-birth-weight babies among other women during the same time periods.

Those professional bleeding hearts over at the American Sociological Association have helpfully put together a list of the "essential" protest songs of the past five decades and published it in the latest issue of the journal Contexts.

Fourteen tunes made the cut, including such standards as "We Shall Overcome," Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin" and the 1930s union anthem "Which Side Are You On?" Other notable selections:

· "Fight the Power" by Public Enemy. "An exuberant hip-hop call to arms," the editors declared of this 1989 mega-hit.

· "Respect" by Otis Redding and performed by Aretha Franklin, a song that proves "the personal is political."

· "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)" by James Brown. The Godfather of Soul also had a way with black-power anthems.

· "I Ain't Marching Anymore" by Phil Ochs. "An antiwar classic, complete with a revisionist history of American militarism," the editors wrote.

· "Strange Fruit" by Abel Meeropol and performed by Billie Holiday. "Chilling protest against lynching. Maybe the greatest protest song of all time." (Meeropol, a New York City schoolteacher, later adopted the children of executed spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.)

· "Lift Every Voice and Sing" lyrics by James Weldon Johnson; music by J. Rosamond Johnson. These accomplished brothers wrote what is "known as the 'Black National Anthem' -- the antidote to 'America, the Beautiful.' "

Here's more evidence that, when cities play ball with professional sports teams, they end up losing big.

Economists Bruce K. Johnson of Centre College in Kentucky, Michael J. Mondello of Florida State University and John C. Whitehead of Appalachian State University found the city of Jacksonville paid far more to attract a National Football League franchise to the city than residents say the team is worth to them.

These researchers surveyed local residents and found taxpayers were willing to spend about $25 million in taxes to keep the team in town -- only about a fifth of the $121 million in subsidies that the city actually spent to renovate the local stadium for the team.

That makes Jacksonville the third city in a row, after Minneapolis and Pittsburgh, where researchers have found that city fathers overpaid for their pro teams, they concluded.

Will the District make it 0-for-4?

" The 'Birthday Blues' in a Sample of Major League Baseball Players' Suicides" by David Lester in Perceptual and Motor Skills, Vol. 101, No. 2. An examination of the 74 major league baseball players who took their own lives found they were more likely to do so within a month of their birthdays than would be predicted by chance alone.

"Admission to Selective Schools, Alphabetically" by Stepan Jurajda and Daniel Munich. CEPR Discussion Paper. Prague researchers find that qualified but not exceptional students with last names that begin with the letters W, X, Y or Z are less likely to be admitted to selective Czech universities than those whose last names begin with A, B, or C, all other factors being equal.

"Damn, It Feels Good to be a Gangsta: the Social Organization of the Illicit Drug Trade Servicing a Private College Campus" by A. Rafik Mohamed and Erik Fritsvold in Deviant Behavior, Vol. 27, No. 1. University of San Diego researchers profile the privileged and predominantly white drug dealers who sell dope to privileged and predominantly white college students at a privileged and predominantly white university in Southern California.