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News Digest
President signs Chinese trade bill
■ Deal could help U.S.
businesses but result in job
losses for Chinese.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON - President
Clinton’s signing of a bill that per
manently normalizes trade rela
tions with China is expected to
translate into billions of dollars in
new sales for U.S. farmers, manu
facturers and service companies.
Increased competition inside
China, however, is expected to
; result in massive layoffs, especial
ly in China’s state-run companies.
The House approved the legis
lation normalizing trade relations
in May; the Senate passed it on
Sept 19.
The measure revises a law
from the mid-1970s that subject
ed trade relations with commu
nist states to annual reviews.
The president invited key law
makers to the South Lawn of the
White House on Tuesday to wit
ness his signing of the bill, a hard
fought victory for the administra
tion.
The legislation is an out
growth of a U.S.-Chinese agree
ment last fall under which China,
as a condition for entering the
World Hade Organization, agreed
to open its markets and reduce
tariffs.
Clinton has argued that the
more China opens its markets to
U.S. products, the more fully it will
unleash the potential of China’s
citizens.
It is China’s 1 billion residents
that U.S. business is eyeing. Labor,
conservative groups and human
rights campaigners had argued
that the annual review allowed the
U.S. a chance each year to pres
sure China on human rights, trade
practices and weapons exports.
After it enters the WTO,
China’s tariffs on U.S.-made goods
would drop from an overall aver
age of 25 percent to nine percent
by2005.
Negotiations at the WTO’s
Geneva headquarters, however,
recently stalled after three weeks
of discussions in which the
Chinese negotiators appeared to
be backpedaling on agreements
made with the U.S. or other
nations.
“We remain engaged with the
Chinese about implementing
PNTR. There are some very
important issues we have to
address,” White House press sec
retary Jake Siewert said Tuesday.
U.S. Trade Representative
“We remain engaged with the Chinese about
implementing PNTR. There are some very
important issues we have to address
Jake Siewert
White House press secretary
Charlene Barshefsky has been in
touch with negotiators and will
continue to talk about the impor
tance of implementing the agree
ment in a way that actually makes
it work, Siewert said. The Chinese
government must live up to the
spirit of the agreement, as well as
to the letter of the agreement, he
said. Barshefsky is set to leave as
early as this week for Beijing to
help clear the way for China’s initi
ation into the WTO.
Barshefsky spokeswoman
Amy Stilwell emphasized Monday
that Barshefsky’s trip was not
aimed at reopening any parts of
the deal the U.S. made with China
last November.
The Chinese know that the
only way they will enter the WTO
is by sticking to the terms of their
agreements, she said.
“She (Barshefsky) is not carry
ing any new proposals with her,”
Stilwell said.
A Palestinian
man is carried
away by medics
Tuesday after he
was shot by an
Israeli soldier as
protests flared
again near the
West Bank town
ofRamaUah.
Ami Vitate/Newsmakere
U.N.to Mideast: Revive talks
■ After a week of subdued violence,
fighting between Palestinians and
• Israelis escalates once again.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
JERUSALEM - Amid scattered but
ugly new outbreaks of violence in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip, the U.N. sec
retary-general appealed Tuesday to
Israel and the Palestinians to get back to
the bargaining table and end the cycle of
killing.
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak
said it was too soon to tell if the relative
calm of recent days would hold after a
series of ferocious clashes that have left
88 people dead since Sept. 28, most of
diem Palestinians.
Hours after he spoke, a 12-year-old
Palestinian shot in the head during a
stone-throwing clash with Israeli sol
diers was declared brain dead. The army
said its troops opened fire after a fire
bomb was thrown into its outpost, burn
ing a soldier. It expressed sorrow but crit
icized Palestinians for putting children in
harm’s way in the clashes.
Tbesday was a day of intense diplo
matic activity, with President Clinton
I
calling Barak and Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat trying to gather support for
a summit. In die region to meet with
both sides were Secretary-General Kofi
Annan, Russian Foreign Minister Igor
Ivanov and European Union security
chief Javier Solana.
Annan, seeking to resolve the crisis
that has brought the Israeli-Palestinian
peace process to the brink of extinction,
has taken on another difficult task as
well: trying to broker the release of three
Israeli soldiers captured on the Lebanon
border by the Shiite Muslim guerrillas of
Hezbollah.
The secretary-general, who goes to
Lebanon on Wednesday, said the sol
diers were believed to be alive and well,
and called their capture a violation of
international law.
Israel has massed troops, including
elite commando units, along the border
and has warned of drastic consequences
if the soldiers are not freed. In the West
Bank and Gaza Strip, fighting between
Israeli troops and Palestinian stone
throwers and gunmen has fallen off in
recent days.
Tuesday again saw isolated clashes,
near the West Bank town of Ramallah
and the Gaza Strip town of Rafah, on the
Egyptian border.
On the edge of Ramallah, black
smoke from burning tires billowed into
the air as about 200 Palestinians massed
on the road near an Israeli outpost. In a
confrontation that lasted hours, protest
ers hurled stones at Israeli troops, who
responded with tear gas and rubber
coated steel bullets.
The army also said two Palestinians
were seriously wounded when soldiers
returned fire outside the village of
Tapuah, near the West Bank town of
Nablus.
Barak has given Arafat an ultimatum
- extended Monday night by what he
and aides said would be a few days - to
halt the violence or face heavy reprisal.
After his meeting with Annan in
Jerusalem, the Israeli leader said it wasn't
yet clear whether Palestinian rioters had
been reined in.
Earlier in the day, speaking at a
memorial for those killed in the 1973
Yom Kippur War, Barak urged persever
ance in pursuit of peace. Arman, who
had met earlier in the day with Arafat,
said he was heartened by signs of calm
ing.
“Let’s get to work - stop the violence,
move back to the negotiating table,” he
said. “The region has suffered too
much.”
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DAILY NEBRASKAN
Hole in ozone layer
balloons to record size
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WELLINGTON, New
Zealand - The hole in the ozone
layer over Antarctica stretched
over a Chilean city when it
reached to a record size last
month, the first time it has
reached a population center,
scientists said Thursday.
Previously, the hole had only
opened over Antarctica and the
surrounding ocean.
Citing data from the U.S.
space agency NASA, atmospher
ic research scientist Stephen
Wood said the hole covered 11.4
. million square miles - an area
more than three times the size of
the U.S.- on Sept. 9 and 10.
For those two days, the hole
extended over Punta Arenas, a
southern Chile city of about
120,000 people, exposing resi
dents to very high levels of ultra
violet radiation.
Too much UV radiation can
cause skin cancer and destroy
tiny plants at the beginning of
the food chain.
Wood is a researcher with
New Zealand’s respected
National Institute of Water and
Atmospheric Research.
Dr. Dean Peterson, science
strategy manager of the
Antarctica New Zealand
research group, said Wood’s
findings showed a city being
exposed to the ozone hole for
the first time.
“The longer it gets, the
greater the chances of populat
ed areas being hit by low ozone
levels,” said Peterson, who was
not involved in the study.
Because of misinformation given to the Daily Nebraskan,
certain ticket prices for David Spade’s performance at the
Devaney Center were listed incorrectly iri Tuesday’s edition.
Students can buy tickets at the $12.50 discounted rate through
the Nov. 2 performance. Public tickets, which cost $16.75, will
begin selling Saturday.
Court ponders
free speech,
spending link
■The Supreme Court's ruling focuses on'hard
money,'cash typically used in campaigns for
mass mailings and candidate ads.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court waded into
the debate over money in politics Tuesday, agreeing
to decide whether some federal spending limits on
political parties are an unconstitutional crimp on free
speech. '
A ruling in the case could erase spending limits on
party “hard money,” the cash raised under federal law
that can be used for direct help to candidates. Without
limits, parties would be free to funnel huge amounts
to chosen candidates early on, or lavish last-minute
cash on die closest races.
The court will look at the caps on a political party’s
spending done in concert with a particular campaign.
Such party money, called coordinated expenditures,
usually goes for such things as mass mailings and ads
promoting an individual candidate. .
The court earlier struck down limits on party
money spent independently of the candidate's cam
paign. In both instances, the party money is not con
sidered a campaign contribution since it remains
separate from die candidate’s coffers.
“Depending on how the court sides, the parties
could be given yet another device for contributing
even greater amounts of money to the political
process,” said Steven Weiss, spokesman for the non
partisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks
campaign money.
"This would remove any remaining obstacle that
parties now face to spending as much hard money as
they want, whenever they want and wherever they
want,” Weiss said.
Reducing the influence of money in politics was
the hallmark of Sen. John McCain’s insurgent candi
dacy in the Republican presidential primary, and
campaign finance has remained an issue in the presi
dential campaign.
At the first presidential debate last week, Vice
President A1 Gore, the Democratic nominee, tried to
get his Republican counterpart, Texas Gov. George W.
Bush, to sign on to a proposal to overhaul current
campaign finance laws.
Bush instead invoked a litany of Clinton-Gore
campaign finance scandals dating to 1996. “This man
has no credibility on the issue," Bush said.
The major parties are raising ever-increasing
sums of hard money. As of June 30, Republicans had
$65 million of it in the bank, and Democrats had $40
million.
The Supreme Court case arose out of a 1986
Senate race in Colorado. Ruling on another part of the
same dispute, the Supreme Court said in 1996 that
political parties could spend unlimited hard money
as long as they weren't working in consultation with
die candidate.
At the time, the court bypassed the debate about
whether spending could be limited if parties were
consulting with the candidates.
This time around, the Federal Election
Commission and the Justice Department argued in
court papers that candidates would know where huge
influxes of "coordinated expenditures" came from,
and once in office might feel beholden to individual
party officials.
“There is no reason to believe that such individu
als are immune from the corrupting temptations and
self-interest of other persons,” the government
argued.
Without limits on coordinated expenditures, par
ties could become funnels for campaign cash from
individuals and political action committees with their
own axes to grind, the government added.
TODAY
* Partly cloudy
. high 70, low 56
TOMORROW
Mostly cloudy
high 68, low 50
The Associated Press
■Washington
Embassy to be reopened
in Belgrade,Yugoslavia
In a show of support for
newly installed President
Vojislav Kostunica, the Clinton
administration will reopen the
U.S. Embassy in Belgrade and
also hopes to re-establish diplo
matic relations with Yugoslavia
quickly.
The State Department also
announced on Tuesday that
James C. O'Brien, the senior
U.S. official for Balkans devel
opments, was flying to Belgrade
to meet with Kostunica, a fur
ther reversal of the icy distance
that marked Slobodan
Milosevic’s rule.
O’Brien will bring the new
government up to date on the
process of lifting sanctions
against Yugoslavia but also will
try to ensure that the process
doesn’t inadvertently enable
former aides of Milosevic “to
loot assets or somehow misuse
state assets,” Department
spokesman Richard Boucher
said.
■Pennsylvania
Prison guards arrested
in sperm smuggling
HARRISBURG - TWo former
guards at a federal prison
accepted thousands of dollars
from inmates to smuggle con
traband and sperm used to
impregnate the inmates' girl
friends, prosecutors say.
One of the inmates involved
in the alleged scheme was a
New York mob associate,
Antonino Parlevecchio, accord
ing to a criminal complaint filed
in federal court.
The former guards, Troy
Kemmerer and Todd Swineford,
were arrested last week,
charged with bribery and
released.
Kemmerer, 33, allegedly
accepted $5,000 on Oct. 5 from
an undercover agent posing as
an inmate’s girlfriend. The
agent asked that sperm be
smuggled out of the Allenwood
prison in a cryogenic sperm kit.
■ Washington, D.C.
Congressmen call for ban
on exporting heating oil
Five congressmen from the
Northeast called on President
Clinton on Tuesday to issue an
executive order banning the
export of heating oil, saying the
fuel “should not be sent to
Europe” when U.S. supplies are
low.
While hard statistics are
scarce, there has been growing
evidence that refiners in
September stepped up exports
of heating oil to take advantage
of higher prices in Europe.
Refineries were operating at
high production rates, but U.S.
inventories have continued to
lag, Energy Department offi
cials said earlier this week.
The U.S. normally imports
more distillates - heating oil
and diesel fuel - than it exports,
but exports in the past have
increased when higher prices
are available abroad, as was the
case last month.
■North Carolina
Murder heard through
chat-room microphone
DUNN - A woman’s ex-hus
band broke into her mobile
home and shot her as friends on
the other side of the state lis
tened from an Internet voice
chat room, authorities said.
Deanna Diane Gregory, 28,
died Monday at a university
hospital in Chapel Hill follow
ing the weekend shooting.
Gregory told four friends
through her computer’s micro
phone that her ex-husband was
breaking in, the Harnett County
Sheriff's Office said.
The friends heard three
gunshots and notified authori
ties, who found Gregory’s front
door open and the woman
wounded on the couch, Maj.
Steve West with the sheriff’s
office said.
Adam Bruce Moore, 29, was
initially charged with attempt
ed murder, but the charge was
expected to change to murder,
West said. He was also charged
with first-degree burglary.
