—
News Digest
Legal battles surround recount in Florida
■ Republicans request blocking
four county hand-recounts the
Democrats requested
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The legal skirmishing quick
ened Sunday in the overtime race
for the White House as
Republicans warned that
painstaking recounts in
Democratic-dominated coun
ties expose Florida to political
mischief and human error.
Democrats said they expect
America's next president will be
determined “in a matter of days -
not weeks, not months.”
Updated voting figures in
Florida gave Republican George
W. Bush a 288-vote margin out of
some 6 million votes cast with
recounts under way in four juris
dictions.
Democrat A1 Gore leads in
the nationwide popular vote, but
the Electoral College tally is so
close that whoever wins in
Florida almost certainly wins the
White House.
Both parties previewed then
legal strategies for a federal court
hearing today on Bush’s request
to block manual recounts. Top
Bush adviser James A. Baker III
described the five-day Florida
standoff as “a black mafic on our
democracy and on our process.”
His rival, Gore adviser Warren
Christopher, portrayed vote
recounts as a routine necessity of
democracy.
“If at the end of the day,
George Bush has more votes in
Florida than we do, certainly the
vice president will concede,”
Christopher said, while leaving
open the prospect of court action
if recounting ends with Bush
ahead.
A climax could come at the
end of this week when overseas
mail-in ballots will be counted
and the trailing candidate would
be forced to concede or push
deeper into uncharted waters.
“By next Friday,” said Sen.
Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., “the
pressure on someone is going to
be enormous to accept whatever
results Florida has reached.”
Their public financing drying
up, both camps are raising
money to pay rafts of lawyers and
political operatives sent to every
precinct in Florida to examine
county voting records and wage
a campaign-style public rela
tions battle.
The Bush team dispatched
an e-mail message Sunday ask
ing supporters for up to $5,000 to
help finance the recount cam
paign. Democrats are hoping to
“By next Friday; the pressure on someone is
going to be enormous to accept whatever
results Florida has reached."
Robert Torricelli
D-New Jersey senator
raise million, wun lop uore
aides moving from his headquar
ters in Tennessee to Democratic
offices in Washington.
Bush had a 17-vote lead in
New Mexico, where state police
have begun impounding ballots
from Tuesday’s election.
Republican lawyers asked the
courts to order protection for
early voting and absentee ballots
cast statewide.
A Gore-requested manual
recount in Broward County, Fla.,
another Democratic bastion
with Fort Lauderdale as its hub,
was 10 Degin today, a nearing is
scheduled Tuesday in Miami
Dade County, site of what Gore
hopes will be a fourth manual
recount.
Bush and Gore were in seclu
sion with top aides Sunday -
Bush at his Texas ranch, Gore at
his Washington, D.C., residence.
Bush has made several public
appearances since Hiesday, cast
ing himself as a man preparing
for the transition to power. Gore
has laid low, wary that voters
might interpret his legal chal
lenge as a grab for power.
Clinton urges sides
to establish peace
■Violenceand disputes mar
the President's separate meet
ings with Israel's Barak and
Palestinian leader Arafat.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — President
Clinton was making another
appeal Sunday to end the vio
lence in the Middle East, meet
ing at the White House with
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Barak three days after a visit with
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Barak, whose trip was
delayed after twice reversing his
plane’s course due to a hijacking
crisis at home, has offered little
hope the meeting could help end
the bloodshed that has killed
nearly 200 people in die past six
weeks.
The Israeli leader was look
ing for Clinton to pressure Arafat
into making a declaration that
the Palestinians should not
attack Israeli soldiers and civil
ians. But Arafat was defiant at an
Islamic summit conference in
Qatar.
Barak left Israel on Saturday
night before the hijacking and
reversed course for a second
time before heading back to
Washington.
Hie delay led to the cancella
tion of a planned meeting with
Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright and National Security
Advisor Sandy Beiger.
Clinton was scheduled to
depart today for an economic
meeting in Brunei followed by
the first presidential visit to com
munist Vietnam since the war’s
end in 1975.
Nearly 200 people, most of
them Palestinians but also Israeli
soldiers and civilians, have died
in six weeks of violence on the
West Bank, in Gaza and Israel.
Arafat blamed Barak directly,
saying Thursday night after
meeting with Clinton that the
prime minister had reneged on a
promise to withdraw Israeli
forces from Palestinian areas.
In clashes Saturday, six
Palestinians and one Israeli sol
dier were killed on the West Bank
and in Gaza.
Clinton has devoted much
time and effort trying to prod
Israel and the Palestinians into
an accord. In July, he mediated a
meeting between Arafat and
Barak at Camp David, the presi
dential retreat outside
Washington, but could not over
come disputes over Jerusalem’s
future, refugees, and a handful of
other issues.
Still eager to attain his goal,
Clinton said last week he would
not apply pressure and any set
tlement must spring from the
parties themselves.
Cancer claims activist Rabin
■The peace advocate and wife
of slain Israeli Prime Minister,
Yitzhak Rabin,dies at age 72.
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
JERUSALEM — Leah Rabin,
who became an outspoken cam
paigner for peace after her hus
band, the late Israeli Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was
struck down by an assassin’s bul
let, died Sunday of cancer. She
was 72.
Mrs. Rabin had never hesi
tated to criticize friend or foe in
the five years since her husband
was shot by an ultranationalist
Jew. Though she was viewed by
some of her countrymen as a
divisive figure, she was feted
abroad as a promoter of Israeli
Arab coexistence.
She counted political lead
ers, including President Clinton
and Palestinian leader Yasser
Arafat, among her close friends.
After her husband was killed,
she crisscrossed the globe carry
ing the torch for his peace poli
cies.
“We have lost a dear friend,
and the Middle East has lost a
friend of peace,” Clinton said.
Former Prime Minister
Shimon Peres, a Labor party ally
of Mrs. Rabin’s husband, said
she was “like a lioness.”
“When she learned of her ill
ness she did not surrender,”
Peres said, “and went out to the
great battle for her life, as she
had fought, with the same
“When she learned of her illness she did not
surrendered went out to the great battle for
her life, as she had fought, with the same
courage, to eternalize the memory of her
husband
Shimon Peres
former Israel prime minister
courage, to eternalize the mem
ory of her husband.”
Rabin had been suffering
from cancer at least since the
spring. The gravity of her illness
became clear when she was
unable to appear at a rally last
Saturday marking the fifth
anniversary of her husband’s
killing.
She is to be buried
Wednesday in a plot next to her
husband's in Jerusalem’s Mount
Herzl cemetery. Her coffin will
lie in state at Rabin Square in Tel
Aviv, where Yitzhak Rabin was
assassinated on Nov. 4,1995,
Israel television’ second channel
reported.
Rabin spared no one her
sometimes acid-tongued opin
ions, even denouncing some
peace moves of the man who
emulated her husband, Prime
Minister Ehud Barak.
“Yitzhak is spinning in his
grave,” she said when Barak
offered Palestinians some con
trol over parts of east Jerusalem.
Barak, in a statement
released while he flew to
Washington for talks with
Clinton, called Rabin “a coura
geous and devoted woman who
worked together with her hus
band for two generations to
bring Israel into a secure situa
tion and, in recent years, to
bring peace."
In Israel, Rabin’s detractors
saw her as an arrogant standard
bearer of Israel’s European-born
elite. They blamed her for her
husband’s resignation from his
first term as prime minister in
1977 over an illegal U.S. bank
account she held.
Her harshest critics were
supporters of hard-line leader
Benjamin Netanyahu, whom
she accused of fanning the
hatred that led to her husband’s
killing at a Tel Aviv peace rally.
Netanyahu opposed land-for
security agreements that
Yitzhak Rabin signed with the
Palestinians.
In 1997, Rabin was booed by
vendors and shoppers as she
walked through Jerusalem’s out
door Mahane Yehuda market, a
stronghold of hawkish Israelis.
Election muddles Congress'actions
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON — Lame-duck ses
sions of Congress are always unpre
dictable, but the one starting this week
could prove even more muddled because
of the unsettled presidential election.
Neither party’s congressional leaders
know whether it makes sense to resolve
budget fights quickly or try delaying a deal
until the next administration - with either
Republican George W. Bush or Democrat
A1 Gore in the White House on Jan. 20,
inauguration day.
Top Democrats seem ready to settle
and leave town quickly. With their ally,
President Clinton, still in office, they
appear eager to shake hands on a huge
education, health and labor bill that was
nearly completed before Congress left
town on Nov. 3 for the elections.
“There’s an array of issues that have to
be addressed. I don’t think we can leave
without having addressed them,” Senate
Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., said
Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” Earlier,
he said, “It will take give on both sides, but
I think we can do that”
Five of the 13 annual spending bills for
fiscal 2001, which began Oct 1, are hang
ing. They cover seven Cabinet depart
ments, dozens of smaller agencies, con
gressional operations and the District of
Columbia’s budget
Also unresolved are a $240 billion, 10
year tax bill, an increase in the minimum
wage, higher Medicare reimbursements
for health care providers, disputes over
immigration and workplace injuries and
an intelligence agencies’ bill that Clinton
vetoed because it would have criminalized
the leaking of some government secrets.
The Senate’s top Republican, Trent
Lott of Mississippi, raised the possibility
on “Fox News Sunday” that lawmakers
would “set aside those issues where we’re
not going to come to agreement and pass
what we can.”
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Hijacking ends peacefully
in Israeli desert, officials say
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
UVDA, Israel — Two planes took off
from this air force base late Sunday, end
ing a bizarre hijacking that started when
an apparently deranged man comman
deered a plane in Dagestan, taking 57
passengers and crew to Israel's barren
southern desert.
The hijacker, identified by Israeli offi
cials as a Chechen but by Dagestani offi
cials as a Dagestan resident, had com
mandeered the Vnukovo Airlines plane
on a domestic flight from Dagestan to
Moscow late Saturday night.
Carrying a fake bomb that turned out
to be a blood-pressure gauge, he forced
the plane to refuel in Baku, Azerbaijan,
and diverted it toward Israel.
The hijacker brought two letters from
his father and demanded to hold a news
conference, the Israelis said. They refused
the demand.
He gave Israeli military officers the
letters and a cassette tape. Israeli army
Maj. Gen. Yomtov Sarnia said the hijacker
told officers he was sent by his father to
send a message to “the emperor of Japan
and the world” about “the yellow race
taking over the white race.”
After Israeli authorities refused to let
the plane land at Ben-Gurion Airport
near Tel Aviv, it headed toward the Uvda
airfield in the southern desert.
The Russian airliner landed at this
desert airfield just after sunrise. First off
the plane was the captain, who turned
over some weapons to Israeli officials.
Soon the hijacker walked down the air
craft stairs and handed himself over to
Israeli authorities.
The passengers filed off the plane
shortly after the hijacker surrendered,
and spent the day in barracks at the base.
Many of those on board were soccer
fans flying to Moscow to root for a
Dagestani team in a game there, Russia’s
ITAR-Tass news agency said.
Apki Bakayev, 11, from Chechnya,
who suffers from leukemia, was flying to
Moscow for chemotherapy. His mother,
Tamara, wrote a thank-you note to the
Israelis, saying “we will never forget
Israel.”
Israeli officials identified the hijacker
as Amarchenov Avmerchan, in his late
20s and a resident of Chechnya.
Suppressing a smile, Sarnia said the man
was “not all there.”
A Dagestani official, Imam Yaraliyev,
gave a different name, identifying the
man as Ahmed Amirkhanov, who lives in
Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan.
Chechnya and Dagestan are neigh
boring Russian republics. It was unclear
which official gave the correct identifica
tion.
The hijacker was returning to Russia
late Sunday on the plane he diverted, the
Israeli military said. Another plane,
which carried a crack Russian anti-terror
team that landed after the drama was
over, was taking passengers to Moscow,
their original destination.
\A/~ ^4-U
ucali ic
TODAY
Partly cloudy
high 36, low 25
TOMORROW
Partly cloudy
high 40, low 23
World/Nation
The Associated Press
■Austria
OPEC rejects oil production
price-easing increase
VIENNA — The
Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries snubbed
consumers Sunday by rejecting
a price-easing increase in oil
production and raising the
specter of slashing output early
next year to keep prices from
falling too fast
The 11 nation oil-producing
cartel, which produces 40 per
cent of the world's crude, argues
it's just a matter of time before
prices tail off and it could be
battling a market awash in oil
fewer people want to buy.
Until then, consumers are
left with some of tjie highest oil
prices in 10 years.
Winter demand for heating
oil is expected to evaporate with
warm spring weather a scenario
OPEC remembers getting
burned in after boosting output
in December 1997. One year
later, prices dropped to about
$10 a barrel, battering OPEC
members.
■Austria
Day spent mourning for
victims of cable car fire
KAPRUN - Relatives and
friends who had waited through
the night in this Alpine village
began to get word Sunday
whether their loved ones were
among the dead in a cable car
fire that killed about 170 people
in a mountain tunnel
With the village hall draped
in black and candles burning on
shop steps, shattered residents
gathered in a Kaprun church for
Sunday Mass. As they mourned,
emergency crews tried to reach
the spot where scores of people,
many children and teen-agers,
were killed Saturday by smoke
and flames.
The car, pulled on rails
underground for most of the
3,200 yards up the
Kitzsteinhorn mountain to a
glacier region, stopped after
catching on fire about 600 yards
inside the tunnel Saturday
morning. The cause of the fire
has not been determined.
Rescuers could not reach
the victims as the fire raged.
Passengers tried to flee through
the deep tunnel, but most were
felled by the thick smoke and
flames.
The 18 survivors fled down
wards in the tunnel where the,
smoke was thinner, authorities
said.
■South Carolina
Woman charged with killing
two children with ax
CAINHOY — A woman was
charged with murder for
allegedly killing her 6-year-old
daughter and 1-year-old son
with an ax.
The two children were
found lying in tall grass near an
abandoned home on Saturday.
Berkeley County coroner Wade
Amette said the children were
likely killed inside the family’s
mobile home, then taken out
side.
Police searching the home
on Saturday found an ax.
Perstephanie Simmons, 30, was
arrested and charged with two
counts of murder after a neigh
bor reported the children had
been harmed.
Deputies questioned
Simmons, but still don't know
what prompted the killings,
said Berkeley County Sheriff's
Capt. Ricky Driggers.
■Illinois
Gathering gives Jews chance
to show allegiance to Israel
CHICAGO—A gathering of
Jewish leaders from around the
world - once intended to cele
brate the Middle East peace
process - has become a forum
for U.S. Jews to show their alle
giance to Israel, organizers said
Sunday.
The General Assembly of
United Jewish Communities,
which runs through
Wednesday, is “ground zero for
North American Jews at a time
when we stand to show solidar
ity with Israel," said Michael
Kotzin, a local Jewish
Federation official.
