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• Military quality of life is Bush’s first priority Chuck Kennedy/College Press Exchange Bush has devoted this week to national security and to boosting what he calls a sagging military morale. by Scott Lindlaw Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) — Improving quality of life in the military is the Bush administration’s first order of business as it conducts its top-to-bottom armed services review, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Sunday. “I think the focus has to be on quality of life for the people,” Rumsfeld said on Fox News Sunday. “Without the men and women that we’re able to attract and retain to man the forces, then we really don’t have a national defense, so that has to be the first focus.” Bush has devoted the rest of the week to national security, including a visit Monday to an Army base in Geoigia to bolster what he has warned is sagging military morale. During his campaign, Bush said equipment shortages, poor housing and pay and unfocused, “overextended” missions were eroding morale. At Bush’s direction, Rumsfeld has un dertaken a “force structure review” of the Pentagon, and the administration will rely on that examination as it sets defense spending priorities. The defense secretary said on ABC’s This Week that he remains convinced a defense budget increase is necessary. Rumsfeld also defended Bush’s plan to develop a missile defense system, calling it a “reasonable” step to protect against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. “It threatens no one, and it should be of concern to no one, including the Russians or the Chinese, unless someone has an intention of doing damage to other people,” he said on Fox. “The goal isn’t to win a war; the goal is to be so capable of winning a war that you don’t have to fight it,” he said. Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., said he feared such a system would prompt China, India and Pakistan to build up their own nuclear arsenals. If they did, “I’m not sure it’s a safer world to be in at the end of the day,” he said. He does not flatly oppose such a nuclear “umbrella,” but Biden said he was concerned that building one could alienate U.S. allies and Russia by violating the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. While he studies the missile defense issue, Bush is also moving to deliver on his campaign pledgeto increase pay for the mil itary. Convicted McVeigh supports public viewing of his execution OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh wrote in a published letter that his execution should be broadcast publicly. In a letter published in The Sun day Oklahoman, McVeigh questioned the fairness of limiting the number of witnesses to his execution. The A Federal Bureau of Prisons is 9 considering a closed-circuit broadcast to accommodate survivors and relatives of victims. “Because the closed-circuit telecast of my execution raises these fundamental equal access concerns, and because I am otherwise not opposed to such a telecast, a reasonable solution seems obvious: hold a true public execution — allow a public broadcast,” he wrote. McVeigh, 32, is set to be executed May 16 by injection at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., for his role in the April 19,1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The bombing killed 168 people and injured 500. McVeigh’s attorney, Rob Nigh Jr., confirmed that McVeigh wrote the letter and is serious about broadcasting % his execution. “He is in favor of public scrutiny of government action, including his ‘It has ... been said that all of Oklahoma was a victim of the bombing. Can all of Oklahoma watch?* Timothy McVeigh In a letter to The Sunday Oklahoman execution,” Nigh told the newspaper. About 250 people who survived or lost family members in the bombing have asked to see McVeigh’s execution, but only eight seats are available for witnesses on behalf of victims. A national broadcast isn’t an option, bureau spokesman Dan Dunne said. “It hasn’t been considered. It won’t happen,” Dunne said. Closed-circuit television has been a part of McVeigh’s legal process from the start. His Denver trial was shown to bombing victims at an auditorium in Oklahoma City. In McVeigh’s Feb. 1 handwritten letter, he wondered who would be considered for watching his execution. “It has... been said that all of Oklahoma was a victim of the bombing. Can all of Oklahoma watch?” he wrote. He also complained in the letter about the limits put on his witness list. McVeigh can have six witnesses, including one spiritual adviser, two lawyers and three adult relatives or friends. McVeigh would be the first federal inmate executed since 1963. He dropped all appeals in January and has until Friday to seek clemency from President Bush. The idea of televising executions is not new in the United States. Several states, including Oklahoma, have allowed relatives of murder victims to watch executions on closed-circuit television. McVeigh will not make a legal push for a public execution, but Nigh said he supports the idea. “If it is our collective judgment that capital punishment is a reasonable re sponse to crime, we need to come to grips with what it actually is,” he said. U.S. sub sinks fishing boat by Jaymes Song Associated Press HONOLULU — With head bowed and eyes filled with tears, a Japanese fishing boat captain described the terrifying minutes after a U.S. submarine smashed into his boat and caused it to sink into the waters off Hawaii. “The ship went down without tilting, almost straight down,” Hisao Onishi, captain of the Japanese fishing vessel Ehime Maru, said Saturday. “We couldn’t get the life rafts out and were washed into the sea.” Onishi expressed anguish over the nine people who are still missing and disbelief at how long it took for the 26 survivors to be rescued after their boat was struck by the USS Greeneville. “We did our best to find other survivors,” Onishi told reporters in Japanese. “We just couldn’t find the nine missing.” On Sunday, Coast Guard rescue teams were continuing to search the waters for three crew members, two teachers and four students from Uwajima Fisheries High School in southwestern Japan. Five aircraft and four vessels were sweeping a 4,000-square-mile area, said Coast Guard Chief Mike Cobb of the Joint Resource Coordination Center. Search conditions were excellent on Sunday, with winds at 5 to 10 knots and seas between 1 and 2 feet, Cobb said. Still wearing the blue jump suit he was issued at the Coast Guard base after his rescue, Onishi appeared at a press conference Saturday with Ietaka Horita, the principal of the school who sent staff and students for training on the 180-foot vessel. Onishi, 58, recounted how an ordinary fishing expedition in good weather turned tragic when the nuclear powered attack submarine surfaced under his ship. “There was a violent collision, or I should say there was a very loud noise and a jolt that seemed to lift our stem up,” Onishi said. “We heard two cracking noises. I could not see any other ships in the area, and I looked around, thinking we might have hit a floating object.” The submarine was on a routine one-day training mission Friday afternoon when it surfaced, splitting open the Ehime Maru and sinking it within 10 minutes. The power went out, preventing Onishi from calling for help, but he said he yelled for everyone to head up to the bridge and into the life rafts. Crew member Akira Kagajyo later told Onishi the engine room flooded to the ceiling and he managed to get two breaths before he was “flushed out” to eventual safety. The survivors waited 50 minutes to be plucked from the waters. A Coast Guard helicopter and plane reached the scene about 35 minutes after the collision. Patrol boats that rescued the 26 survivors arrived about 15 minutes later, said Coast Guard spokesman Lt. Greg Fondran. “I could see several people on the (submarine) tower,” Onishi said. “They lowered a rope ladder from the conning tower, but none of our crew members were rescued by the submarine... They were just looking until the Coast Guard arrived,” he said. Adm. Thomas Faigo, commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, said choppy conditions made it too dangerous for the Greeneville crew to open hatches to take survivors on board. There were waves of three to four feet with a six-foot swell at the time, Faigo said. But Onishi said conditidns were calm enough that water didn’t enter the life rafts. The Greeneville stayed at the search scene overnight to provide rescue support before returning to port at Pearl Harbor under its own power Saturday morning. The submarine incurred only superficial damage to its rudder and port side, Navy officials said. The Navy and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating what went wrong as the 360-foot, 6,900-ton Greeneville practiced an emergency surfacing maneuver that put it on a collision course with the Japanese boat. Napster fans log on to grab music, fearing imminent court decision by Ron Harris Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO — Fans of the song-sharing service Napster logged on by the tens of thousands Saturday for a last minute grab at music they fear a federal court might knock offline. Nearly 10,000 users logged on to •last one of Napster’s more than 100 com puter servers sharing nearly 2 million free MP3 song files, according to the Web site. A sample used this past July saw 7,300 users sharing 800,000 files. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is set to rule Monday on a lower court’s injunction against the Redwood City-based company. The recording industry sued Napster in December 1999 for copyright infringement. The appeals court stayed the injunction in July, allowing Napster to stay online. If the court reinstates the injunction, Napster could be crippled. UCLA student James Papasin, 23, said he wasn’t panicking. Papasin said if Napster had to shut down, he could easily find other ways to get free music by using the right Internet search engines. “You can just search for whatever music you want, and it directs you to links where you can download the music from people’s private servers,” Papsin said about Napster alternatives. “It’s pretty impossible to police all those sites.” Despite alle gations of illegal trading via the FanN,NG service, Napster s base of registered users has exploded and challenged major record labels to consider different methods of reaching consumers online. Napster has remained confident that its service will withstand the legal test, saying on its Web site over the weekend, “We have great confidence in our legal position.” Gene mapping to aid cancer, AIDS research by Paul Recer Associated Press WASHINGTON — Mutations in the human genome predispose or cause at least 1,500 diseases, varying from diabetes and asthma to cancer and heart attacks. But why these mutations prompt these diseases is not perfectly understood, and patients suffer and die for reasons that still befuddle medical science. The connection between gene mutation and disease will become much clearer now, say experts, with the mapping and sequencing of the entire human genome. They believe that new understanding eventually will lead to dramatic new treatments. 0 “With the anatomy of the human genome at hand, the biomedical research con^nunity is facing sweeping changes in its methods and strategies,” wrote Dr. Leena Peltonen of UCLA and Dr. Victor A. McKusick of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The complete genome opens up the real prospect of developing medical treatments tailor-made for individual patients, of developing drugs that attack only the disease and leave the rest of the body alone and of predicting, perhaps at birth, which person is most likely to de velop which disease and offering a way to prevent it. In the future, say Peltonen and McKusick, newborns might be screened for treatable genetic diseases and “children at high risk of coronary artery disease can be identified and treated to prevent changes in their vascular walls during adulthood,” thus preventing heart attacks. It rt&ght be possible, said Barbara J. Trask of the Hutchinson Cancer Center, for medical science to pinpoint in each patient the genes that have gone awry and caused cancer and then to design a treatment specifically for that problem. “Cancer is really a disease of the genome,” said Trask. Some gene within the cell suddenly is changed or silenced, sending the whole cell spiraling into a pattern of uncontrolled growth and division. Having a map of the whole genome as a reference base, said Trask, “will allow you to more rapidly find those places where the cancerous cells deviated from the reference.” Once those changed genes are identified, scientists will be able to find what they do and why they help cancer develop and spread, she said. With the genome map, said Trask, medica^science will be able to find answers about other diseases, such as why some people who contract a virus rapidly become sick, while others don’t. “Why do cancer cells in some peo ple progress, and in others they do not?” she said. “Having the complete genome will help us figure all this out.” Trask said cancer now is treated with “a sledgehammer approach.” Patients are given chemicals or radiation that attack virtually every cell in the body, not just the cancer cells. There is nausea, pain, loss of hair and general, deep exhaustion. “Each cancer cell is special and has a different genetic reason for going awry,” said Trask. With a genome map in hand, researchers will eventually be able to recognize the rogue genes and determine why and how they went wrong. “We could then design treatments that specifically address that defect in the tumor, and the treatments would become more targeted and less grueling for the patient,” Trask said. Genes are not the final answer in treating disease. In most cases, a mutated or changed gene gives a predisposition for cancer or other diseases. It is thought to take an “environmental insult” such as smoking to trigger the predisposition toward cancer. Genes might open the door to heart disease, but a high fat diet and a lack of exercise might also play a role. Research into the whole human genome will help find the genes that predispose for dis ease, and other studies will help determine the environmental influences that help give birth Jo the disease, Trask said. News Briefs ■ Astronauts install Destiny laboratory on space station CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — With anxiety running high every step of the way, space shuttle Atlantis’ astronauts installed the $1.4 billion Destiny laboratory on the international space station on Saturday. The shuttle’s robot-arm operator, Marsha Ivins, cau tiously eased the laboratory module out of Atlantis’ payload bay and, after almost two hours of maneuvering, hoisted it up to space station Alpha. Because she had only camera views and no direct line of vision, two space walking crewmates assisted from out side, serving as her eyes. As soon as he heard that the latches had clicked be tween the laboratory and the station, spacewalker Thomas Jones called out, “Excellent news.” ■ Bush promotes military pay raise WASHINGTON (AP) - Moving to fulfill a campaign promise, President Bush plans to tell the armed forces this week that he will seek $ 1.4 billion to im prove pay and living standards — and an additional $1 billion as an incentive to retain highly skilled service members. Bush, who plans three one-day trips to military installations this week, said in his weekly radio address on Saturday that the visits “signal the priority that I place on our military.” His emphasis clearly is on the troops. Bush said in the address that he will of fer “meaningful increases in funding to improve the lives of our men and women in uniform.” ■ Schools seek out help in teaching Hispanic population GAITHERSBURG, Md. (AP) - A new face arrives in teacher Sharon Dreyfus’ second-grade classroom about every couple of weeks. The youngster typically speaks little English and comes from a family of recent immi grants. The most recent Census Bu reau estimates show the Hispanic pop ulation increased 46.7 percent, to 32.8 - million, between the 1990 census and -■ November 2000. The growth rate in the 1990s in Montgomery County, Md., where Gaithersburg is located, was 64.3 percent. The effects are now evident in suburban and smaller public school districts facing challenges that, until recently, were primarily a con cern for big-city schools. Administrators and civil rights groups hope some help arrives soon from new education proposals in Washington. ■ System neglect a major cause of energy crisis LOS ANGELES (AP) - As Cali fornia’s energy crisis accelerates to ward a summer of uncertainty, law makers are attempting a quick fix for longtime neglect that has created an aging and inadequate power system. Years of inactivity — partly because utilities hesitated to spend money in anticipation of a deregulated market — have left the state playing catch-up. Gov. Gray Davis announced Thursday that he hopes to have enough new power plants built by summer to light 5 million more homes. But state officials say it will be two to three years before California’s ener gy production fully catches up with demand, and the threat of rolling blackouts will continue at least through the summer. IDie (Samccock Online dailygamecock.com not pom, but definitely worthy of your attention.