Historical Newspapers of South Carolina

Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page. It is also available as plain text as well as XML.

Cuba warns U.S. relations could be strained if boy isn’t returned by Anita Snow Associated Press Havana—The communist government warned Thursday that failure to return a 5-year-old Cuban boy to his father on the Caribbean island could further harm Cuba’s already delicate relation ship with the United States. If Elian Gonzalez is not returned, “the United States will be responsible [for] how the relationship between the two countries develops,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Alejandro Gonzalez said dur ing a weekly news conference. The two countries have no diplomatic relations, and the United States maintains a nearly four-decade-old trade embargo against Cuba aimed at toppling President Fidel Castro. The newest flap threatens to stymie attempts by the Clinton ad ministration to increase contact between the Cuban and American people. The child’s father, Juan Miguel Gon zalez, 31, Ijas asked theCuban Foreign Ministry to help him get back the boy, who survived a deadly boating accident last week. The boy was found on Thanksgiving Day, clinging to an inner tube in the waters off Fort Lauderdale. Two other people also were rescued. The boy’s mother, Elizabet Broton Rodriguez, drowned when the overloaded powerboat she and her young son were traveling in sank during the crossing to Florida. The boy’s stepfather also was among the 10 people who died in what the U.S. Coast Guard said was a smug . gling operation. Juan Miguel Gonzalez said his ex wife took their son out of the country without his permission and that he con siders the child to have been kid napped. ‘In Washington, State Department spokesman James P. Rubin said the Cuban government delivered a diplomatic note on Nov. 27 to the U.S. mission in Havana seeking the child’s return. The Foreign Ministry’s warning comes less than two weeks before regularly scheduled migration talks between the two countries on Dec. 13 in Havana. The United States and Cuba have held the occasional talks since signing 1995 migration accords that helped stem a flood of thousand of illegal immigrants leaving the island on inner tubes and homemade rafts. Cuba agreed to stop people from leaving the country illegally, and the Unit ed States agreed to repatriate illegal Cuban immigrants picked up at sea. The U.S. government has paroled Elian to the care of his paternal great aunt and great-uncle in Miami, who say they can give him a better life than he would have in Cuba. Television images of the boy in Mi ami “are repugnant, a scene of a kidnapped child surrounded by toys with which they have tried to buy his innocent conscience,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Gon zalez. As for whether the boy’s father will go to the United States to fight for his son in Florida courts, the government spokesman said that “this is not a theme for negotiations or for legal steps, but is of the highest political sensitivity.” He said the case wouldn’t be judged fairly in the courts in Florida, which he said were presided over by “corrupt judges” tied to anti-communist exile groups. The case’s growing politicization un derscores the ideological differences that separate Cuban families with members living on both sides of the Florida Straits. The boy’s relatives in the United States say the kindeigartner wants to stay with them. The Cuban American National Foun dation distributed flyers with Elian’s pic ture and the phrase “Another child vic tim of Fidel Castro” to delegates attending the World Trade Oiganization meeting in Seattle. Castro’s government says it has filed documents with U.S. authorities de manding the child’s return. U.S. legal ex perts have said that Florida state courts might ultimately decide whether Elian should be raised in the United States or returned to Cuba. What might have to be resolved, they say, are two conflicting principles—the child’s custody, which in most cases is granted to the surviving biological par ent, and his immigration status. The Cuban Readjustment Act of 1966 grants any Cuban who reaches American soil the right to stay. Rubin said the case has been referred to Florida authorities because state law takes precedence in custody disputes. -1 Giuliani courts Jewish community, Hillary losing support among women by Shannon McCaffrey Associated Press Washington — New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani reaffirmed his long-standing support for a strong Israel on Wednesday before a supportive group of GOP Jews that had sponsored a television ad attacking Hillary Rodham Clinton. Meanwhile, two polls out Wednesday showed Mrs. Clin ton failing to hold an early lead over Giuliani among New York’s female voters. Marist College’s Institute for Public Opinion poll, the first conducted since Mrs. Clinton’s announcement last week that she definitely was running for the U.S. Senate, had Giu liani leading Mrs. Clinton, 49 percent to 40 percent, among all voters. Among women, she was favored by 45 percent, while 42 percent opted for the Republican mayor — a statistical dead heat given the margin of error of plus or minus 4 per centage points. In February, while sympathy was still strong for Mrs. Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Mrs. Clinton led Giuliani among women voters, 56 percent to 38 percent, in a Marist poll. Also Wednesday, a Journal News-Manhattanville Col lege poll had Giuliani ahead 46 percent to 43 percent among all voters surveyed, a statistical tie. Among women, the first lady was ahead 47 to 44 per cent, also a statistical dead heat. That poll has a margin of er ror of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points. Giuliani talked up his Jewish credentials in a speecf before the Republican Jewish Coalition. The group recently paid for a television ad showing and criticizing Mrs. Clinton for embracing Yasser Arafat’s wife after she accused Israelis of using “poison gas” on Pales tinian women and children. The Jewish vote in New York is large and influential Giuliani said that Jerusalem should remain the undivid ed capital of Israel and that the U.S. Embassy should be moved there from Tel Aviv. He also said there was no moral equivalent between the state of Israel and the Palestinian authority. And in a seem ing jab at Mrs. Clinton, the mayor said his views were dri ven by conviction, not polls. “Everything I just said to you was my view 20 years ago, was my view yesterday and would be my view if I became the senator from New York,” Giuliani told the crowd at a Washington hotel. Although Giuliani is expected to enter the Senate race against Mrs. Clinton, he hasn’t committed yet to running. Also Wednesday, Giuliani said Mrs. Clinton’s plane had delayed other flights from taking off and landing at La Guardia Airport in New York, a charge the Clinton camp and the Federal Aviation Administration denied. “Yesterday, there were planes being delayed because a certain candidate for the Senate who still doesn’t live in New York was having the flights delayed that come into LaGuardia Airport,” Giuliani said. The mayor was joking about how he had to get back to New York City because his plane might be delayed. Giuliani spokesman Bruce Teitelbaum said the mayor wasn’t making an accusation, but was repeating anecdotes he had heard about the delays from others. Ron Morgan, the FAA’s director of air traffic, said that 241 flights had been delayed Tuesday night at LaGuardia be cause of weather and high volume and that Mrs. Clinton’s plane had been among them. “The first lady’s aircraft experienced an arrival delay much like the other aircraft,” Morgan said. “She received no special treatment.” Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said Giu liani “ought to |!jet his facts straight and stop spreading lies.” m + r_ Special to The Gamecock Florida congresswoman llena Ros-Lehtinen plays with young Elian Gonzalez at his Aunt’s home Wednesday in Miami’s Little Havana. The five-year-old Cuban boy survived two days adrift at sea after a boat carrying illegal migrants heading for the United States sunk. To most Egyptians, Y2K problem is incomprehensible - BY SCHEHEREZADE FARAM ARZI Associated Press Cairo, Egypt —The Problems of the Year 2000, as the Y2K bug is known in Egypt, seem a light year away for the men puffing on water pipes in a small cafe in a Cairo slum. “Let me first solve the problem of 1999,” declares 50-year-old Fat’hallah Mohran. A quick briefing about the comput er malady that has consumed much of the Western world only confuses him fur ther. Some computers can only read two digit years, and if they’re not fixed, they won’t work properly in 2000, when they will assume “00” is 1900. The same ignorance can be found all over Egypt, where many banks, compa nies and government services are com puterized, but where nearly half the adults can’t read and the majority of the 60 mil lion population lives below the poverty line. And that’s exactly how Egyptian au thorities want it to be to avoid millen mai nysterra. “If you don’t know, you won’t pan ic,” said Ehab Mostafa Elwy, head of the government agency in charge of ensur ing Egypt’s computers are compliant. Y2K panic might send people rush ing to hoard supplies, causing shortages, or spur them to withdraw money from banks, bringing about a collapse of the fi nancial market, Elwy said. His job is not to make sure the pub lic is Y2K savvy, but to ensure people in volved with computers know what to do. The government has organized seminars and training, much of it underwritten by $4 million in grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Elwy insists that although Egypt was relatively late to address it, the millen nium bug has been eradicated in all vi tal services: electricity, water, energy, gas, telecommunications and aviation. Some equipment in hospital inten sive care units is not yet compliant, he admits, so hospitals are using a contin gency plan — instead of programming the computers by the year, they are do ing so by the week. Elwy claims that the government is 97 percent compliant and that its 166 mainframes and 108,518 other c6mput ers are all Y2K ready. But as is the case for most countries, those claims have not been independently verified. Ali Moselhi and Mohammed Ab delfattah El Azab, who organized most of the Y2K awareness programs, think authorities are pretty much ready, but the private sector is likely to suffer signifi cant problems. Only about lialf the estimated 100,000 mainframe and minicomputers in the pri vate sector will be ready, says El Azab. As a result, air conditioning and eleva tors could fail in some hospitals, hotels and other buildings. That would affect some of the 50,000 tourists expected for a New Year dusk to-dawn pyramids bash just outside Cairo featuring a new opera by the French com poser Jean Michel Jarre. Officials say get ting cash from ATM machines could al so be a problem. Egypt was cited by the CIA’s expert . . t_A_l_2 UU 1 Z.1V, IjUWIUIVV/ vjuioimm, m vvw ber as being among countries where Y2K preparations have been poor and where significant failures in essential services are possible. The U.S. ambassador to Egypt, Daniel C. Kurtzer, is quoted on the embassy’s Web site, however, as saying in an Oc tober speech: “We don’t anticipate a ma jor disruption of utilities and services.” Egypt, a country where chaos and bu reaucracy are a way of life, is not known for contingency planning. So if pension checks don’t reach the poor on time, for example, there will not be much fuss, Moselhi said. They are never on time anyway. And because Egypt is more a cash based than electronic society, experts say it won’t be as severely affected as West ern countries. Most local bank branch es aren’t even connected to their central offices, let alone to overseas banks. New Year’s falls within the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, a period of fast ing and prayer in this predominantly Mus lim nation. No evidence to link magnetic fields, childhood cancer, study says by Emma Ross Associated Press LONDON — New research concludes that there’s no evidence to support the controversial theory that children face an increased risk of cancer from elec trical wiring in the home or power lines. The study, led by a Cambridge University sci entist, is the largest ever undertaken into childhood cancers and electromagnetic fields. But Wforld Health Organization scientists say it’s not the definitive study they had hoped for. The study, published Friday in the British med ical journal “The Lancet,” concluded that children exposed to high levels of magnetic energy from near by power lines or from home appliances were no more likely to get leukemia or any other childhood cancer than children exposed to low levels. The study of 4,452 children under 14 compared 2,226 children diagnosed with cancer in the pkU four yean—including all the nation’s leukemia cas es — and matched each of them with a healthy child of the same sex and birthday. The researchers, led by Nick Day of Cambridge University, measured the level of magnetic emis sions from power lines within 200 yards of each child’s home and school. In addition, they measured the magnetic emis sions from electrical wiring inside the children’s homes, testing everywhere from next to the chil dren’s beds to the middle of the kitchen. To verily the doses found inside the home were the same as those absorbed by the children, 100 of the children wore monitors for one-week periods, three times a year. The levels matched. The study found that about 2 percent of the chil dren were exposed to levels higher than 0.2 mi crotesla, the threshold at which other studies have suggested a link with cancer. In a commentary in “The Lancet,” ^forld Health Organization scientists said the investigation was “very large and well conducted, [but] it is not the ‘definitive’ study that scientists have been hoping for.” They noted that while high levels of exposure are rare in Britain, a U.S. study reported 10 percent of children above that level and a Canadian study had 15 percent. Day said the higher levels in North America were because electricity is supplied at 110 volts, com pared with 220 volts in Europe. That means that for the same power consumption, North Americans use twice as much current as Europeans, which pro duces a stronger magnetic field. Only 17 children in Day’s study had readings of 0.4 or more, but that didn’t change the results. Eight had cancer, while nine did not. Day said the number of children exposed in the study to 0.4 or more was too small to draw con clusions about safety at that level. “Almost all of the high exposures were not due to proximity to overhead power chbles, but to electrical wiring in the house,” Day said. Only seven children lived near a power cable, but they also had no increased cancer risk. The issue of whether exposure to electromag netic fields increases the chances of childhood cancer has been debated for years. A high-profile study by California-based re searcher Robert Liburdy in 1992 linked power lines to cancer, fueling fear among people living near them. hi 1994, Liburdy’s lab reviewed the findings af ter a student challenged his results. The U.S. Office of Research Integrity, contacted by the lab, later found he intentionally falsified and fabricated data. Liburdy was forced to resign from his job at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory but has stood by his findings. Scores of subsequent studies have found little evidence to support his findings, while others have found a weak link. 4$ World Briefs ■ Boy left in court’s holding cell over weekend Indianapolis (AP)—A 13-year-old boy spent the weekend unattended in a cour thouse cell after a bailiff forgot to check it before going home. After a court hearing Saturday, Aaron Robinson was locked in the Juvenile Court holding cell with no food, water or toi let facilities. He was discovered Monday morning. The bailiff, a 10-year employee of the court, was fired. ' Robinson had been arrested and tak en to the court building Friday night af ter his mother told police officers he had stolen her car. The boy was released after a hearing but feared punishment from his parents and didn’t want to return home, ac cording to Superior Court Judge James Payne said. So he was taken to a holding cell and was to have been transferred to a detention center on another floor Sat urday evening. “Aaron has not been able to really sleep. I just keep replaying this in my mind: My child beating on the door and no one able to hear his pleas for help. There could have been a fire or he could have had a panic attack,” his mother, Pearlinea Robinson said. ■ ABC bringing back ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ New York (AP) —There’s still hope, would-be millionaires. ABC and Regis _ Philbin will soon give you three chances a week to get rich before a na tional TV audience. The quiz show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” a ratings sensation in two limited runs, will become a regular part of ABC’s prime-time schedule starting Jan. 11, the network announced Thurs day. It will be on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays — three hours of “final an swers” each week. “Tens of millions of viewers sent a very clear message that they wanted more ‘Millionaire,’ and we’re going to deliv er,” said Stu Bloombeig, co-chairman of ABC Entertainment. Startling TV executives, viewers flocked to the game show with the apoc alyptic music and space-age set design. Its 18-night run in November laid waste to the competition, enabling ABC to win its first ratings “sweeps-” month in five years. Its last airing, the night before Thanks giving, drew nearly 30 million viewers. ■ Arcnaeoiogy experts outraged after Roman relics found in landfill Rome (AP) — Preservationists and ar chaeologists blasted Rome’s mayor Thurs day for trying to complete a Holy Year project too quickly and allowing trucks to haul away scores of fragments of an cient statues and frescos. The artifacts turned up Wednesday at a dump outside Rome, sparking a furor when police traced them to the site where construction workers were rushing to complete a multilevel parking garage ahead of Christianity’s 2000 Holy Year celebrations. About 40 demonstrators gathered at the construction site today, waving ban ners with slogans such as “Stop the. rampage!” and demanding the building stop. “We blame the Vatican for such a greedy approach to the Holy Year,” said Carlo Ripa di Meana, a former European Union environmental commissioner. “They have turned a place near to where St. Peter was martyred into a mad business circus,” he said. A top archaeologist, Lorenzo Bianchi, was also appalled. “It is very sad,” he said in a newspa per interview. “It is clear the work was done too fast. An archaeological dig takes a very, very long time.” Mayor Francesco Rutelli said he had n’t seen the artifacts, but he said that in Rome, relics are found anywhere one digs.