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. McCain compares self to Reagan, Clinton as primary race heats up by Ron Fournier Associated Press Spartanburg —John McCain likened himself Thursday to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, two-term presidents who reached across party lines. “If we win here, I don’t see how we can be stopped,” McCain said, hop £ ing for a surge of Democrats and inde pendents in Saturday’s primary. Two days before the South Carolina contest, national front-runner George W. Bush kept up his case against McCain by suggesting that the Arizona senator was a hypocrite riding his “high horse” down a “low road.” With polls predicting a tight race, Bush’s supporters fear that a defeat in South Carolina would lead to follow-up losses in Michigan on Tuesday and in Vir-. ginia seven days later, setting off a cata clysmic chain reaction. Even his allies say backers in Congress and elsewhere would begin to peel away. New polls out Thursday showed Mc Cain faring as well as or better than Bush in a matchup against Democratic front runner A1 Gore. This is bad news for Bush, who courted victory-starved Republicans for months based on polls that showed him besting his GOP rivals in matchups against the vice president. “There’s a rising belief that Mc Cain could win, as well,” said Rep. Bil ly Tauzin, R-La., a Bush supporter. McCain, whose financial and politi-. cal standing improved dramatically after his victory in New Hampshire, believes that he can win Michigan and Iris home state of Arizona, even if South Carolina goes to Bush. “We can lose here and go on,” Mc Cain told 300 veterans. “But I’ll tell you what, my friends: If we win here, I don’t see how we can be stopped.” Bush said South Carolina is not do or-die. “I’m continuing one way or an other,” he told reporters, acknowledging a scenario that would have been un thinkable just a few weeks ago. The key will be turnout, and both campaigns are contacting thousands of supporters in the contest’s closing days. Bush is especially aggressive, deploying the GOP establishment and conservative special interest groups. Trailing far behind Bush among self-identified GOP voters, McCain stepped up his appeal to independents and Democrats by promising a new po litical coalition and a dedication to senior citizens, children and veterans. “These things are part of an inclusive party, the party of Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. That’s what this is really about,” he said “So I view this campaign as sort of a sem inal event for our party and this coun try.” Aboard his campaign bus, McCain al so said Clinton has done a “marvelous job” broadening the Democratic Party and said he can do the same for the GOP “You can’t help but admire the job Pres ident Clinton did in assembling a coali tion — moving to attract the great cen ter in political life,” he said. Campaigning amid the resorts ol Hilton Head, Bush said McCain’s high minded rhetoric belied a below-the-radai campaign to discredit him. He waved; McCain flier that criticized Bush’s tax cutting plan, saying it was fdled with false information and calling it evidence of negative campaigning. It was the same prop Bush used in Tuesday night’s debate. “I don’t accept this high horse and low-road attitude of Senator McCain,” Bush said, sticldng to his strategy of try ing to undermine McCain’s reformist im age. “I am saying this is a man who says one thing and does another.” The effects of the campaign began to show on both candidates. McCain bris tled aboard his campaign bus when ques tioned about his persistent criticisms of Bush, and the governor was unusually s terse in his news conference. “Turn that off,” Bush said curtly when a pager interrupted him. He was in better spirits later in the day, when 1,500 people showed up in Primary see page 4 Trial begins in dispute over Kuralt's secret life by Bob Anez Associated Press Virginia City, Mont. — The secret life of the late CBS correspondent Charles Kuralt began unfolding in court Thursday as his mistress of 29 years sought to inherit the Montana fishing retreat they shared. The pudgy 440n the Road” reporter died in 1997 at age 62, and the fight oyer the property was originally between Ku ralt’s widow, Suzanne “Petie” Baird Ku ralt, and his mistress, Patricia Shan non. After Mrs. Kuralt died in October, Kuralt’s two daughters from a previous marriage took up the legal battle. On Thursday, Shannon testified that Kuralt, the traveling correspondent known for his folksy reports about quirky American;!, played the role of husband 0> and father for his secret family while his wife lived in New York Shannon described how Kuralt paid for college for her children, provided her with money to live and start a business, and gave her property in Ire land and Montana. She said her son some times traveled with Kuralt while he was on assignment with CBS and went with him to political conventions. “I considered, and I think he con sidered, and I know the children con sidered, that we were a family,” she tes tified. Shannon contends that Kuralt in tended that she have the fishing retreat, which consists of 90 acres and a reno vated schoolhouse valued at more than $600,000. Her claim is based on a letter Ku ralt wrote to her two weeks before he died of lupus: “I’ll have the lawyer vis it the hospital to be sure you inherit the rest of the place in MT, if it comes to that." “I always thought of it as ours,” Shannon said of tire retreat. ‘‘Charles al ways thought of it as outs.” Todd Hillier, an attorney for the es tate, argued that Kuralt knew how to write a valid handwritten will and that if he had wished to make the letter bind ing, he could have done so. The daughters, Susan Bowers and Lisa Bowers White, didn’t attend Thurs day’s court session. The non-jury trial is expected to last no more than two days. Kuralt met Shannon in 1968, the year after he started his “On the Road” travels. He was six years into his second marriage, to Baird. Shannon was a di vorced, 34-year-old social activist and mother of three. For years, she testified, he called al most every night. They often spent time at a fishing cabin along the Big Hole Riv er, one of America’s finest trout streams. In 1997, Kuralt gave Shannon the cabin and 20 acres, and she continues to live there. But in his will, he gave the adjacent 90-acre retreat to his wife and children. Microsoft unveils Windows 2000 by Martha Mendoza Associated Press San Francisco — Microsoft intro duced its new Windows 2000 operating system Thursday, backed by cheering fans, celebrities and a giant mock-laptop com puter. 0 Despite the hoopla, the company said ' it’s marketing the software to businesses and operators of sophisticated networks — not consumers — and warned that home users might find that it doesn’t work with some games and other software. “Today, we unveil the future of com puting,” said Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, clasping his hands and smiling to his audience at a conference staged by the company to introduce the software upgrade. Windows 2000 is Microsoft’s latest effort to maintain its dominance in the worldwide software market. However, despite its name, Windows 2000 is not a successor to Windows 98, which runs die vast majority of the world’s personal computers. Rather, it’s supposed to replace the corporate system Windows NT 4.0. The new operating system is designed to run powerful business PCs called work stations and servers that run computer networks and Web sites. It’s considered more stable and reli able than Windows NT and has new features that help technology managers run large systems. The debut of Wndows 2000 came nearly a year later than expected, but it has received praise from industry analysts and selected companies that have been running it for months on a test basis. With more than 35 million lines of computer code, it’s one of the most complex soft ware programs ever made. However, some companies, tired of waiting, have turned to a new rival sys tem called Linux to run their computer systems. It’s cobbled together by soft ware writers around the world and, sur prisingly, given away for free. On Wednesday, Microsoft chief ex ecutive Steve Ballmer said the delays gave Microsoft’s competitors, including Lin ux, time and opportunity. He said that some academic institu tions and Internet service providers in particular abandoned Windows and went to Linux. (jore bent on burying Bradley by Sandra Sobieraj Associated Press New Orleans—ForAlGore,it’snot enough to be far ahead of Bill Bradley in the polls. The vice president, piling up endorsements from abortion-rights, gay rights and labor groups, is bent on not just beating his rival, but burying him. “All I’m concentrating on is pouring the gas on... and making sure that I dri ve the message home,” Gore said Thurs day. Talking tough, he has called Bradley a “special agent” for the Republicans and charged him with one of the worst sins a Democrat could commit: trying to “starve Medicare.” Bradley was sounding philosophical Thursday, addressing high school and col lege athletes in Providence, R.I.: “When you encounter those moments in life that are tough, those moments are not like a hammer hitting a clay pot, shattering it, but like a hammer hitting metal, tem pering it and making it stronger.” But he knows he needs real victories, and soon. “I clearly have to win a number of states on March 7 and 14, no question about that,” Bradley said. He told reporters in Boston that Gore could expect a two-week “bump” in sup port from the vice president’s Feb. 1 vic tory in New Hampshire, and “now we’re in the third week.” Bradley is concentrating on the North east, where he is strongest, and on Cali fornia, where he is 40 percent behind in public opinion polls. His forays to Wash ington state, which holds a primary Feb. 29 but doesn’t elect delegates until March 7, suggest that he’s bidding for an invig orating, symbolic victory there. Acknowledging Gore’s lead, Bradley said “I don’t think it’s impossible to over come when the public focuses again.”To try and command that focus, campaign strategist Anita Dunn promised sharper ' ads raising questions about Gore’s record — on abortion and gun control, for ex ample. But in the abortion ad he began air ing Thursday in Michigan, Ohio, Mary land and Washington, Bradley mentions only his own consistently pro-abortion rights record. Meanwhile, Gore, top-heavy with Democratic Party support but anxious for insulation, has wrangled endorsements from the National Abortion and Repro • ductive Rights Action League and the gay-rights Human Rights Campaign — two groups that had planned to remain neutral in the Democratic primary. “I’m campaigning as if I’m one vote behind,” Gore said Thursday. Asked this week how often he would be back cam paigning in New York, Gore cracked that the better question was: “How often am I going to leave?” New York, where Bradley was a pro basketball star with the Knicks, was a neck-and-neck race one month ago. The latest poll, on Feb. 10, put Gore ahead, 56-32. “It’s hard to make a souffle rise twice,” Democratic consultant Bill Car rick observed. And getting Democrats to take a second look will be tough for Bradley. News Briefs ■ Book says lowans first took down flag Des Moines, Iowa (AP) — The sol diers who first struck down the Confed erate flag over South Carolina’s state Capi tol were lowans, according to a new book. And it was an Iowan who raised the U.S. flag in its place. Charles Larimer, author of “Love and War: Intimate Civil Whr Letters between Captain Jacob and Emeline Ritner,” came across the information in some letters while researching the book. The Ritners are his great-great-grandparents. Jacob Ritner told Emeline in the letters about conquering Columbia. Larimer said that there was a race - among Union soldiers to take down the Confederate flag following the South’s surrender. “It was a big priority,” he said. Company F of the 1st Iowa Infantry was the first to reach Columbia. Larimer said while it’s unclear which of the soldiers took down the Confed erate flag, the commanding officer of Company F, George Stone of Mount Pleasant, raised the U.S. flag over the van-' quished Capitol. Larimer, a genealogist who grew up ' in Sioux City, graduated from the Uni: versity of Iowa in 1975. ■ Cyanide contaminates Romanian streams Baia Mare, Romama (AP)—The top EU environmental official demanded to know Thursday how tons of cyanide con taminated two major rivers, killing mass es of plant and fish life in its path. The cyanide poured into streams from a containment dam at the gold mine in Baia Mare, passing through Hungary and Yugoslavia in the Szamos and Tisza rivers before returning to Romania on the Danube. EU Environment Commissioner Mar got Willstroem called the spill a “major « environmental accident, and to the peo ple living by the rivers, this is a cata strophe.” Speaking in Szolnok, Hungary, where she inspected the Tisza, Willstroem said she wanted answers as to “what happened, how bad is the damage and what can be done to rehabilitate the environment.” Willstroem also called for a task force to be set up to assess and control the dam age and prevent future accidents. ■ Elian’s backers voice frustration over stalemate Washington (AP) — Two prominent Democratic House members lambasted the Clinton administration on Thursday for its failure to return Elian Gonzalez to Cuba many weeks after concluding that he belongs with his father on the island. Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif, said Immigration and Naturalization Services Commissioner Doris Meissner made the right decision m early January in ruling that the boy should be sent back. “But she literally has botched it in not expediting her own decision, ” Waters said. She also criticized Attorney General Janet Reno for not using her authority to send Elian back. There was no immediate re sponse from immigration officials to Wa ters’ comments. s EGG DONATION PROGRAM Women Helping Women Healthy, young women (21-32 years of age) are needed to donate eggs anonymously to help inlertde couples achieve pregnancy. This . procedure does not involve surrogacy and requires only a month of your time. Accepted donors are compensated $1,500 - $2,000. i | For more information call: 803 779.4668 Need Some Cash? Help Sera Tec Help Others by Donating Life Saving Plasma New donors or anyone who has not donated in . 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