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.

Wtiz 0amecock Rain puts damper on Montana fires by Becky Bohrer Associated Press RED LODGE, Mont. — Wide spread light rain, high humidity and cooler temperatures put smiles on a lot of faces at Montana's multiple wild fires Thursday. More of the same was forecast, rais ing hopes of putting a dent in the drought contributing to the nation's worst fire season in half a century. “There was quite a bit of dew on the ground this morning. We're opti mistic,” Scott Fitzwilliams, informa tion officer for the fire just south of Red Lodge, said Thursday. The last of some 150 evacuees from the fire area were allowed to re turn home Thursday morning, and ad ditional firefighters arrived, Fitzwilliams said. Things were going well enough at the state's second-biggest fire, between Helena and Bozeman, that managers released some firefighters — sending them home for at least a brief rest. “Wfe're not fighting an 81,000-acre fire anymore,” fire information offi cer Wendell Peacock said. “We’ve got a lot of it out and a lot of it where it's not going to hurt anybody, so we're reducing the focus to deal with what we have left.” Thirty laige fires are burning in an area of 656,991 acres in Montana, ac cording to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho. Firefighters were trying to build nearly nine miles of fire line around the Red Lodge blaze. The moisture helped firefighters attack new blaze north of Helena that had forced five families out of their homes near Wolf Creek late Tues day. The evacuation order was lifted the next day, and the 400-acre fire was contained Wednesday night. An 11,000-acre fire at Beaver Creek, west of Yellowstone National Park, also was contained Wednesday, and the rain was a key factor, forest officials said. Even better news was that more rain was in the forecast through Monday for Montana as well as Idaho, where 25 large foes are burning on 717,360 acres. But fire managers cautioned it would take a lot more to reverse the extreme conditions in either state. It took months for the trees and vegeta tion to become more parched than kiln-dried lumber, and there is always the risk of winds and lightning. “The fuels are so dry up here it will take a lot more than what we'll get this weekend to put this fire down,” said Greg Meffert, the meteorologist assigned to a 59,000-acre blaze burning on the Payette National For est in west-central Idaho. President Clinton on Wednesday declared Montana a federal disaster area at the request of Gov. Marc Raci cot. A request was pending from Ida ho Gov. Dirk Kempthome for Clin ton to do the same for his state. Sen. Conrad Bums, R-Mont., said the fire-and-drought-related aid need ed by Montana might top $1 billion. Rick Weiland, regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the financial losses in Montana warranted the disaster dec laration. He said the agency would send an official to Helena to begin coordi nating the claims process. “The economic injury is just so substantial,” he said. “This is such an enormous problem here. I don't think many of us have seen anything like this.” Across the nation, there are 85 major fires burning on 1.64 million acres, the fire center said. Fires have charred 6.3 million acres in the West this year. China head sympathized at Tiananmen Associated Press NEW YORK — In a rare admis sion for a Chinese communist leader, Pres ident Jiang Zemin says he sympathized with the passions for freedom and democ racy that drove students into Tiananmen Square 11 years ago. Jiang recalled his own days as a stu dent protester against Japan's occupation of China in the 1940s in an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes.” The comparison was brought up by correspondent Mike Wal lace. “In the 1989 disturbances we truly understood the passion of students who were calling for greater democracy and freedom. In fact, we have always been working to improve our system of democ racy,” Jiang said, according to a transcript of the interview to be broadcast Sunday. His comments were the most sym pathetic portrayal of the student move ment by a senior Chinese leader since the leadership ordered tanks and troops to oust the demonstrators. Hundreds, if not thousands, died in the military assault on June 34,1989. The Chinese government has never giv en a credible account. Jiang reverted to the party line, how ever, in defending the crackdown. He ac cused people he did not identify of try ing to “use the students to overthrow the government under the pretext of democ racy and freedom.” When asked whether he felt inspired by the courage of the lone protester who faced down a tank during the assault, Jiang said “we fully respect every citi zen's right to freely express his wishes and desires. “But I do not favor any flagrant op position to government actions during an emergency,” Jiang said. “The tank stopped and did not run the young man down.” The “60 Minutes” interview.was con ducted at the Chinese leadership retreat at the seaside resort of Beidaihe, a first for Western television. Jiang is due in New York next week to attend a U.N. summit. Polite but at times feisty, Jiang said he agreed to the interview to underscore his government's desire to work with the United States— even in the aftermath of the U.S. bomb ing of China's embassy in Yugoslavia last year. Given the United States' state-of-the art military technology, China cannot ac cept Washington's explanations that the bombing was a mistake, he said. He said he told President Clinton thatthey will never agree on this. “The identification marks of the ChT nese Embassy in Belgrade were too clear for people to miss. So why has there been guch an incident? It is still a question. But we have decided to look forward, to improve China-U.S. relations,” Jiang said. Jiang also denied that the Wen Ho Lee, the ethnic Chinese scientist accused of ntishandling nuclear secrets from a U.S. government lab, was a spy for China. He turned aside U.S. criticisms of com: munist authoritarian one-party rule, say ing that Americans find it hard to believe Chinese supporttheir government. | Treatment of scientist questioned by Randolph Schmid Associated Press WASHINGTON - The leaders of three of the nation's most prestigious scientific oiganizations are taking issue with the treatment of fired Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee. “Although we make no claim as to his innocence or guilt, he appears to be a victim of unjust treatment,” the three said in an open letter Thursday to Attorney General Janet Reno. The letter was signed by Bruce Al berts, president of the National Acade my of Sciences; William A. Wulf, pres ident of the National Academy of Engineering and Kenneth J. Sliine, pres ident of the Institute of Medicine. The three oiganizations are inde pendent research groups chartered by Congress to provide scientific advice to government. The Taiwan-bom Lee is waiting to learn if the government will appeal a judge's order that he be freed on $ 1 mil lion bail. Lee, 60, his been jailed since his ar rest Dec. 10 on 59 counts alleging he transferred restricted data about nuclear weapons to unsecure computers and tape at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The three scientists said in their let ter to Reno that they were making their concerns public because previous in quiries about Lee's treatment had been responded to only by a form letter. “\Vfe are concerned that inaccurate and detrimental testimony by govern ment officials resulted in Dr. Lee need lessly spending eight months in prison under harsh and questionable conditions of confinement,” the scientists wrote. In their earlier letters the three had asked about Lee family complaints that Lee was being held in solitary confine ment, that restraints had been used on him and that contact with family was restricted. In their letter to Reno the scientists contended that “the handling of tliis case reflects poorly on the U.S. justice sys tem.” “The concerns that we have ex pressed and the questions that we have posed in our letters are identical to those our Committee on Human Rights reg ularly poses to foreign governments, some of which have had the courtesy to respond. Surely we cannot expect less from our own government.” On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Mies Parker ordered the government to disclose documents that could help him determine whether Lee was a tar get of selective prosecution and ethnic profiling. U.S. Attorney George Stamboulidis said an area of concern if Lee is freed on bail is the unrestricted communica tion allowed between Lee and his wife, Sylvia, in their home. Parker’s proposed release conditions included limits on communication, trav el, home visits and required removal of all electronic communication devices except for one telephone line from Lee’s home. Lee would have to remain under electronic monitoring except when be ing driven by his lawyers to court or the lab to work on his defense. His mail al so would be inspected. Castro might come to the Big Apple Mark Stevenson Associated Press HAVANA — President Fidel Castro may travel to New York to attend the U.N. Millennium Summit, but if not Cu ba will at least send a lop official to ar gue against what it calls the hijacking of the oiganization "by a small and pow erful group of countries." "A decision will be made in the next 72 hours" on whether Castro will visit New York for the first time since 1995, when he addressed the 50th anniversary U.N. session, Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque told a news conference Thursday in Havana. He said he was unworried about the possibility of violence or an assassi nation attempt against Castro in New York if he attends the Sept. 6-8 U.N. meeting. “No threat or risk is capable of scaring anybody in this country." Tensions between Cuba and the United -States rose this week after the State Department accused the island nation of preventing some Cubans with U.S. visas from emigrating. Uuoa, in turn, accused the United States of failing to provide enough visas for poorer or less-educated Cubans, while ■ selectively giving out visas to doctors and other professionals in what it claims is a U.S. effort to strip the island of trained personnel. In Washington, the State Department said Thursday that Cuba had agreed to end a two-month suspension of talks on legal migration of Cubans to the United States under accords signed in 1994 and 1991 Cuba suspended the semiannual talks in June amid a fuior between the Unit ed States and Cuban exiles in Florida over Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old whose mother died at sea in an illegal attempt to get to America with him. But Perez Roque said Cuba has been — and still is—waiting for Washington to set a new date for the talks. The exchange of accusations between the two countries also escalated with the denial of a visit last week to Ricardo Alar con, the president of Cuba's National As sembly, keeping him from attending an international of parliamentarians in New York. Perez Roque said a U.S. visa has al ready been requested for Alarcon to at tend the U.N. meeting. Earlier, a U.S. of ficial suggested that visa request would be approved. Whoever heads it, the Cuban dele gation will speak out against "the grow ing tendency of a small and powerful group of countries to violate the U.N. charter" by not consulting the General Assembly on key decisions, and orga Postal from page 4 In the wake of the violent incidents, the post office instituted programs to pre vent repeats, including a zero-toler ance policy for weapons on postal premis es. The report said those programs should be continued. It also made other rec ommendations, including improved screening of job applicants for potential violence, and improved security by es tablishing a communications system for carriers, especially in high-crime and re mote areas. j Federal panel backs off metro plan by Laurence Arnold Associated Press WASHINGTON-A federal committee has backed off a proposed radical change in how the government defines urban areas. The plan would have seen some communities — and one state — disappear statistically. The Metropolitan Area Standards Review Committee still recommends some changes in how the government compiles data front the 2000 Cen sus. But the panel no longer is proposing to lump communities into “megapolitan” areas of 1 mil lion or more people, sticking instead with small er and more numerous “metropolitan” divisions. That's good news for New Jersey, which would have become part of the New York City and Philadelphia “megapolitan” areas, and for towns such as Lawrence and Haverhill, Mass., which would have been part of a Boston “megapolitan” area. “It definitely looks like they have taken some of our concerns to heart, and made some adjust ments accordingly,” said Gaylord Burke, who pro motes Lawrence and Haverhill as executive di rector of the Merrimack Valley Planning Commission. “We were concerned we’d be to tally wiped out, and our identity eliminated.” The government's definition of core metro politan areas influences how census information is grouped together, which in turn helps determine the distribution of federal funds, decisions by cor porations about where to locate and lists of “best places to live.” Under the revised plan, adjacent cities with common commuting patterns will be “combined areas.” But census data still will be broken down by individual metro area as well, so smaller cities will continue to be identified. The federal government first defined metro politan areas in 1949. Every decade since, it has re-evaluated the definitions. This time a federally appointed Metropoli tan Area Standards Review Committee proposed replacing “metropolitan” areas and with three types of “core-based statistical areas” defined by popu lation: megapolitan (1 million or more), macrop olitan (50,000 to 999,999) and micropolitan (10.000 to 49,999). The Office of Management and Budget re ceived hundreds of comments on the proposals, many of them negative. The review committee made several changes as a result. Gone from the committee's final recommen dations is “megapolitan.” Back is the term “met ropolitan” to describe urban areas of 50,000 or more people. Areas with 10,000 to 49,999 people would still be “micropolitan.” “There was a lot of comment to retain the word ‘metropolitan,’” said Colleen Joyce, a geograph er for the U.S. Census Bureau who worked on the revisions. “People wanted to retain it to avoid con fusion or maintain some consistency through time.” Not eveiyone is pleased with the compromise. Residents and officials in High Point, N.C. — wliich proudly bills itself as “Furniture Capital of the World” — howled that the original proposal would turn that city into an unnamed subset of a Greens boro, N.C., metropolitan area. i Casino boom bypasses Indians by David Pace Associated Press SAN CARLOS, Ariz. — The plaque outside the Apache Gold Casino declares the $40 million ho tel, golf and gambling resort has “helped enable the San Carlos Apache Tribe to give a better qual ity of life to its tribal members.” But seven years after the casino opened—and four years after the debut of a glittering new com plex — many Apache families still crowd in small 1 apartments or mobile homes. The reservation's unemployment rate has climbed from 42 percent in 1991 to 58 percent in 1997, the latest year available. The number of trib al members receiving welfare has jumped 20 percent. And the tribal government still grants home sites without water and sewer connec tions. “We get no help from the casino, no money, nothing,” said Pauline Randall, 75, a lifelong res ident of San Carlos. Similar complaints echo across the 1.8 million acre reservation in east Arizona, but they could just as easily be heard on many other Indian reser vations across the country that have built casinos in the past decade. Despite an explosion of Indian gambling rev enues — from $ 100 million in 1988 to $8.26 bil lion a decade later — an Associated Press com puter analysis of federal unemployment, poverty and public assistance records indicates the major ity of American Indian','have benefited little. Two-thirds of the American Indian population belong to tribes locked in poverty that still don’t have Las Vegas-style casinos. And among the 130 tribes with casinos, a few near major population centers have thrived while most others make just enough to cover the bills, the AP analysis found. . Despite new gambling jobs, unemployment on reservations with established casinos held steady around 54 percent between 1991 and 1997 as many of the casino jobs were filled with non-Indians, ac cording to data the tribes reported to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “Everybody thinks that tribes are getting rich from gaming and very few of them are,” said Louise Benson, chairman of the Hualapai Tribe in north western Arizona, one of two tribes with casinos that failed during the 1990s. Of the 500,000 Indians whose tribes operate casinos, only about 80,000 belong to tribes with gambling operations that generate more than $ 100 million a year. Some of the 23 tribes with the most success ful casinos — like the Shakopee Mdewakanton Dakota Tribe in Minnesota — pay each member hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. In Scott County, which includes the Shakopee reservation south of Minneapolis, the poverty rate declined from 4.1 percent in 1989 to 3.5 percent six years later. The reservation's unemployment rate also plummeted from 70 percent in 1991 to just 4 percent in 1997. Such success stories belong mostly to tribes with casinos near major population centers. The tiny Mashantucket Pequot tribe of Connecticut reported more than $300 million in revenue in the first five months this year from its Foxwoods Casi no, located between New York and Boston. And the Seminole Tribe's Hollywood Gaming Center on Miami’s Gold Coast generates more than $100 million a year with pull-tab slot ma chines. The unemployment rate on that reserva tion, however, still was 45 percent in 1997, and the average poverty rate in the two counties it touches rose from 10.4 percent in 1989 to 12.1 percent in 1995. For many of the 130 tribes with Las Vegas style casinos, like the San Carlos Apaches, gam bling revenues pay for casino operations and debt service, with little left to upgrade the quality of life. hi counties that contain reservations with casi nos, the poverty rate declined only slightly be tween 1989 and 1995, from 17.7 percent to 15.5 percent, the AP analysis founds. Counties with reservations with no gambling saw their poverty rate remain steady at slightly more than 18 per cent. Nationally, the poverty rate hovered at near 13 percent during the period. In California, the Tachi Yokut Tribe in the San Joaquin Valley brags on its Web site that its Palace Gaming Center has provided employment for trib al members, helped raise education levels and up graded housing. But the poverty rate in Kings County, which includes the tribe's small reservation, climbed from 18.2 percent in 1989 to 22.3 percent in 1995. The reservation's unemployment rate dropped slight ly to 49.2 percent in 1997. Jonathan Taylor, a research fellow at the Harvard University Project on American Indian Economic Development, said many investments gaming tribes have made in social and economic infrastructure don't translate into immediate im provements in quality-of-life indicators like pover ty. “You see investments arising out of gaming taking hold slowly in greater educational success, greater family integrity, greater personal health, greater crime prevention,” he said. There are some optimistic signs that tribes hope to build on when the casi no construction loans are repaid. The analysis indicates casino gambling has slowed, though not reversed, the growth of tribal members on public assistance. Participation in the Agriculture Department's Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations increased 8.2 per cent from 1990 to 1997 among tribes with casinos, compared with 57.3 percent among tribes without them. And economic development has been spurred in communities near tribal casinos, according to an analysis of county business patterns. The Oneida Indian Nation in cen tral New York has become the largest employer in Oneida and Madison counties, thanks to a casino that’s generating more than $100 million in annual revenues. A championship golf course and convention center are under construction. At the Fort Mojave Indian Reservation along the Caljfornia-Arizona Nevada border, the unemployment rate climbed from 27.2 percent in 1991 to 74.2 percent in 1997.