The Battalion
Thursday -June 12, 1997,
Dispute could
delay production
of abortion pill
NEW YORK (AP) — Wide
spread distribution of the
French abortion pill in the Unit
ed States could be delayed until
next year because a European
company balked at producing
the pill, its American sponsor
said Wednesday.
Negotiations were still con
tinuing between the unidenti
fied company and the New
York-based Population Coun
cil, which holds the U.S. rights
to produce mifepristone,
known as RU-486.
“We had thought we’d be
able to get all of this done by the
end of the year,” said council
spokeswoman Sandra Wald-
man. “But this development
will cause some delay. How
much, we don’t know.”
The council’s commercial
partner, Advances-Neogen, was
speaking with other manufac
turers in case the European
company backs out, Waldman
said. “But not a lot of companies
are knocking on the door look
ing to do this,” she added.
The American groups would
not discuss why the European
company had wavered on pro
ducing pills that offer an alter
native to surgical abortions.
Anti-abortion groups have
promised a boycott of any com
pany producing the pill, and no
U.S. companies are willing to
risk their wrath.
The Abortion Rights Mobiliza
tion, which is currently dispens
ing RU-486 in seven U.S. cities in
a test program, refused to identi
fy the plant that produced its pills
because it feared reprisals against
the manufacturer.
Gloria Feldt, president of
Planned Parenthood Federation
of America, said the latest delay
was frustrating but expressed
optimism that the pill would
soon be available domestically.
“It will be just one more
stumbling block on the path, but
I don’t think it will stop the
progress,” she said.
McVeigh’s parents
recall ‘a happy Tim’
IHlHll
-
DENVER (AP) — Timothy
McVeigh wiped his eye as his par
ents pleaded for his life Wednesday,
using home movies to remember
him as a good son, “not the monster
he has been portrayed as.”
Jurors sat grim-faced through the
testimony, the last in the trial’s penal
ty phase. After closing arguments
Thursday, jurors will begin deliberat
ing whether McVeigh should die by
injection for the April 19, 1995,
bombing of the Oklahoma City fed
eral building that killed 168 people.
“I still to this very day cannot be
lieve he could have caused this dev
astation,” Mildred Frazer said as she
read from a brief statement. “He
was a loving son and a happy child
as he grew up. He was a child any
mother could be proud of.”
Choking back tears, she read on:
“He is not the monster he has been
portrayed as. ... Yes, I am pleading
for my son’s life. He is a human be
ing just as we all are.”
McVeigh clasped his hands tight
ly in front of him and listened in
tently as his mother spoke, moving
only to wipe his hand under his
right eye, even though no tears
could be seen.
He swiped at his eye again as his
father, William McVeigh, took the
stand and introduced a poignant
15-minute videotape showing still
pictures and home movies of his
son as a child, happily climbing
onto Santa’s lap, playing with toy
trains and riding on a tractor.
Defense attorney Richard Burr
asked him to comment on a picture
of the smiling father and son arm in
arm several years ago.
“It’s a happy Tim. It’s the time I
remember most of my life,” William
McVeigh said.
McVeigh’s sister, Jennifer, who sat
near her brother inside the court
room, wept throughout the testimo
ny, and as she left she told reporters
through tears: “I just want him to live.”
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Photograph: Pat |amef
Going Solo
Mark Whiteman plays his trumpet during a performance by Throwaway People.
The show was put on by MSC Town Hall at the Rec Center Wednesday.
Ending the impasse
Republicans back down on disaster relief bill, agree to negotiate ‘clean’ legislation
WASHINGTON (AP) — Signaling retreat,
congressional Republicans said Wednesday
they stand ready to scrap or soften provi
sions that sparked President Clinton’s veto
of an $8.6 billion disaster-aid bill.
Determined to prevail, Democrats
brought the Senate to a standstill for the sec
ond straight day. “We want people to know
we’re not going to give up” until there is agree
ment on a replacement bill, said the party’s
leader, Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota.
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, in
comments backed by House leadership
aides, said he was ready to drop a provision
designed to avert a government shutdown
and handle it in separate legislation.
On a second contested provision. House Re
publicans said they were hoping to reach a
compromise with the White House on a pro
posal to ban sampling in the 2000 census, but
it wasn’t clear whether that issue would survive
in any form in the replacement measure.
Negotiations were also under way on the
price tag of a new bill. Lott at one point sug
gested $3.9 billion, but White House officials,
publicly at least, were holding out for the en-
Weather Outlook
tire $8.6 billion contained in the vetoed bill.
Whatever the outcome, there were unmis-
There is another
time, another bill, for
these provisions.”
House Republicans calling on
Speaker Newt Gingrich to allow
amendment of the disaster-aid bill
takable signs of restlessness in the GOP ranks
over their leadership’s handling of an issue that
Democrats have gleefully likened to the two
government shutdowns of two winters ago.
“Finally, I think they’re getting the message
that this isn’t serving anybody’s interests,”
South Dakota Republican Rep. John Thune
said of his own party’s leadership.
Twenty moderate House Republicans
signed a letter, written on Delaware Rep. Mike
Castle’s letterhead, calling on Speaker Newt
Gingrich to allow a disaster-aid measure to
come to the floor without the disputd items.
“There is another time, another bill, for
these provisions,” they wrote of the anti
shutdown and census controversies. They
added that disaster victims were “losing
faith in the federal government’s ability to
respond to their emergency needs.”
With a majority of only 11 seats, the GOP
would lose if Castle and his 19 co-signers
joined with Democrats to try and force pas
sage of a bill stripped of the contested issues.
At the White House, press secretary Mike
McCurry said, “We just are waiting for the Re
publicans to come to their senses and present
to the president a good, clean bill that gets the
funding where it needs to go and doesn’t gum
up the works with extraneous measures.”
Lott and Gingrich both said they hoped
for a swift resolution of the issue.
Gingrich said he hoped for agreement by the
end of the day, although he coupled his com
ments with a denunciation of Clinton’s veto. “I
don’t know why the president wants to preserve
the right to shut down the government,” he sail
But efforts to work out an accommoda
tion were complicated by divisions amonj
Republicans. Lott and his Senate col
leagues were the main supporters of th
anti-shutdown proposal. Gingrich and th
House leadership were adamant about sal
vaging at least some compromise on the
census controversy, as evidenced by a trip
by Commerce Secretary William Daley —
whose department oversees the Census
Bureau — to the Capitol to meet with a key
House Republican.
The issue of cost loomed large in the House, j
as well, with leaders fearful that conservatives]
would vote against a measure that spent too
much, while Democrats would band together
and oppose a bill that spent too little.
There was little controversy in the vetoed]
measure over the aid provisions. These in
cluded $5.6 billion for victims of natural dis
asters in 35 states, including devastating
springtime flooding in the Dakotas and
Minnesota. The bill also included $1.9 bil
lion for the Pentagon for operations in
Bosnia and elsewhere.
L
SATURDAY
SUNDAY
MONDAY
Internet giants ally for online privacy
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WASHINGTON (AP) — Microsoft Corp. and
Netscape Communications Corp., two of the Inter
net’s biggest rivals, today announced a stunning al
liance aimed at more tightly controlling the person
al information that businesses collect about World
Wide Web users.
The teaming of the two software competitors re
flected the heightened concern in the business com
munity that government regulators may impose
rules to crack down on privacy intrusions by Inter
net companies.
Microsoft today joined a plan that was first pro
posed by Netscape and two other Internet software
companies, Firefly Network Inc. and Verisign Inc., two
weeks ago.
Their “open profiling standard” envisions new Web
software that would allow computer users to determine
what sort of personal information they are willing to
share and with which Web sites.
At the heart of the concern are so-called “cookies,”
which can track a computer user’s recently visited Web
sites, the pages the user looked at, and even their hob
bies — and then link that information to the user’s
name and address.
The owners of Web sites can then sell that informa
tion to advertisers and other interested parties without
the consent or knowledge of the computer user.
The proposal would not do away with “cookies,” but
would create a format useable on either the Netscape
Navigator or Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser,
which would allow computer users to spell out what in
formation they leave behind at a Web site.
On other fronts, Microsoft and Netscape are locked
in a fierce battle for supremacy on the Internet with
each company trying to make their own software stan
dards prevail.
But the companies’ level of concern has been
heightened this week during hearings before the Fed
eral Trade Commission where regulators and privacy
advocates have expressed skepticism over voluntary
guidelines that businesses have announced to try to
head off possible government rules.
Of all the proposals presented to the commission
this week, the Netscape-Microsoft agreement may
stand out because of the unprecedented nature of
the alliance.
Microsoft and Netscape officials said in a telephone
interview today that they have submitted their plan to
the World Wide Web consortium, an industry body that (
sets standards for Internet technology.
The FTC plans to use its findings gathered from
this week’s hearings to determine whether it needs to
recommend to Congress that it should enact online
privacy laws.
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THEFT OF MEDICAL
EXAM FOILED IN S.F.
17-year-old With Nonfunctioning
Gun Beaten by Students
By H. K. Lee and C. Bowman,
Chronicle Staff Writers
A young masked gunman burst into
a room full of students taking a medical
exam Saturday in San Francisco and
demanded a copy of a test section but
was thwarted when several outraged
proctors and would-be doctors punched
him out, police said yesterday.
Police said the youth grabbed a green
folder at the front of the room,
disappeared into a bathroom and then
re-emerged, cursing. He then confronted
a proctor, demanding the Physical
Sciences portion of the test. As the
proctor fumbled for the test section, the
youth may have been careless with his
gun—the proctor grabbed it, and
suddenly the intruder found himself at
gunpoint.
The youth then apparently smacked
the proctor in the face. Enraged, at least
five proctors and test-takers surrounded
the suspect and threw punches at him,
drawing blood, witnesses said...
The San Francisco Chronicle.
Monday, August 19, 1996
You don 1 !
need
a gun.
You just need
our course
(We've got all the released
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KAPLAN
1 -800-KAP-TEST t
www.kaplan.com
Stew Milne, Editor in Chief
Helen Clancy, Managing Editor
John LeBas, City Editor
April Towery, Lifestyles Editor
Kristina Buffin, Sports Editor
James Francis, Opinion Editor
Jody Holley, Night News Editor
Tim Moog, Photo Editor
Brad Graeber, Graphics Editor
Jacqueline Salinas, Radio Editor
David Friesenhahn, Web Editor
Staff Members
Cnv- Assistant Editors: Erica Roy & Matt Weber;
Reporters: Michelle Newman, Joey Schlueter &
Jenara Kocks; Copy Editor: Jennifer Jones
Lifestyles- Rhonda Reinhart, Keith McPhail
& Jenny Vrnak
Sports- Matt Mitchell & Jeremy Furtick
Opinion- John Lemons, Stephen Llano, Robby Ray,
Mandy Cater, Leonard Callaway, Chris Brooks,
Dan Cone, Jack Harvey & General Franklin
Night News- Assistant Editor: Joshua Miller
Photo- Derek Demere, Robert McKay, Rony
Angkriwan & Pat James
Graphics- Quatro Oakley, Chad Mallam &
Ed Goodwin
Radio- Tiffany Moore, Will Hodges, Missy Kemp,
Amy Montgomery, Sunny Pemberton, Joey
Schlueter, Michelle Snyder & Karina Trevino
Web- Craig Pauli
Office Staff- Stacy Labay, Christy Clowdus &
Mandy Cater
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