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President: End
acial profiling
adov
CLINTON
exit
WASHINGTON (AP) — President
^Clinton instructed federal law agen-
f cit s Wednesday to collect race and
jgender data on people they stop or
arjest, in a move to end racial profil-
by the police. “It is wrong, it is de-
ictive, and it must stop,” he said.
■ Clinton said at meeting of police
Hd civil rights ac
tivists that while
K executive order
would cover “only
a i raction” of the
nation’s law offi-
■rs, he hoped it
would spur state
Hd local agencies
to begin collecting
such data, too.
I “We all have an obligation to
mi've beyond anecdotes to find out
Hactly who is being stopped and
wny,” Clinton said.
I Police shootings this year have
|kilied young blacks in New York,
^Htsburgh and Riverside, Calif., and
traffic stops based on a driver’s race
H an occurrence known casually as
“driving while black” — has
prompted a national outcry.
1 The Treasury, Justice and Interi
or departments will develop, within
120 days, a plan for collecting data
on the race, gender and ethnicity of
Hople agency officers stop to ques
tion or arrest. Field tests on those
pi ms would begin within 60 days af
ter that.
I Reggie Shuford, the American
Civil Liberties Union’s lead attor
ney on racial profiling cases, said
Clinton’s order should have “a
domino effect” at the state and lo
cal levels, and would alleviate the
problem in federal jurisdictions
wherever it arises.
“Wherever yqu have a predomi
nantly white environment and there
are people of color, they’re going to
be scrutinized beyond what is nec
essary,” he said. “So if it’s in a park,
yes, it could happen in the Park Ser
vice. ”
“Clinton’s order confirms what
people of color have said for a long
time, and it starts the process of get
ting documentation to support those
allegations.”
Clinton also voiced support for
legislation by Rep. John Conyers, D-
Mich., to provide funds for states to
collect similar data. Law enforce
ment officials generally have resist
ed such efforts.
“Our opinion on this hasn’t
changed,” Robert Scully, executive
director of the National Association
of Police Organizations, which rep
resents 4,000 police groups, said.
“There are laws on the books for
people who feel they are being ha
rassed, and vehicles for them to file
complaints,” Scully said Wednesday.
“It would be better to invest more
time in the laws already on the
books rather than add another bur
den to law enforcement officers.”
Clinton’s order covers federal of
ficers such as the police who patrol
national parks, and the Customs
agents and Immigration and Natu
ralization officials monitoring U.S.
ports of entry.
The Customs Service is facing a
class-action lawsuit by nearly 100
black women who say they were
singled out for searches because of
their race and gender.
Mind your manners
ANTHONY DISALVO/The Battalion
Joann Kouba, an animal science graduate student, trains Ripley, a six-month-old German Shepherd mix, to accept food properly
Wednesday afternoon.
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Sides reach
peace pact
in Kosovo
KUMANOVO, Macedonia (AP) — After 78
days of intense NATO airstrikes, Yugoslav and
Western generals signed a pact Wednesday
clearing the way for a Kosovo peace plan to end
the bombings, pull Yugoslav troops out of the
troubled province and allow hundreds of thou
sands of refugees to return home.
“The war has ended,” Yugoslav Col. Gen.
Svetozar Marjanovic told reporters in Macedo
nia after lengthy negotiations at the French mil
itary base near the Kosovo border.
NATO ambassadors quickly approved the
deal at a late-night meeting in Brussels, Bel
gium, Secretary-General Javier Solana said. The
alliance will suspend the bombing as soon as
Yugoslav troops begin to withdraw, he said.
President Clinton tempered his remarks on the
deal, calling the agreement “another important
step toward achieving our objectives in Kosovo.”
Speaking in Bethesda, Md., he also warned
that NATO will watch carefully to make sure the
forces leave Kosovo peacefully according to the
agreed timetable.
In Belgrade and the Kosovo capital Pristina,
people celebrated by firing weapons in the air
and honking horns. Refugees in northern Alba
nia embraced one another when they heard
Tribunal asked to consider NATO crimes
THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — A “No person is excluded from the authori-
group of independent lawyers pressed the ty of the tribunal,” tribunal spokesperson
Yugoslav war crimes tribunal Wednesday to Paul Risley said.
investigate allegations that NATO has com
mitted war crimes in Yugoslavia.
Chief prosecutor Louise Arbour met pri
vately with lawyers from Britain, Canada,
Greece and Switzerland to discuss evidence
they claimed showed that the alliance vio
lated “international criminal law in causing
civilian death, injury and destruction” in
bombing that began March 24.
The tribunal has focused its actions so far on
the behavior of Yugoslav forces and the coun
try’s leaders, but U.N. court has made it clear it
also will evaluate the credibility of any evidence
implicating the Western military alliance.
news of the agreement.
A Serb official said Belgrade would begin
withdrawing its forces Thursday.
Lt. Gen. Michael Jackson, commander of
NATO troops in Macedonia, said the agreement
detailed how all Serb-led forces would conduct
a “phased, verifiable and orderly withdrawal
from Kosovo.”
“It also provides a clear legal basis for the
deployment of the international security force”
into the province “to establish a secure envi
ronment in Kosovo,” he said.
NATO’s bombing campaign, which began
March 24, is to stop once a Serb pullout has
been verified. Under the military-technical
agreement signed Wednesday, Serb troops
will have 11 days, rather than the original sev
en, to withdraw.
“If the Serbs live up to what they have
Arbour and the lawyers discussed^ the for
mal launching of an investigation, Risley said.
He did not elaborate on what kind of evidence,
if any, the tribunal might have in hand.
The group made the presentation on be
half of unspecified peace groups, the Move
ment for the Advancement of International
Criminal Law in Britain, and the American
Association of Jurists.
Included in the presentation were alle
gations against United States President Bill
Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair
and NATO Secretary-General Javier
Solana.
signed, this will end the killing and begin the
peace,” U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen
told reporters.
The talks in Macedonia began late Tuesday
after Russia, the United States and six other
leading democracies agreed on the text of a
peace plan to be sent to the Security Council.
Pentagon spokesperson Kenneth Bacon said
it probably would take at least 24 hours after
the beginning of a withdrawal before the first
U.S. peacekeepers could enter Kosovo, where
they will face a daunting task complicated by
land-mine threats, booby-trapped bridges and
villages burned to the ground.
The crisis in Kosovo, a southern Serb
province, began in February 1998 when Presi
dent Slobodan Milosevic launched a bloody
crackdown on Kosovo Liberation Army rebels
fighting to achieve independence.
Breaking the code
Scientists hide message within DNA dot
(AP) — Updating a Nazi spy trick
used during World War II, scientists
have devised a way of hiding a cod
ed message in a dot of human DNA.
The technique would not be of
much use to secret agents because it
is a cumbersome way of sending a
message. It is little more than a neat
trick that exploits the enormous ca
pacity of DNA to hold information.
Nazi spies sent messages by re
ducing them photographically to a
so-called microdot. The dot was
then pasted over a period at the end
of a sentence in an innocent-look
ing letter, which was dropped in the
mail.
In today’s issue of the journal Na
ture, researchers led by molecular bi
ologist Carter Bancroft at the Mount
Sinai School of Medicine in New
York describe how they made — and
mailed — a microdot that contained
a secret message hidden amid mil
lions of strands of DNA.
Bancroft likened it to a page from
the Where’s Waldo children’s books,
where Waldo is hidden in a large, de
tailed drawing of lots of people.
DNA is shaped like a twisted lad
der, with four kinds of rungs, called
bases. The scientists built a DNA
strand in which different combina
tions of bases represented the letters
of their message.
At either end of the strand they
put sequences of bases that would
serve as the key to finding the strand.
The strand was one three-thou
sandths the width of a human hair
in length.
The scientists then chopped the
entire DNA of a human cell into
pieces of about the same length, and
mixed them with the message
strand.
They soaked the mixture into pa
per with a period printed on it, cut
out the period and pasted it onto a
letter. They mailed the letter to them
selves to prove that the DNA could
survive the rigors of the U.S. mail.
When the letter arrived, they ex
tracted the DNA, multiplied millions
of times the strand containing the
message, and read its contents. The
message they chose for their test was
perhaps the most famous secret of
the microdot era: “June 6 invasion:
Normandy.”
Without knowing the key, it
would be practically impossible to
find the message among the 3 mil
lion or so similar strands of DNA.
“This is definitely an intriguing
idea,” Anne Condon, a computer
scientist at the University of Wis-
consin-Madison, said. “It exploits
one of the great advantages of
DNA, which is that you can have a
huge amount of information in a
tiny volume.”
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