Clinton signed the three bills in a Rose Garden ceremony just before leaving for a New York retreat to prepare for Sunday's debate with Republican nominee Bob Dole, in which crime and drugs are certain to come up.
"This is a good day for America because we have seen a sea change in the attitudes of our people, the action of our communities and the work in Washington on the problem of crime," Clinton said.
Dole's campaign knocked Clinton's record on fighting illegal drugs yesterday, and Dole himself continued to accuse Clinton of using executive privilege to hide a 1995 memo "telling him how bad his drug policy was."
In the memo, the heads of the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration complained about a lack of "any true leadership" in fighting an influx of heroin and cocaine, according to an August report in Newsweek magazine.
Clinton asserted presidential privilege over the memo and refused to turn it over to a congressional subcommittee.
"The president's claimed executive privilege. He doesn't want anybody to know before Nov. 5," Dole said during a campaign stop in Johnson City, Tenn.
Asked whether the memo criticized Clinton's leadership of anti-drug efforts, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick said yesterday, "Not in my view at all." She added that the Justice Department's legal experts on executive privilege had approved Clinton's claim of it in this case.
Clinton signed the Comprehensive Methamphetamine Control Act, which allows authorities to seize chemicals used to make the drug, identified by law enforcement officials as the nation's fastest-growing drug problem. The new law also increases penalties for trafficking in the chemicals and possessing equipment needed to manufacture methamphetamine.
The discovery could delay the satellite industry's ambitious efforts to offer high-speed Internet access to companies with remote plants or offices, as well as to Pacific Islanders and millions of others without high-speed access to the content-rich portions of the Internet such as the World Wide Web.
During the next decade, the satellite industry has plans to spend more than $20 billion to extend modern communications services such as telephony, video programming and computer networks to remote regions.
If satellites cannot be made to work seamlessly with the Internet, tens of billions of dollars in additional investment in terrestrial transmission systems would be required instead. And many people, particularly those in developing countries, may never get connected at all without satellites.
The Alzheimer's Association called the mouse "an important new research tool," and a National Institutes of Health expert said the mouse is "good news for patients with Alzheimer's disease."
A University of Minnesota team led by Dr. Karen Hsiao developed the laboratory rodent by inserting into a mouse embryo the mutated gene linked to Alzheimer's brain cell damage in humans.
Maze experiments testing the animals' thinking ability show that the new mouse breed suffers from a loss of memory that mimics the decline seen in humans, Hsiao said. The mouse brain also develops beta amyloid plaques, a substance found in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.
"This is the first time that anybody has made a mouse that shows an association between plaques and a functional loss of learning memory which is very much like Alzheimer's disease," Hsiao (pronounced sh-HOW) said in an interview.
A report on the mouse study is being published Friday in Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.