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Around the Nation
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Next year, it will be illegal to take the now infamous pictures of Brad Pitt in the buff on a private beach or to shoot Madonna's 1985 wedding to Sean Penn from one of the army of helicopters that swirled above her Malibu mansion.
Gov. Pete Wilson signed the bill into law Wednesday, saying it would give celebrities, crime victims and others grounds for lawsuits when they feel their privacy has been violated by photographers or reporters.
It becomes law on Jan. 1.
''Under this bill, the so-called 'stalkerazzi' will be deterred from driving their human prey to distraction - or even death,'' Wilson said.
The bill was introduced after Princess Diana was killed last year in a Paris car crash following a high-speed flight from paparazzi, or celebrity photographers. However, the paparazzi who chased Diana would not have been covered by California's law because her activities were in a public place and there was no expectation of privacy.
Outrage at the paparazzi following Diana's death came from some of the biggest names in show business - like Madonna, Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Stallone and Elizabeth Taylor. They called for everything from consumer boycotts of supermarket tabloids to new laws on libel and privacy.
The bill defines invasion of privacy as trespassing with the intent to capture audio or video images of a celebrity or crime victim engaging in a personal or family activity.
It extends trespassing to electronic devices. And it allows the celebrity or crime victim to recover damages from the paparazzi and people who employ them.
First Amendment lawyer Douglas Mirell said the new law is too vague and doesn't address issues of true public concern.
''This is a law that addresses a non-problem,'' Mirell said. ''This is a P.R. effort spawned by the tragedy of Princess Diana's death but addresses no legitimate issue that is not now in existing law.''
Violating the law can be costly. Violators must pay triple the amount of any actual damages plus surrender of any proceeds from the sale of material obtained through an intrusion on privacy.
Masur predicts the threat of such lawsuits will be enough to prevent problems.
''Our aim is to chill the behavior of interfering with a person's privacy,'' Masur said. ''Outside of the press I've never heard a single person raise an objection to a person being left alone.''
On this recent weekday night in Torrance, Calif., things went well: Mayor Dee Hardison gave her a glowing recommendation in her campaign for Congress, and the crowd seemed responsive to her speech.
A decade ago, there were 25 women in Congress. Today there are 63, and the trend shows little sign of slowing. Women have won half of the eight special elections held to fill vacant seats in this term of Congress, and nearly half of the most competitive races in the country this year feature female candidates.
California, where 13 of the 52 House members and both senators are women, is considered one of the most receptive to female candidates, particularly Democrats.
The only exception was 1992, when the combined number of women in the House and Senate jumped from 32 to 54 and the backlash over Senate confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas propelled scores of women into politics.
- the increase has been slow but steady for two decades. Women now make up 12 percent of the House and 9 percent of the Senate.
The political trend has mirrored corporate America, where women began moving into middle management in significant numbers during the 1970s. In politics, women began establishing their base in state legislatures - and many of those women have been moving on to the national level.
"What's happened is that there has been a quarter of a century of incremental process," said Ruth Mandel, director of Rutgers University's Eagleton Institute of Politics, which runs the Center for the American Woman and Politics. "In fact, that incremental progress represents enormous changes in terms of participatory democracy."
Politically, women have come a long way since 1916, when Jeannette Rankin (R-Mont.) became the first woman elected to the House. This year, women have won 130 party primaries for House and Senate seats, although many are challengers with little chance of unseating incumbents. By comparison, 61 women had won party primaries entering the November 1988 election.
Mandel and others argue that the progress, while incremental, has demonstrated to other women that high political offices are accessible. It "sends a powerful message to young boys and girls about who our decision-makers are, that they are women also," Mandel said.
During an interview at her Torrance town house, Hahn said her gender has made little difference on the campaign trail. But, she said, in some places women might have a slight advantage among voters who are looking for something different. Hahn, a moderate, abortion-rights, pro-business Democrat, said many voters identify with her experiences as a divorced single mother of three.
"What it means for me is, I know what it's like to hold a job down, to get your kids to soccer practice or try to get to the PTA meeting on the same night you're trying to do your taxes," said Hahn, who is in a close race with Republican Steve Kuykendall, a longtime state representative. "People understand that."
Among her many concerns when she was deciding whether to run, said Hahn - who has never held elected office - was what would happen to her two children still at home if she won. Taking advantage of the changed political landscape, she consulted with no less than half the women in the state's congressional delegation about this and other questions. The children, she decided, would remain with their father in California if she goes to Washington.
"I didn't have a lot of (female political) role models growing up," Hahn said. "We've come a long way, and I really think it's a lot easier for us now."
Seven states - Alaska, Delaware, Iowa, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Vermont and Wisconsin - have never elected a woman to Congress, according to the center. This year, Wisconsin's 2nd District features an all-female contest, Republican Josephine Musser vs. Democrat Tammy Baldwin.
Women could increase their numbers in the House by four to six members in November, according to Irwin Gertzog, a political science professor at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. Only four female House members are retiring or leaving to run for other offices, and women are strong candidates in several open seats where they, like any candidate, have a better chance of winning than if they were running against incumbents.
A woman could pick up a Senate seat in Arkansas, where former Rep. Blanche Lincoln (D) is favored over Fay Boozman (R), a state senator.
But two female sitting senators - Democrats Barbara Boxer (Calif.) and Carol Moseley-Braun (Ill.) - are in tough races. Boxer's opponent, Republican Matt Fong, has portrayed her as an apologist for President Clinton, despite Boxer's attempts to distance herself from the president. Moseley-Braun's opponent, multimillionaire businessman Peter Fitzgerald, has poured his own money into the race and leads her in several polls.
But Gertzog predicted that gender would not be an overt factor in any of the races. "In terms of voter attitudes, there are a very small number of people who won't vote for a woman because she's a woman," said Gertzog, whose book "Congressional Women: Their Recruitment, Integration and Behavior" chronicles the subject. "And there is very little evidence that there are very many people who vote for a woman because she's a woman."
Among the most important changes in recent years, many female politicians say, is an easing of the reluctance of voters - both men and women - to contribute to their campaigns.
"Women aren't facing the daunting fund-raising problems that I faced in 1982," said Rep. Nancy L. Johnson (R-Conn.) referring to the year she was first elected to Congress. "Many of the men you were asking for money had never even made a serious decision with a woman. There has been a tremendous culture change, and I think it's for a much better society."
Barbara Burrell, a University of Wisconsin political researcher, said that until 1988, female congressional candidates raised only about three-fourths of what men did. Since then, female candidates have on average raised about the same or more than male candidates. Burrell, who wrote a book called "A Woman's Place is in the House: Running for the House in the Feminist Era," said much of the fund-raising success is related to groups such as Emily's List and the Women's Campaign Fund, which have pumped millions of dollars into targeted campaigns.
Most of the women who have benefited from such groups are abortion-rights Democrats - Democratic women today outnumber GOP women in Congress by 2 to 1. In California, 12 of the 13 female House members are Democrats, as are both senators.
John Fairbank, a Los Angeles-based Democratic pollster, said the West Coast in general has been more hospitable to female candidates. Many coastal communities, he said, offer the kind of highly educated, socially moderate places where women do well. He said many Republican women cross over to vote for Democratic women who favor abortion rights and emphasize education, the environment and economic development - people such as Harman and Rep. Ellen Tauscher (Calif.).
Three other female Democratic challengers are given a good chance to win in California. San Diego Councilwoman Christine Kehoe - one of four openly lesbian women running for Congress - is challenging Rep. Brian P. Bilbray (R). And in Sacramento, lawyer Sandie Dunn is challenging GOP businessman Doug Ose to fill the seat of retiring Rep. Vic Fazio (D).
NewsCom10/01/98 10:43:10 AM
The children, 11 months, 12 months and 13 months old, each had both arms broken.
Police said yesterday they would charge the owner of the day-care center, Beverly Bonds, with neglect and child abuse. She was not immediately arrested.
"These injuries are not accidental in nature," police said Wednesday in the court papers used to close down the Bonding Babies day-care center.
, which operated in a working-class neighborhood out of a cream-colored concrete-block home with burglar bars on the front door and windows.
Bonding Babies cared for 10 youngsters, including Mrs. Bonds' two children. The other children were being checked for injuries, too.
Day-care centers in Alachua County are licensed and inspected by the county Health Department. Family day-care homes like Bonding Babies are inspected twice a year, and Bonding Babies was last inspected in February, said Len Arcidiacono of the Health Department.
"This place has been open since '93. We've never had a problem with it, never had any complaints, and then all of a sudden this happened," he said. "The inspections were all kind of mediocre."
At Mrs. Bonds' home yesterday, a broken swing set and large oak trees stood in the back yard, shrubs dotted the neatly trimmed front lawn, a satellite dish was on the roof and a basketball net lay along the driveway.
A woman who answered the door said she had no comment.
Sheriff's Detective Carl Mader said he was notified Saturday by Shands Hospital that a year-old child suffered two broken arms while at Bonding Babies. Another youngster had been treated for two broken arms the day before, and a third child was at the hospital Saturday night with one arm in a cast and the other arm broken in more than one place, Mader said.
The three children, two boys and a girl from different families whose names were withheld, were recently cared for at the day-care center, investigators said.
X-rays also showed evidence of previous fractures in all three children, The Gainesville Sun reported yesterday.
"When a number of different children show up with similar injuries, then we have to look at what they have in common, and if it's a day-care center, I mean that sends up every imaginable red flag," said Tom Barnes, a spokesperson for the state Department of Children and Families.
At Prairie View Elementary School, two houses from Bonding Babies, Principal Melvin Flourney said Mrs. Bonds and her husband were long-standing supporters of the school. The couple's children are 3 and 8.
"They are great parents," Flourney said. "Allegations are only allegations."
The more than 14,000 day-care centers in Florida are not required by law to report injuries to the state, so no figures exist on how many children are hurt in centers each year.
Harold Rogers, a University of Florida professor of pediatrics and a member of the child protection team at Shands Hospital, would not discuss the specifics of the three children, but said: "A broken arm in a toddler is not uncommon. If you have a child with two broken arms, it would be unusual."
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Around the World
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Citing documents recently discovered in Britain's public archives, The Daily Telegraph said the plan, codenamed "Operation Unthinkable," was eventually rejected by Churchill and replaced with a defensive strategy to guard against invasion by Josef Stalin's Red Army.
Historians had long believed that the tense period immediately after the war gave rise to such invasion plans, but had never been able to prove it until the documents were found, the Telegraph said.
"Nobody has ever seen this kind of thing before," the newspaper quoted war historian D. C. Watt as saying. "But we have had strong suspicions that they must have been written."
Churchill described the plan as "a purely hypothetical contingency," but regarded it as necessary enough to have his planning staff working on it amid the euphoria of victory, the Telegraph reported.
The battle plan, presented as a report to Churchill on May 22, 1945 - 14 days after the end of the war - included the use of German troops to back up 500,000 British and American soldiers.
attacking through northern Germany, the newspaper reported.
It predicted that Stalin would invade Turkey, Greece, Norway and the oil fields of Iraq and Iran in retaliation for the attack and launch extensive sabotage operations in France, the Netherlands and Belgium.
In the tensely divided West Bank city of Hebron, dozens of Palestinian teen-agers took turns lighting firebombs and hurling them yesterday at Israeli soldiers, who fired stun grenades and rubber bullets in response. Two Palestinians were injured. Palestinian policemen patrolling nearby mostly watched.
, making only halfhearted efforts to stop the youths.
Meanwhile, the leader of the militant Palestinian group Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, warned his group would make good on threats to attack Israelis in retaliation for the killing of two Hamas fugitives by Israeli soldiers last month.
Palestinian intelligence said yesterday they had arrested a Hamas activist and former chemistry student accused of stashing nearly a ton of explosives in his home next to Palestinian police headquarters on the outskirts of Hebron. The announcement of the arrest came three days after an explosives-laden car, apparently being prepared for a suicide attack by Hamas, prematurely blew up in the Palestinian city of Ramallah.
In Hebron on Wednesday, a Palestinian assailant threw two hand grenades at an Israeli army outpost, injuring 11 soldiers and 11 Palestinian passersby. The assailant then fled back into the Palestinian-controlled sector, prompting a sharp protest from Israel to the Palestinian Authority demanding it do more to catch the fugitive.
- Compiled from Daily wire reports.
10-02-98
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