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Around the Nation
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Around the Nation
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President Clinton renewed his threat to veto the election-year bill because it would spend part of the $1.6 trillion budget surplus forecast over the next decade instead of holding all of it until Social Security is safeguarded.
The House passed the measure 229-195 on Saturday, sending it to the Senate, where its future is less certain. The 16-member Michigan delegation followed a mostly party-line vote with all six Republicans and Democrat Jim Barcia (D-Bay City) voting for the measure. The delegation's other nine Democrats voted against it.
On Friday, the House voted for 90 percent of any federal surplus to be held in reserve until a Social Security rescue plan is in place.
Republicans pushed through the Social Security bill on a 240-188 vote to blunt Democratic criticism - certain to echo across congressional political campaigns - that the GOP tax cut would amount to a raid on the popular retirement program.
The Michigan delegation split along party lines, with all 10 Democrats voting against it and the six Republicans for it.
Most Democrats do not support the use of a surplus that may not materialize to pay for the tax cuts. "They're rushing to spend a surplus that doesn't exist," said House Minority Whip David Bonior (D-Mount Clemens).
On Thursday, the House approved a bill allowing more high-skilled immigrants to work in the United States despite concerns they may take jobs away from Americans.
The legislation, sponsored by Michigan Sen. Spencer Abraham, would increase the number of H-1B visas granted each year to foreign computer programmers, engineers and other skilled workers. Currently, 65,000 visas are granted annually and this year's supply was exhausted in May.
Passed by a 288-133 vote, the bill would raise the annual cap on those special visas 115, 500 for the next two years and to 107,500 in 2001. The ceiling would return to 65,000 in 2002.
In the Michigan delegation, all six Republicans voted for the measure, along with Democrats Sander Levin of Royal Oak and Debbie Stabenow of East Lansing. The delegation's eight other Democrats voted against it.
On Tuesday, a proposal to raise the minimum wage by $1 an hour on Jan. 1, 2000, was defeated 55-44 in the Senate.
Abraham voted to kill an amendment providing the increase while Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, a Democrat, voted against killing it.
Gathered behind closed doors for the first conference of the new term, the nine justices will shake hands, trade a few words about their summer vacations and sit down to decide on the 1,701 appeals that came in while they were away.
In a rapid-fire series of votes, they will select a dozen or so cases for full hearings and written opinions. Then, in large part because of negative recommendations from young law clerks, they will reject the rest.
After a quick three hours, they will adjourn. Other appeals will be considered by the justices beginning in October at conferences every Friday of the term.
As the civic textbooks say, in America you can appeal your case all the way to the Supreme Court. And the high court is free to decide which cases and legal questions are worthy of its time and attention.
For the justices, the first fall conference - coming a week before the official opening of the new term - often sets the agenda for the year ahead.
Two years ago, the justices announced they would decide on the constitutionality of doctor-assisted suicide. The year before, it was the legal status of federal affirmative action.
But for many lawyers and their clients - the first fall conference is both highly anticipated and ultimately disappointing. Hundreds of lawyers labor over their appeal petitions but fewer than one in 100 wins a full review.
"It's a mysterious process but I can tell there is a lot of energy devoted to getting in that door," says Washington attorney Theodore J. Boutrous Jr.
Big law firms often charge $30,000 - and sometimes more than $100,000 - to write an appeal petition. Yet getting the court's attention has become much harder. While the number of appeals has risen gradually to nearly 7,000 annually, in recent years the justices have agreed to decide fewer than 100 cases during a term, down from 150 in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In that earlier period, then Chief Justice Warren E. Burger complained that the court was overworked and understaffed. The first conference - known in those days as the dreaded "long conference" - often dragged on for a full week as the justices haggled over hundreds of cases. In despair, Burger called for the creation of a junior Supreme Court to relieve the workload.
Since replacing Burger in 1986, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist has steadily whittled down the decision docket. He has insisted that the court focus on only major legal questions and ignore the rest. These days, no one speaks of the need for a junior Supreme Court.
With Rehnquist at the helm, the justices move quickly and efficiently - too efficiently, some say - to sift through the huge pile of pending appeals.
"They are interested in managing federal law, not doing justice in individual cases," said Thomas Goldstein, a Washington lawyer who has made a specialty of analyzing what cases attract the court's attention.
So, what does it take to win a review by the high court?
A "split in the circuits," Goldstein said, meaning contrary decisions by different federal appeals courts on the same legal issue. "That is the primary factor. They want uniformity in (federal) law," he says.
Suppose the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston rules that a taxpayer can take a deduction for a home office even though he has an office elsewhere and later the U.S. Circuit Court in Chicago rejects the same claim. It may not sound like a fascinating legal issue but the Supreme Court would be likely to take up the matter when one of the cases is appealed.
However, if taxpayers say they were penalized by the Internal Revenue Service after following bad advice from their tax adviser - and several pending appeals make just that claim - the high court almost surely will dismiss the appeal.
According to former law clerks, the justices rarely read the petitions. They rely instead on memos from clerks who do the initial screening and describe the key issues raised in the appeals. In most instances, an appeal is doomed if the clerk recommends that it be denied.
"It's really an extraordinary process. Lawyers go to such great effort to craft these petitions but they are often reduced to a four-page memo from a recent law school grad," Goldstein said.
Each year, a new crop of clerks arrives in July and they are especially cautious at first in recommending that the high court hear a case.
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"There's nothing more humiliating than recommending a grant (of review) and having the court vote to deny," one former clerk said.
The result, according to some lawyers, is a strong "bias against grants," especially early in the term.
"It's frustrating. How do you explain to a client that his case has been rejected by a 25-year old law clerk?" asked Carter G. Phillips, a veteran Supreme Court advocate.
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Despite the court's stingy attitude, there is no shortage of new appeals covering a vast spectrum of law. On average, about 125 arrive every week throughout the year.
Many are business disputes. One pending appeal has composer Andrew Lloyd Webber asking the court to throw out a copyright infringement suit filed by a folk music singer who says "The Phantom of the Opera" was patterned after his tune (Webber vs. Repp).
The Wal-Mart Stores have appealed the case of Clyde Griffith, a former sales clerk who won government disability benefits because of a back injury and sued the retailer for discrimination based on his disability. In its appeal, the discount chain wants the court to rule that people who are deemed totally disabled cannot sue for discrimination because they cannot work (Wal-Mart vs. Griffith).
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Often, the most far-reaching appeals come from interest groups.
Aurelia Davis sued a Georgia school district because her daughter was repeatedly harassed at school and even contemplated suicide, yet school officials refused to intervene. She lost, but the National Women's Law Center has appealed and urged the justices to take up the question of whether schools can be held liable for student-to-student sexual harassment. Clinton administration lawyers also urged that the appeal be granted (Davis vs. Monroe County).
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The volume of appeals is daunting but the justices and their clerks began going through them in the late summer when the court was officially in recess.
A few weeks ago, Rehnquist sent his colleagues a list of the appeals that he believes should be discussed at today's conference. The other justices were free to add cases to that list, but court officials said that fewer than one in 10 appeals makes the so-called "discuss list."
The system, known as the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP), is a science-based method of determining where contamination might occur all the way through the chain of food production. Processors must take action at those critical points to head off contamination, rather than just poking and sniffing carcasses at the end of the line.
Before the new rules went into effect in January, federal inspectors found that 20 percent of broiler chickens tested positive for salmonella. Six months later, 10.4 percent of chickens were found to be contaminated.
The proportion of salmonella detected in pork also dropped, from 8.7 percent to 5.5 percent. Figures for beef and other meats are not yet available.
Salmonella, one of the most common food-borne pathogens, can cause diarrhea, vomiting and sometimes death. The bacteria, which can be killed by thoroughly cooking food, sickens an estimated 3.8 million Americans each year.
The statistics from the Agriculture Department's Food Safety Inspection Service will be officially released on today.
USDA officials said the chicken statistics come from about 60 of the nation's largest processors - the first sector of the industry required to comply with the new food-safety rules. Some 300 meat and poultry plants, responsible for about half of America's processed meat and poultry, make up that first wave of HACCP compliance. Smaller plants have two years to phase in the procedures.
Caren Wilcox, USDA's deputy undersecretary for food safety, emphasizes that the new statistics are preliminary and may not augur permanent improvement. The quick drop could have been caused by a statistical quirk or seasonal differences, and the numbers might change as more meat processors come into compliance.
Still, Wilcox said, "We have to assume and do believe that it will continue. We're very encouraged."
The new salmonella numbers arrive as the federal government struggles with issues of food-safety funding. President Clinton had proposed a $100 million food-safety initiative that has hit snags in Congress. The House version of the agriculture appropriations bill put up less than $20 million for the program; the Senate version would provide just under $70 million.
"This administration has made food safety a top priority, and now we have the results to show for it,"said Bruce Reed, domestic-policy adviser to the president. "But there's more to do. Congress shouldn't play politics with the food supply - they should give us the money to finish the job."
Lawmakers looking to upgrade food safety applauded the new figures. "This is real progress,"said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) "but the war continues. . . . More resources need to be focused on research, consumer education, increased inspection and surveillance."
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) who has held hearings on the risks of imported foods, said the drop in contamination "suggests to me the benefit of applying a risk analysis and a science-based approach to food safety," both domestically and around the world. Echoing the words of many food-safety experts, however, she also stressed: "Everybody should still cook their chicken until it's done."
The FDA already requires the HACCP system for seafood; many meat and poultry processors had a form of HACCP in place before the USDA mandated it. It cannot completely prevent outbreaks of food-borne illness, but the rigorous procedures and record-keeping requirements can reduce risk and help to stop an outbreak once it is detected.
"We're very pleased with the progress that's been made on the part of the industry," said Dane Bernard of the National Food Processors Association. He predicted that further research will show that HACCP implementation also has cut the risk of an even more common pathogen, campylobacter. And additional funding will be necessary, Bernard said, because "we've probably pushed the limits on existing technologies."
But one consumer advocate said the rapid progress shows that the industry and regulators have not been doing enough. Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest said, "Regulators haven't had sufficient funding to police food safety; if the data holds true that in six months they can achieve a 50 percent drop in salmonella, it shows how far behind our poultry industry was before HACCP was implemented. Suddenly, in six months, we can turn it around? Why didn't they do this years ago?"
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Around the World
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But as Yasser Arafat prepares to step to the podium at the United Nations today to deliver his first address to the General Assembly as a head of government, it is still unclear whether he will use the occasion to announce his plans to declare a Palestinian state in barely seven months' time.
The Palestinian Authority president already has said that unless there is significant progress toward an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, he intends to make a unilateral declaration of statehood on May 4, 1999, the date marking the end of a transition period set by the interim peace accords reached in Oslo, Norway, in 1993. But an announcement from the stage of the United Nations would increase the stakes sharply.
"If he goes forward with the announcement - and it's hard to imagine why he would give up the opportunity to drum up international support - it will make it much harder for either the Palestinians or the Israeli government to back down," said Joseph Alpher, head of the Jerusalem office of the American Jewish Committee and an expert on political and strategic affairs.
However, other observers suggest that Arafat might bow to U.S. and Israeli pressure during a new American push to revive the peace talks and might keep his remarks relatively muted on the sensitive issue of Palestinian statehood.
In the last few days, the Clinton administration has launched an intensive effort to reach a deal on an overdue agreement for a further Israeli troop withdrawal from the West Bank, taking advantage of the presence in New York for the annual opening of the General Assembly of both Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu, who met several times over the weekend with U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, is scheduled to meet President Clinton at the White House today.
U.S. officials have said that while a comprehensive accord appears unlikely this week, they believe agreement is possible on some of the issues that have kept peace talks deadlocked since March 1997. And Arafat, who is to make his own White House visit later in the week, could well decide he does not want to run the risk of being blamed if the sides fail to achieve an accord, these officials said.
But even if Arafat refrains from referring explicitly to the May 4 deadline, a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians believe that a Palestinian declaration of independence next year is all but certain.
The reasons, they say, range from a fundamental distrust that has developed between Netanyahu and Arafat, making real headway toward peace unlikely, to the Palestinian leader's own need to show his people that five years of peace talks with Israel have produced tangible results.
In his own speech last week before the United Nations, Netanyahu sought to head off Arafat's announcement, warning that a unilateral declaration would constitute a "fundamental violation of the Oslo accords" and cause a collapse of the peace process.
Netanyahu also said that a unilateral proclamation of statehood could prompt similarly one-sided actions from Israel. Officials in Jerusalem have said the government could decide to annex West Bank land still under Israeli control or even try to reconquer areas that have already been handed over to Arafat's self-rule government.
Aware of the risks, Israelis across the political spectrum have expressed concern over the possibility that Arafat will decide to announce his plans today. Labor Party opposition leader Ehud Barak and President Ezer Weizman, among others, have sought to dissuade him, saying that Labor, like Netanyahu, would view a unilateral declaration as a violation of existing agreements.
Arafat told Labor Party legislator Yossi Beilin, who visited him last week in Gaza City, that he plans to declare sovereignty only over areas under his control, but he did not specify whether that would include areas under shared authority. Also uncertain is whether he would claim as part of his state all areas that Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War, including East Jerusalem.
Yesterday's dramatic events - unusual in a country where opposition voices have been suppressed routinely - were capped by a defiant evening rally by tens of thousands of people.
representing a broad slice of society. During the rally at the suburban headquarters of the Malaysian Islamic Party, known as PAS, a succession of speakers delivered rhetorical broadsides against Mahathir. They accused him of using the country's Draconian, colonial-era, anti-subversion laws to suppress political dissent and demanded he resign.
"Let's deliver our message to the police, so they can give it to those people in power," said Mat Noor of the opposition Democratic Action Party, one of four political parties united in a new coalition calling for reforms. "When people attend rallies, (Mahathir) says they are just onlookers. This rally is significant because it shows people actively oppose Mahathir's leadership."
The two new groups launched yesterday are an attempt by opposition parties and nongovernmental groups to provide focus and direction to a small "people power" movement that has seen near-daily demonstrations in the capital's streets for the past week.
The protests were triggered by the arrest last Sunday of Mahathir's popular longtime deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, whom the prime minister has accused of sexual misconduct. Anwar, 51, has denied the allegations, and his supporters say the accusations were trumped up when Mahathir sensed his younger rival was about to move to oust him and expose corruption in the ruling party.
09-28-98
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