Around the Nation

Around the Nation

Interest rates may fall after Fed meeting

The question, private economists said yesterday, is how much success any cut would have in containing a financial crisis that so far has proven unstoppable and now threatens more countries, including Brazil.

"A Fed rate cut will help under gird a deteriorating global economic situation. But it isn't a magic bullet," said Sung Won Sohn, chief economist at Norwest Corp. in Minneapolis.

Emphasizing the urgency, international authorities were busy working behind the scenes on a rescue package for Brazil.

The largest economy in South America is being hit by the same panicked rush to the exits by foreign investors that has already flattened many Asian countries and Russia.

Officials in Washington said discussions were centering on emergency loans of around $30 billion assembled by the International Monetary Fund with contributions from the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and individual countries, including the United States.

Board faults feds for secrecy about JFK

The Assassination Records Review Board closes shop this week after gathering and releasing a mountain of detail - tantalizing and mundane - about the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of Kennedy in Dallas.

The documents it has collected over the past four years include new information about events in Dallas, the alleged assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, the presidential autopsy, photographs and reactions of government agencies to the assassination. It provides new fodder to be debated by historians and conspiracy theorists alike.

''The review board's experience leaves little doubt that the federal government needlessly and wastefully classified and then withheld from public access countless important records that did not require such treatment,'' the board said in a 208-page report being released today.

Such secrecy ''led the American public to believe that the government had something to hide,'' the report said.

''Change is long overdue and the review board's experience amply demonstrates the value of sharing important information with the American public,'' the board said.

The board was created by Congress in response to public frustration that the government was withholding information about the assassination. Disagreement over the Warren Commission's conclusion in 1964 that a lone gunman killed Kennedy and government conspiracy claims in Oliver Stone's 1991 movie ''JFK'' led to a consensus that it was time to open assassination records for public inspection.

However, the board was not charged with re-opening the investigation, and while it added to the millions of documents at the National Archives touching on the assassination, it did not address the question: Who killed Kennedy?

''Although the review board intended to search for any 'smoking gun' document that might still exist, the board knew that its greatest contribution would likely be to provide to the public those records that would frame the tragic event,'' the board's final report said.

Author Gerald Posner, whose book ''Case Closed'' accepts the lone-gunman conclusion, said the board made a significant contribution by providing ''documents that help fill in the details of this horrible event in Dallas 35 years ago.''

Others believe the identity of Kennedy's killer or killers remains an open question.

''There is physical, medical, ballistics evidence that leads you to conclude that one person could not have fired all the shots,'' said James Lesar, a lawyer who runs the private Assassination Archive Research Center. ''That's the one solid thing we know. As to who was behind it, it is still up in the air.''

David Lifton, author of ''Best Evidence,'' a 1981 book concerning medical evidence about the assassination, said the new material released by the board will forever change the debate.

''These documents give us new dots to connect in all key areas - the medical evidence, Oswald's trips to Mexico and Russia,'' Lifton says. ''No one working on the Kennedy assassination today can ignore what the review board did. The true debate now begins.''

The board spent more than $8 million to gather and release records. It got more than 60,000 documents from the FBI, CIA, other federal entities and private collections, some which gave them up reluctantly.

To shed more light on the assassination, additional witnesses - some never previously questioned - were interviewed. Autopsy results were rehashed with doctors, including one who traveled from Switzerland. Photographs were preserved with digital computer technology. New forensic tests were ordered on a bullet fragment.

The records will be kept at the National Archives. Some still must be processed before the public can inspect them. Remaining blacked-out sections on some records will come to light at different datetween now and 2017 when all redacted records will be fully disclosed, the board says.

The board was made up of five people with legal, archival and historical expertise: U.S. District Judge John R. Tunheim of Minnesota; historian Henry Graff of Columbia University; Kermit Hall, Ohio State University professor of history and law; William Joyce, Princeton University archivist; and Anna Nelson, professor of foreign relations at American University in Washington.

Impotence drug put in new form

Early testing shows the impotence cream Topiglan is a leading candidate in this effort to give patients targeted relief for many ailments, with fewer side effects.

"It's a no-brainer," said Dr. Irwin Goldstein of Boston University, a urologist leading studies of the impotence cream who expects many of today's medicines eventually to be applied to the skin.

"It has a lot of use in lots of drugs."

Topiglan needs more studies, Goldstein cautions, and is not for sale. It might become a good alternative for men who can't take the popular impotence pill Viagra - which sometimes causes dangerous side effects in men with heart disease, Goldstein said. Or, severely impotent men could use both treatments together.

Topiglan is made from a longtime impotence drug called alprostadil that works very well, but has a problem: It must either be injected into the penis or inserted as a suppository, both painful.

A company based in Lexington, Mass., MacroChem Corp., invented a "skin enhancer," a chemical that lets potent drugs seep through the skin by opening a temporary window in skin's normally impenetrable barriers. That means patients can get much-higher drug doses delivered straight to the site of disease.

By adding its skin enhancer, MacroChem created a cream that patients can rub onto the end of the penis.

Goldstein gave 114 moderately impotent men either a dummy cream, a low dose of Topiglan or a high dose. Inside a doctor's office, they used the creams and then watched an adult movie or used a stimulator. The excitement alone helped 20 percent of placebo patients get an erection adequate for intercourse, but high-dose Topiglan helped 69 percent.

09-29-98