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High court to rule on sexual harassment
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The justices will decide whether a Georgia school district can be sued over teachers' alleged failure to step in after a fifth-grader complained that another student was sexually harassing her.
A federal appeals court said a federal anti-discrimination law does not allow lawsuits involving student-on-student harassment, although children can sue over such misconduct by a teacher.
The case is not about ordinary teasing or schoolyard hazing.
The girl says the boy, also a fifth-grader, repeatedly tried to touch her breasts and other body parts, rubbed against her in a suggestive way, and made vulgar comments indicating he wanted to have sex with her.
In granting review to that case and 11 others that arrived during their summer recess, the justices got a head start on the 1998-99 term scheduled to begin Monday.
-How far police can go in searching the personal belongings of motor vehicle passengers when the officers suspect the driver committed a crime.
-Whether states violate poor people's right to travel when they limit the amount of welfare benefits paid to new residents. California's policy imposing such limits was blocked by lower courts.
-Whether the NCAA can be sued under a federal law banning sexual discrimination by any program or activity receiving federal financial aid.
-To what extent race can be considered in drawing election districts. The justices agreed to take a third look at a much-disputed congressional district in North Carolina.
The American Association of University Women Educational Foundation said in 1993 that 85 percent of girls and 76 percent of boys had experienced sexual harassment in school. But Julie Underwood of the National School Boards Association said Tuesday that since then, many districts have drafted anti-harassment policies and sought to educate students and teachers about the problem.
In June, the Supreme Court made it harder for students to force school districts to pay financial damages over sexual harassment by a teacher. But the ruling said payment can be ordered when someone with authority to do something about the problem ''has actual notice of or is deliberately indifferent'' to the teacher's misconduct.
In the Georgia case, a federal appeals court ruled that a federal law known as Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 does not apply when students harass each other.
The Clinton administration urged the high court to overturn that ruling.
Government lawyers said the justices' ruling in June "makes clear that when a school district responds with deliberate indifference to known incidents of sexual harassment of a student, it discriminates against that student."
The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year threw out a lawsuit against the Monroe County, Ga., school board and two officials.
Aurelia Davis sued over a five-month "barrage of sexual harassment and abuse" she said her daughter LaShonda endured at Hubbard Elementary School in Forsyth, Ga., in the 1992-93 year.
The lawsuit stated that LaShonda and her mother reported each incident to school officials but the boy was never disciplined. He pleaded guilty to sexual battery after Mrs. Davis complained to the county sheriff.
The lawsuit said the harassment caused LaShonda's grades to fall and harmed her mental and emotional well-being. In April 1993, her father found a suicide note she had written, the lawsuit said.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. - President Clinton said Saturday that he will sign a $268 billion defense bill that he had threatened to veto.
Clinton had promised to take out his veto pen if the bill contained language preventing two closing military bases in California and Texas from privatizing.
But a compromise was struck, so "I have decided to sign the defense bill," said Clinton at McClellan Air Force Base near here.
Clinton said the compromise language was "not ideal," but that Secretary of Defense William Cohen assured him that it is fair.
He announced economic rescue packages for McClellan and a second base, Kelly Air Force Base at San Antonio, Texas, to help foster privatization.
"We will continue to do everything we can to help McClellan make the transition," the president said.
The president, in Sacramento for a wildlife area dedication and a fund-raiser, also said the government would provide $5 million for redevelopment efforts at Kelly and transfer machinery and equipment over to the base redevelopment agency.
The huge McClellan Air Force repair facility, along with the sprawling Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, was ordered closed by the 1995 base closure commission.
A coalition of lawmakers opposed to privatization because it would mean military bases in their states would absorb fewer jobs from the closing bases had tried to block the efforts.
Defenders of Kelly and McClellan fought for months to strip out of the defense bill provisions that would chill plans to privatize work at their bases, slated to close in 2001. At stake are some 5,000 Kelly jobs and 2,300 McClellan jobs that advocates for the two bases want spared by allowing defense contractors to take over the work and keep it on site.
In a letter to the president sent Nov. 13, Secretary of Defense William Cohen said the bill "changes the terms under which the Department can conduct the remaining public-private competitions for Kelly and McClellan."
Some changes would be helpful for privatization, others would hamper efforts, Cohen said.
But "on balance, I believe the department has flexibility to proceed ... in a way that is fair to both sides," Cohen said in the letter.
The Senate passed the defense authorization last week by a veto-proof margin after the Texas and California senators abandoned their filibuster in the hope Clinton would veto it. The House passed it earlier, also by a wide margin, making it possibhat Congress could override a veto.
With Congress adjourned until January, Clinton could have vetoed the bill and left the issue in limbo for months.
While administration officials objected to language relating to the depots, the bill contains many provisions Clinton favors - including giving him the power to kill the B-2 bomber program and fully funding the F-22, FA-18 E and F and Joint Strike Fighters. It also provides the military a 2.8 percent pay raise.
The book quotes some Netscape employees, including company co-founder Marc Andreessen, as saying they should have focused more on "quality control" in developing their Internet browsing software, according to people who have read a manuscript of the book, which is titled "Competing on Internet Time: Lessons From Netscape and Its Battle With Microsoft."
The book also quotes a Netscape employee as attributing the loss of two key business deals to distribute its browser software - with America Online Inc. and Intuit Inc., a maker of personal finance software - to software deficiencies, the people who read the manuscript said.
The Justice Department and 20 state attorneys general allege that Netscape lost the deals because Microsoft offered AOL and Intuit the ability to promote their products on the "desktop" of Microsoft's dominant Windows operating system.
By doing so, the government contends, Microsoft illegally used the Windows software to distribute its own browser.
The book was written by David B. Yoffie, a professor at Harvard Business School, and Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management.
Although Microsoft's lawyers have obtained a copy of the manuscript from Netscape, they served a subpoena on the authors last week seeking, among other things, tapes of their interviews with Netscape employees. Harvard and MIT on Friday filed papers in a Boston federal court objecting to the subpoena.
Yoffie, reached by telephone, would not comment. Cusumano could not be reached.
A Microsoft spokesman called the manuscript a "major bombshell against the government's case."
"Our outside counsel believes that this book and the source tapes utterly disprove the central allegations the government is making," said Microsoft spokesman Mark Murray. "We understand that the book features various Netscape executives admitting that their problems are, to a large degree, Netscape's own fault through poor technology, inferior software code and sweeping business miscalculation."
A Netscape lawyer said this week that "there is little in the book that was previously unknown."
"If Microsoft's defense is resting on it, it's a fairly weak defense," said the lawyer, who contended that some of the quotes were taken out of context.
NewsCom 09/29/98 09:42:33 AM
"I was told that I did have it and then the conversation moved in a direction that I did not want to go," Winfrey said. "I do not pay for interviews, no matter what the payment is called."
Lewinsky's spokeperson Judy Smith said she wouldn't comment on the aborted interview talks.
In a competitive television world, landing the first in-depth talk with the woman President Clinton had an affair with would be the year's biggest coup.
After talking with Lewinsky's representatives, Winfrey said she was led to believe she was the one.
An hour later, they called back and started talking about who owned the rights to sell a tape of the interview in international markets, Winfrey said in an interview with TV Guide.
"My feeling was giving up the rights was just someone else paying the check," she told the magazine. "That was really the turning point."
Winfrey made the announcement of the non-interview on her show yesterday.
The lurid stories outlined in Kenneth Starr's report to Congress or Clinton's videotaped grand jury testimony did nothing to change her mind about the worthiness of the interview, Winfrey said.
She said she was interested in talking to Lewinsky because she could relate to her predicament.
"I think Monica's gotten a really bad rap," she said. "I've been 21 and I know what it's like to be 21. And an intern. In a situation where the president of the company acts like he likes you. So already my first question to Monica would be, 'How did this happen?"'
Ethnic Albanians say the victims were slaughtered Sunday after a Serb attack against the Kosovo Liberation Army, which is fighting for independence for this majority Albanian province. Most were killed in a makeshift camp in the woods where they were hiding after Serb troops overran their communities.
The killers slit the throat of a 10-year-old boy, blew out his mother's brains, cut open the stomach of another female relative and shot a pregnant woman in the head.
Two days later, the victims remained unburied, sprawled in the forest where they died.
"Serb police executed everybody," said one trembling elderly man, who identified himself only as Fazli.
As he spoke, the occasional crackle of rifle fire rang through the valley about 25 miles west of Pristina, the provincial capital. The thud of two mortar rounds echoed as a Serb police armored personnel carrier escorted out about a dozen ethnic Albanian women and children on the back of a trailer drawn by a tractor.
Serb police had no comment on the killings. The day before, KLA fighters killed seven Serb policeman in the area.
The bodies were seen Monday by diplomats from the United States and other countries who are members of a permanent international observer mission to Kosovo. They refused to discuss what they saw before reporting to their governments.
But Jack Zetkulic, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade, said Tuesday he and others touring refugee sites in Kosovo were shown "some harrowing photographs" and a report on the alleged massacre from the observer group.
An estimated 275,000 people have been driven from their houses by the fighting.
Each side has accused the other of killing civilians since President Slobodan Milosevic launched a crackdown on Albanian secessionists seven months ago. Serbs say at least 39 Serbs were tortured, mutilated and killed near Glodjane earlier this month after they were kidnapped by "terrorists."
The U.N. Security Council has demanded an immediate cease-fire, and NATO has threatened airstrikes if the government ignores the order.
According to friends and relatives of the victims, masked Serbs in green and blue uniforms descended on this town, which the Serbs call Obrinje, on the weekend, capturing a man in his 60s.
Wielding a knife from the man's own kitchen, the attackers forced him to take them to where refugees were hiding. The man's body was found at the edge of the camp. The back of his head was blown off, his throat was slit and the butcher knife carefully placed on his chest.
In the camp, the attackers shot a man and a woman, both 65 years old, while they lay in a makeshift tent that had sheltered them since they fled their home days earlier.
Their bodies were spread on the blankets, surrounded by their blood-spattered clothing, pots and pans. The woman's right foot was partially cut off and her mouth was gaping open.
According to villagers, six women tried to escape with four children. But the attackers caught up with them in a shallow ditch. Their bodies were lying in the ditch.
The attackers slit the throat of a 10-year-old boy and shot women and children in the back of the head at point-blank range. The body of an 18-month-old boy lay half-hidden under that of his 38-year-old mother, who received a bullet in the back of the head.
Valmir's minute right hand was raised and stiffened in a defensive posture. His pacifier was still dangling from the dried blood on his chin.
In a house leading to the refugee camp lay the charred body of an elderly man, burned with his house and the rest of his belongings.
Two brothers, one 40 years old and the other 55, lay sprawled in the tracks of a tank that plowed through the woods near the refugee camp. Attackers shot both of them in the back of the head.
In his first public appearance since his arrest nine days ago, Anwar Ibrahim - who is fast becoming a symbol of opposition to Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's 17 years of rule - pleaded innocent to the nine charges against him.
Outside, riot police with assault rifles patrolled the streets to keep Anwar's supporters from swarming the courthouse.
Since Anwar's arrest, Kuala Lumpur has been rocked by street protests demanding his release and Mahathir's resignation. Every day since Friday, several thousand people have defied arrest and police batons to gather and shout "Reform!" During Monday's demonstration, at least 80 protesters were arrested.
Anwar, 51, hugged his wife and daughter when he saw them in court. He pointed to large bruises above his left eye and on his neck and rolled up his shirtsleeves to show his family the marks of police beatings on the first night of his custody, witnesses in the courtroom said.
The former deputy told the court he was led handcuffed and blindfolded to a police lockup, where he was greeted with thundering punches that bloodied his nose, cracked his lips and left his eye swollen shut for two days.
"I was boxed very hard on the left temple and right part of my head and neck," Anwar said, according to his lawyer, Pawancheek Marican.
He said he fell unconscious until morning. But his pleas for a doctor were ignored even when he told police he could not see with his left eye, walk properly or use one of his arms, Marican added.
Anwar also said police moved him to solitary confinement on the third day of his arrest and hustled him to and from various secret hideouts. A police doctor was allowed to treat him on the fifth day of his detention, during which neither his lawyers nor his family were allowed te him.
On Tuesday, police tried their best to keep him out of sight, whisking him from a four-wheel drive vehicle into a secret passageway that led into the second-floor courtroom.
The court granted Anwar's appeal for a medical examination. Anwar's wife, Azizah Ismail, said later that an eye doctor examined her husband and determined that his retina wasn't permanently damaged - for now.
"When I first saw him, I was shocked and stunned," said Azizah, who is an eye doctor. "After all he's been through, his spirit is very strong and I'm proud of that."
Anwar was arraigned on four counts of illegal homosexual acts during his tenure as finance minister and deputy prime minister before Mahathir fired him Sept. 2. The charges are punishable by up to 20 years in prison and lashes with a whip.
The five corruption charges relate to alleged misuse of his ministerial powers to thwart the investigation of the illegal sex charges against him.
Anwar's bail plea was referred to the higher court that is to try him soon in a landmark legal case in this Islamic country. No other senior politician has faced such charges of committing illegal homosexual acts.
Anwar replied, "Not guilty, I claim trial," as each charge was read out before Judge Hasnah Hashim.
Mahathir has said that he was compelled to fire Anwar because of the allegations of homosexuality against his deputy. But Anwar says that he incurred Mahathir's wrath by challenging his rule.
Since his firing, Anwar led a campaign against his former boss, saying Malaysia needed a more liberal government, a cleaner administration and a media that was not shackled to the rulers.
The crackdown on Mahathir's critics has continued away from the scene of demonstrations. On Tuesday, police said three people, including one of Anwar's defense attorneys, were jailed under the harsh Internal Security Act which allows indefinite imprisonment without trial.
-Compiled from Daily wire reports.
09-30-98
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