Around the Nation

Around the Nation

U.S. planes fire at Iraqi anti-ship missles

This was the first time during a recent escalation of tensions with Iraq that U.S. planes targeted Iraqi weapons designed to strike ships. The other, almost daily, U.S. attacks have been against anti-aircraft missile launchers and radar used to threaten U.S. and British planes patrolling Iraq's skies.

Also yesterday, a senior U.S. defense official said Iraq in recent days moved a substantial number of surface-to-air missile launchers out of the northern and southern "no-fly" zones to central Iraq. The move appeared to signal a newfound desire by Iraq to preserve its dwindling air defense forces, said the official, who discussed the matter on condition he not be further identified.

The U.S. strikes in southern Iraq were among a half-dozen incidents yesterday that U.S. officials said showed President Saddam Hussein remains determined to provoke the United States. Saddam has been challenging U.S. and British enforcement of no-fly zones over southern and northern Iraq, and Pentagon officials said they viewed the activation of anti-ship missiles as another form of Iraqi provocation.

In northern Iraq, U.S. Air Force and Marine Corps aircraft fired on Iraqi anti-aircraft artillery emplacements and an air defense radar. The U.S. European Command, responsible for U.S. forces flying over northern Iraq, said the U.S. pilots responded in self-defense after encountering anti-aircraft artillery fire. There were five separate incidents in that area in the space of about one hour, the European Command reported. The U.S. planes returned safely to their base at Incirlik, Turkey.

No details were available on damage to the Iraqi air defense sites.

The incident in the south marked a departure from the pattern of almost daily U.S. air attacks on Iraqi air defense forces - mainly surface-to-air missile batteries, radar and communications links. This time, two Navy F/A-18s and two F-14s flying from the USS Carl Vinson in the Persian Gulf dropped precision-guided bombs on a battery of shore-to-ship missile launchers and an associated radar, officials said.

One official said it appeared the bombs hit their targets, although he had no details.

The anti-ship cruise missiles, designated the CSSC-3, are an older Russian-designed weapon with a range of about 60 miles. Anthony Cordesman, a professor of national security affairs at Georgetown University and an expert on Iraqi weaponry, said the missiles posed a potential threat to oil tankers off Kuwait.

The anti-ship missile launchers were deployed in recent weeks on the al-Faw peninsula, which juts into the Gulf at the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab waterway. U.S. Navy ships sometimes are in that area to enforce the U.N. economic embargo against Iraq, although they have means of defending against the CSSC-3.

"What you are watching is a desperate effort on Saddam's part to achieve some kind of victory" in the aftermath of a mid-December series of U.S. and British bombings, Cordesman said. Shortly after that bombing campaign, Saddam began more vigorously challenging enforcement of the no-fly zones in the north and south by targeting allied planes with radar and occasionally firing missiles at them.

Defense Secretary William Cohen mentioned the latest incidents in testimony to the House Armed Services Committee.

"We continue to tell Saddam he is not going to move SAMs (surface-to-air missiles) in the north and not move them in the south and put our pilots at risk, and that every time that there is a (radar) illumination or threat to those pilots, they're going to pay a penalty for it. So we are in fact maintaining the no-fly zones," he said.

Northwest pricing lawsuit resurrected

A district judge wrongly interpreted antitrust law in dismissing the lawsuit, a three-judge panel of the 8th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled.

The consumers who sued Northwest don't want to undo the merger, but they seek as much as $400 million in alleged fare overcharges each year.

"It is a meter that's running," said Craig Wildfang, a Minneapolis attorney for the consumers. He will try to have the case certified as a class action, he said.

Northwest spokesperson Jon Austin said the airline would appeal the ruling.

"This is an issue that has been litigated before three federal judges already and has been rejected each time until today," Austin said. "We think this is an incorrect decision. We believe that on review it will be found to be so."

Seven consumers filed the lawsuit in 1997. They argued that the merger violated antitrust law and led to higher ticket prices for passengers at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where Northwest accounts for 80 percent of the traffic.

The case is being watched closely outside Minnesota.

Attorneys general from Michigan and 10 other states filed friend-of-the-court briefs on behalf of the consumers, arguing that U.S. District Judge David Doty misread the Clayton Act in his ruling.

The consumers sued under a section of the law that prohibits companies from anti-competitive use of stock and assets that they acquire. Northwest argued that because the two airlines fully merged and Republic's stock ceased to exist, no claim was possible under that part of the law.

The three appellate judges disagreed, saying the section wording expressly provides for such a claim even when all of a company's stock or assets are acquired.

"To us it is nonsensical to suggest that the Clayton Act was intended to allow for the revisiting of a decision made 13 years ago by the U.S. Department of Transportation" to approve the Republic-Northwest merger, Austin said.

Northwest has maintained it does not engage in unfair competition.

A 15-day strike by pilots which shut down the carrier last fall increased debate about airline competition in areas served by Northwest, which operates hubs in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Detroit and Memphis, Tenn.

In December, the Metropolitan Airports Commission announced it would examine the issue by analyzing the hub system and looking at factors that discourage carriers from competing with Northwest.

"I think the pilots' strike probably illustrated the problem of having a single dominant carrier, but I don't think other than that it was really relevant" to the consumers' lawsuit, Wildfang said.

States who filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the case include Michigan, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

Drugs reduce AIDS virus transmission

The study raises the possibility that for even the poorest nations, a practical method of cutting "prenatal" transmission of the virus is within reach. According to some estimates, as many as 600,000 babies are infected each year worldwide, either during delivery or from breast feeding afterward. Most of those infections occur in Africa.

With a five-week course of the drugs, AZT and 3TC, the reduction was even more dramatic, about 50 percent. Which prevention strategy will be used where depends on cost-effectiveness calculations and the size of drug discounts various governments will be able to negotiate, said Joseph Saba, an official of the international organization UNAIDS, which ran the study.

"Whatever the local context is will determine what is the right treatment," he said.

The results of the PETRA (for prenatal transmission) trial were reported at the Sixth Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, being held here through tomorrow.

The experiment, run at two sites in Uganda, two in South Africa, and one in Tanzania, was strongly criticized two years ago because it included a "placebo arm," in which some women were randomly assigned to take inactive pills. A study done in the United States and reported in 1994 showed conclusively that AZT given for the last trimester of pregnancy, and to the baby for six weeks after birth, cut the transmission rate by about two-thirds.

Critics faulted the African research, which began recruiting patients in July 1996, on two grounds.

The first was that it would be unethical to give some women only placebos because such a study would not be permitted in the United States and other industrialized nations in light of the 1994 findings. The second was that close analysis of the 1994 study showed that most of the protective effect occurred at the time of delivery, and consequently the question of whether the 20-week course of AZT could be shortened already had been answered.

In the African experiment, women were divided into four groups. One took AZT and 3TC (which is also called lamivudine) starting four weeks before expected labor, and continuing through a week after delivery. That group had a transmission rate of 8.6 percent. The second group took the drugs only during labor and delivery and for a week thereafter. Its transmission rate was 10.8 percent. The third group took the drugs only during labor and delivery, and had a transmission rate of 17.7 percent. The fourth group took placebos during all three treatment phases, and had a transmission rate of 17.2 percent.

Saba defended the use of an all-placebo arm, saying that without it "we would have been completely misled as to the size of the efficacy (of different treatments)." He said that he had a "peaceful mind that we made the right choice."

There were two surprising results from the PETRA study.

The first was the unexpectedly low rate of transmission in the African women.

The second was that anti-viral treatment after delivery appeared to have a major benefit. In fact, the women who got the drugs only during labor and delivery, but not afterward, got no benefit at all.

Breast feeding increases a baby's risk of acquiring HIV from an infected mother by up to three-fold, depending on when the child is weaned.

A major moment of risk may occur in the first few days, when the child can take in more than 25,000 HIV-containing cells in the thick fluid known as colostrum.

Around the World

Albanian rebels to attend peace talks

Rebel participation had been thrown into doubt after spokesperson Adem Demaci recommended against sending delegates.

But, the main Kosovo Liberation Army spokesperson, Jakup Krasniqi, told reporters in central Kosovo that the KLA would name its delegates today.

"We have some objections to the proposed document, but we are certainly ready to go," Krasniqi said in comments welcomed by Clinton administration officials.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic has sent the matter over to the Serb Parliament, which meets tomorrow, and resisted giving any signal on whether the Serbs will send delegates to the talks organized by the United States and five European countries. The government has been against any terms that would erode its control over Kosovo, a province in Serbia, the main republic in Yugoslavia.

strikes if they haven't started talks by Saturday in Rambouillet, France, and reached a deal by Feb. 19 to end the conflict over Kosovo Albanians' demand for independence.

More moderate Kosovo Albanian political leaders already have said they would attend, but the key negotiating parties to any settlement are President Slobodan Milosevic's government and the KLA, the warring parties in the conflict over ethnic Albanians' demand for independence.

Krasniqi said the KLA wants to send four delegates as part of the ethnic Albanian negotiating team, expected to number about 15.

The proposed U.S. peace plan at the talks in France would give Kosovo greater autonomy for the first three years. Political parties would decide what happens after that.

Krasniqi said KLA representatives will demand that Kosovo become an international protectorate for three years while negotiators work out a final status for Kosovo. They also want any decision on Kosovo's future to be put to a referendum by the ''people of Kosovo.''

Ethnic Albanians are by far the majority among the 2 million people of Kosovo, and most want independence.

While deferring the question of participation in the talks, the Yugoslav government appealed to the U.N. Security Council to convene an urgent meeting on Kosovo to prevent what it called the ''open and clear threat of aggression'' posed by NATO's threatened military strikes.

The NATO threat ''directly undermines the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the FRY (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) and flagrantly violates the principles enshrined in the U.N. Charter,'' Yugoslav Foreign Minister Zivadin Jovanovic said in a letter to the council.

Despite the anti-NATO maneuvers, Dusko Matkovic, a vice president of Milosevic's Socialist Party, suggested in remarks published Tuesday that the Serbs are likely to send their delegation to France.

He said NATO pressure ''further strengthens Serbian and Yugoslav resolve to find a peaceful solution for Kosovo through negotiations.''

The conflict between Kosovo separatists and Serb and Yugoslav forces has killed at least 2,000 people, most of them civilians, and made refugees out of hundreds of thousands.

Hundreds of people have been killed in continuing violence since an October truce halted most combat, including 45 ethnic Albanians whose brutal slayings in Racak on Jan. 15 prompted renewed international calls for peace in Kosovo.

Survivors from Racak gathered Tuesday outside the morgue in Pristina on Tuesday to demand Serbs release the Racak bodies for burial. The Serbs refused, despite intervention by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the villagers said they wouldn't leave until they had all the corpses.

Meanwhile, the ethnic Albanians' Kosovo Information Center reported Tuesday that two villages in Kosovo's Drenica region and another in the Podujevo region were shelled by heavy Serb artillery overnight. There were no reports of casualties.

IOC under attack at opening of summitt

Barry McCaffrey, a White House adviser on drug policy who spoke on the opening day of the International Olympic Committee's drug summit in Switzerland, said the IOC must institute democratic reforms and open its books to have any credibility in the fight against drugs in sports.

"Recent examples of alleged corruption, lack of accountability and the failure f leadership have challenged the legitimacy of this institution," he said.

A top IOC official retorted that the United States had no right to lecture when drug use remains rampant in American sports. IOC executive board member Jacques Rogge cited slugger Mark McGwire's use of a controversial muscle-booster as a sign of American "hypocrisy."

"If you go on the moralizing and lecturing tone, you must be sure your own house is in order," he said.

The sharp exchange underscored the IOC's worst fear - that the drug conference would be overshadowed by the fallout from the worst corruption scandal in Olympic history.

The scandal started with bribery allegations surrounding the selectionSalt Lake City as host of the 2002 Winter Games. Nine IOC members have resigned or been expelled so far for receiving cash payments, scholarships and other favors from Salt Lake.

''We need to restore faith in the Olympic movement,'' British Sports Minister Tony Banks said. ''At the moment, it's sour and sullied. The IOC's reputation is on the line. The British government expects the IOC to clean up its act.''

German Interior Minister Otto Schily suggested it was time for IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch - in office since 1980 - to step down.

''A constitutional monarchy in sports is harmful,'' Schily told German television in Lausanne. ''If someone is too long in an office, he loses his legitimacy. Everyone has his time and everyone must know when it's time to go.''

Throughout the day, speaker after speaker demanded that the centerpiece of the conference - a proposed international anti-doping agency - be independent of the IOC. This was a direct slap to Samaranch, who has proposed that the agency be overseen by himself and run by IOC drug chief Prince Alexandre de Merode.

''For complete credibility, the agency must be headed by someone other than an IOC member,'' U.S. Olympic Committee executive director Dick Schultz said.

De Merode said he couldn't understand the lack of confidence in the IOC and questioned the moral authority of politicians. ''I take offense that politicians don't trust me to chair this agency,'' he said. ''Why should I trust politicians?''

Pointing to government corruption scandals throughout Europe, De Merode said: ''Ask people in the streets if there is a great confidence in politicians. I have some doubts.''

The conference was further jeopardized by wide disagreement on another key issue: drug sanctions. While some delegates pressed for fixed minimum two-year bans across all sports, senior IOC officials proposed more flexible penalties.

Samaranch referred to the corruption scandal in his opening address, saying, ''We have taken all the necessary measures and are continuing our investigations to ensure that Olympic ethics are respected.''

The IOC, meanwhile, cleared Australian officials Tuesday of any wrongdoing following allegations of vote-buying in Sydney's winning bid for the 2000 Summer Games.

Rogge, the IOC official with oversight for the Sydney Games, said Australian Olympics chief John Coates broke no rules when he offered $70,000 in sports aid to two African IOC members the night before Sydney beat Beijing by two votes.

''It was legal, legitimate and according to the rules,'' Rogge said. ''There is absolutely no problem in the way it was done. No cash money was given, no under-the-table payment. Everything was straightforward.''

The IOC's credibility was questioned forcefully Tuesday by McCaffrey, who said it was time for the organization to reform its structure.

Rogge, however, said there was no relation between the IOC's structure and its inability to control performance-enhancing drug use. He took a direct shot at the United States, saying it is a country ''where in professional sports you see a lack of real anti-doping rules, where you see that one of the biggest heroes, McGwire, is admitting taking androstenedione, which is forbidden in all other sports around the world.''

Androstenedione is banned by the IOC as a steroid but is not prohibited by major league baseball. McGwire, who hit a record 70 home runs this season, said he took it as a legal, over-the-counter nutritional supplement.

Rogge sneered at American claims that androstenedione is not a steroid.

''Let's not be hypocritical,'' he said. ''It's a drug that induces the formation of testosterone in the body and therefore is illegal, illicit and dangerous. Come on.''

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