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Around the Nation
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Around the Nation
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Only four of the 13 spending bills needed to keep the government running have been sent to President Clinton. Meanwhile, one of the biggest bills - which funds a host of education, health and social programs - has yet to be drafted.
The problem is simple to understand: shoe-horning a raft of popular spending items into strict budget limits that Congress imposed on itself two years ago. But lawmakers are having an extraordinarily difficult time figuring out how to do that.
The effort has turned the Capitol into an open-air bazaar of ideas on how to cut spending - or cook the books so it looks like they have. The result is cacophony in the halls of Congress: Slash the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's budget! Abolish the Selective Service! Take back welfare money from the states! Or maybe just postpone writing government checks for a month or two.
Each of these proposals has been on the table. And there should be plenty more in coming weeks as lawmakers fight among themselves and with President Clinton as they confront a dizzying kaleidoscope of decisions that affect government programs from the Pentagon to highways to biomedical research. If they don't reach agreement by the Oct. 1 start of the new fiscal year, they must go into overtime with a temporary budget - or else parts of the government will grind to a halt.
Even before Hurricane Floyd made landfall, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) said that the budget dilemma reminded him of a Jimmy Buffett song: "Trying to Reason With Hurricane Season."
The whole scene is, in one way, utterly baffling. Congress is abuzz with frantic efforts to cut spending just as the government was supposed to be entering an era of fiscal plenty, with the next decade awash in the black ink of budget surplus.
The explanation stems, in part, from a quiet consensus that Clinton and Congress reached months ago to end the decades-long practice of using surplus Social Security revenues to pay for other programs or tax cuts. It was a meeting of the minds that is often overlooked because the issue was settled without a big fight. But its bottom-line result was a pledge to prevent the bulk of the surplus from being spent on anything next year.
"He hears footsteps behind him," said one official. "It's 24 hours a day, wherever he is. Multiple agents follow him."
Even though Lee's case continues to have widespread repercussions, including an internal overhaul of the Energy Department's nuclear weapons programs and a likely Senate vote this week to force a more sweeping restructuring, the Taiwan-born scientist and U.S. citizen remains in legal limbo.
Lee, who was fired six months ago from the Los Alamos National Laboratory and publicly identified as a possible spy, has been the subject of a three-year FBI investigation into whether he gave secrets to China about America's most advanced nuclear warhead.
Yet, he has been neither arrested nor cleared. Justice Department lawyers, in fact, have given up on charging Lee with espionage. They instead have dusted off an early-1980s in-house analysis of an obscure law that has never been used for a criminal prosecution.
The debate is whether Lee can be convicted of breaking the law when he downloaded highly classified computer programs and data files from more than 1,000 nuclear weapons tests into an insecure computer at Los Alamos. Lee has said he protected the files with three passwords and has denied that he passed the "legacy codes" to China or anyone else.
By all accounts, a successful prosecution would be problematic. For a start, prosecutors almost certainly would need to reveal top-secret nuclear weapon documents in open court if they are to prove that Lee jeopardized national security. Energy Department officials have wrestled for weeks to determine how much information safely can be released.
Moreover, a scathing Senate committee report released last month outlined what it characterized as devastating errors in the investigation so far, including the decision to focus on Lee as the only suspect. In addition, Robert Vrooman, the former head of counterintelligence at Los Alamos, raised even more potential legal problems when he stated publicly that Lee was unfairly singled out because of racial bias.
If Lee is charged, his lawyers are expected to demand classified documents from the FBI, CIA, National Security Agency and other government agencies to buttress their claim that others who mishandle classified information are not prosecuted. They also may seek to show that thousands of people in hundreds of places, from defense contractors to National Guard posts, have had access to nuclear warhead secrets, not just a handful of scientists at Los Alamos.
"We continue to provide information to the Department of Justice, and we are hopeful that they will not charge Dr. Lee," said Mark Holscher, Lee's lawyer in Los Angeles.
John Kelly, the U.S. attorney for New Mexico who is in charge of the case, declined to comment through a spokesperson.
If Lee is not indicted, the government has an obligation to issue a statement clearing his name, said John Martin, a former Justice Department prosecutor who headed every espionage investigation for 25 years until he retired in 1997.
"To put an American citizen under this type of scrutiny, to leak information in a screwed-up investigation, and not to publicly clear him, would be horribly improper conduct,"Martin said.
Unless a new contract with the International Association of Machinists is agreed on by 12:01 a.m. Sunday, the airline faces a potentially crippling strike. And once that contract is settled, it faces another labor test with flight attendants.
The labor unrest has created slowdowns and even occasional sabotage that has wrecked the airline's schedule and left many of its best customers looking elsewhere.
During July and August, US Airways canceled an average of 130 flights daily because of weather or maintenance problems.
Tiger Management, US Airways' largest single shareholder with nearly 25 percent of its common stock, has threatened to put the airline into play on Wall Street if financial performance doesn't improve quickly.
Last week, the airline announced it would not report a profit for the third quarter and feared the fourth quarter might not be much better - dropping the stock price to $24.56 1/4, down from its year's high of $64.
Almost everywhere the airline has tried to expand it has suddenly faced new competition, some totally unexpected and some where it was unable to respond because of pilot restrictions on the use of smaller regional jets.
The new management team hasn't coped with the airline's culture, forged over time by numerous mergers that never overcame bitter rivalries of the past.
"They're under attack from everybody, and they haven't fixed a single cost problem in the company," an industry observer who requested anonymity said of the suburban Arlington, Va.-based airline.
Perhaps more important, said the source: "Stephen's tricks have run out. He has no tricks left in his bag."
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Around the World
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The U.S. Geological Survey National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo., said the quake had a preliminary magnitude of 7.6 and was centered 90 miles south-southwest of Taipei.
"There also are tsunami warnings out. There are warnings for Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, Yap, Guam, and Palau," geophysicist John Bellini said.
Telephone service was interrupted by the quake, which occurred at about 1:45 a.m. The Broadcasting Corp. of China said it was followed by six aftershocks and cut electric ice in parts of the city.
Sirens - from fire trucks and police cars - resounded through Taipei, which is home to about 2.6 million people and is the largest city in Taiwan. But there was no sign of panic.
In the southwestern Chiang Kai-shek district, some people brought candles into the street. Many carried umbrellas to stay out of the rain, huddling around battery-operated radios.
Rern-Wei Cheng, a visitor to Taipei from California, said he was watching television with his family when the earthquake struck.
"When I first felt the quake, I thought of a Turkish friend who went back to Turkey to visit his family when the earthquake hit there....We were all frightened and we hid under the kitchen table." No one in the family was hurt.
In one Taipei suburb, electricity was out in houses, but street lights were on.
Experts from the Thai Royal Prosthetic Foundation had to postpone attaching the last part of the splint after the 38-year old cow elephant swung her limb around to stop the team from completing the job they started on Friday.
''She must be upset or in pain. We hope to try again tomorrow,'' Boonyuu Thitiya, the team leader, told The Associated Press.
The pachyderm, whose plight has captured world attention, has endured slow and painful recovery from an operation to amputate her foot three weeks ago, after she trod on land mine near a logging camp in Myanmar, also known as Burma.
The splint, made of metal poles and plastic is designed to help Motola to balance her weight more evenly, as her three good legs are getting tired from carrying her 5,940-pounds.
Eventually specialists hope to fit a permanent prosthesis once her wound has healed, which could take months. The splint should hMotola adjust to living with an artificial aid on her leg, Boonyuu said.
An Evansville, Ind.-based orthopedics company has offered to donate the materials needed to create the final artificial foot. The Thai government's office in Chicago expressed interest in the offer.
09-21-99
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