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"For drugs and weapons, I say: there will be no place to hide," Dole said.
The Republican presidential candidate detailed her education platform at Melrose High School outside Boston where she was a student teacher in the 1959-60 academic year.
She said parents should be able to choose from a "rich smorgasbord of educational choices" in deciding where to send their children to school.
Dole proposed a new tax credit to encourage private support for public and private schools and also recycled proposals from the Republican Congress for "education savings accounts" and for freeing up federal education funds from federal mandates.
"Take a look at this unwieldy stack of paper," Dole said, painting to a more than 600-page copy of the "Clinton-Gore" Elementary and Secondary Education reauthorization bill.
"This would be a joke if our system were working, but it's no joke," Dole told about 150 students, school officials and senior citizens in the school library.
Later in her speech, she underscored her point, saying: "The federal government has become a truly intrusive regulatory presence sapping state authority, local control and parental responsibility. Every hour spent on complying with regulations is time not spent helping teachers and students."
Dole said that if she is elected president, she would let states and local school districts choose how most federal money is spent, as long as students' performance is measured and attained.
Unlike her rival for the GOP nomination, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, Dole did not spell out exactly how she would leverage federal dollars against failing schools. Bush, earlier this month, detailed a formula for measuring student performance, rewarding good schools, and stripping bad schools of federal support.
Dole also wants to reinforce parents' control of their children's education and suggested that school-by-school results be posted on the Internet.
"We should allow competition to foster a rich smorgasbord of educational choices," Dole said. "Whether it's opportunity scholarships for students in failing schools, or charter schools or home-schooling, we should empower parents to make choices as long as their choices get results."
Dole said schools must be made safe for students and kept drug-free. To attain that, she called for parent-approved locker and backpack searches and drug testing.
"The lives and bright futures of all students depend on uwatchful care, at home and at school," she said.
Students warmly welcomed Dole to their school, where she was an 11th grade history student teacher while earning a master's degree at Harvard University. They gave her a key to the city, a "We are Melrose" button and a football jersey saying "President Dole."
"I was always looking forward to seeing the first female president," said Liz Perkins, a 15-year-old sophomore who has high hopes for Dole's campaign.
During a tour of the brick high school, Dole made a surprise visit to the classroom where she had taught.
"This was the room," she said to the sixth grade English students who appeared shocked to see Dole with several dozen reporters in tow. "It's been a few years, but it's good to be back," she said.
Dole based her education plan on her own three R's: returning control of schools to states and local school districts, restoring discipline in classrooms and reinforcing parental control over their child's education.
In advocating more local control of schools, Dole recalled picking through dusty police department files to assemble a lesson plan on the Boston police strike of 1919. "I didn't choose this lesson because it was mandated by the state or by Washington," she said.
The growing student population and teacher retirements over the next decade will necessitate the recruitment of some 2 million new teachers, Dole said. She called for merit pay for teachers and said states should "broaden their uses of alternative teacher certification."
"Let's give mid-career professionals, academics, and our best college graduates a clearer path to working and excelling in our public schools," Dole said.
In what aides described as the first installment of her education platform, Dole also proposed:
- Creating a $1,000 per-year tax credit for individuals who donate to educational foundations helping low-income students in public and private schools through grade 12.
- Increasing tax-free contribution limits for education savings accounts to $3,000 a year to help middle- and low-income parents pay for a child's private school tuition or college education.
In terms of damages sought, the suit would be the largest ever brought by the department, according to legal experts. It would aim to recover from cigarette manufacturers the long-term cost to the federal government of treating sick smokers covered by government health care programs.
Justice Department lawyers have been working intensively on the lawsuit since January, when President Clinton announced in his State of the Union address that the administration had decided to sue cigarette manufacturers.
A Justice Department spokesperson refused to confirm whether the suit would be filed today.
The tobacco industry has been under intense legal pressure since 1994 when state attorneys general began to file multibillion-dollar claims against the industry to recoup the cost of caring for people with smoking-related diseases through the federal-state Medicaid health insurance program.
, which pays for the health care of the poor and disabled.
Those suits were settled last year for $246 billion, which will be paid by smokers through higher cigarette prices.
The federal suit would pose "the most serious financial threat the tobacco industry has faced to date," said Matthew Myers, general counsel for the National Campaign For Tobacco Free Kids, Washington-based nonprofit smoking prevention group. "In one case, the tobacco industry has more at risk than in all of the
cases brought by the states."
Philip Morris spokesman Mike York, an attorney, said: "From a strictly legal standpoint, the best thing you can objectively say about this lawsuit is that it is utterly political."
"Future historians will judge this as a classic case of the Clinton administration bullying good professional people in the Justice Department to do something that they don't think has a valid basis in fact or law," York said.
Mary Aronson, a Washington-based legal and financial analyst said that "the financial implications could be phenomenal."
Noting that the federal government potentially has claims under an array of government health care programs including Medicare, which covers some 39 million Americans, a veterans health insurance program and Defense Department health care plans, Aronson said that the claim "has the potential to dwarf" the big Medicaid suits filed by the states. The filing is likely to "significantly weaken the tobacco stocks," she said.
The tobacco industry, however, is expected to mount a formidable defense. Legal experts, even advocates of the government lawsuit, said that the industry would be expected to argue that the government has "unclean hands." They pointed out that the government has aided the tobacco industry through price support
programs, devised a health warning system that was meant to inform consumers of the risk of smoking and profited handsomely from cigarette smoking through federal excise taxes.
"There are special problems for the government ... such that they've been subsidizing the industry, regulating it, they've done tobacco research," said John C. Coffee Jr. a law professor at Columbia
University. "It's hard for the government to say that they knew nothing about the addictiveness of smoking. There are probably memos showing the government knew something about it," added Coffee, an expert in mass tort litigation who worked on the Massachusetts lawsuit against the tobacco industry, which was part of the national settlement.
The action represents a near-reversal of the Justice Department's previous reluctance to bring such a lawsuit.
The legal complexities of the tobacco case, the massive document discovery involved and the Justice Department's institutionally conservative approach to bringing lawsuits once appeared to have made department lawyers leery of taking on such a risky project.
Indeed, as recently as 1997, Attorney General Janet Reno voiced skepticism about the legal standing of the government to bring such a suit at a Senate hearing after five Democratic senators sent her a letter urging her to attempt to recoup the cost to the government of treating tobacco-related illnesses.
However, it was not until the failed effort on Capitol Hill last year to enact national tobacco legislation that the department, under heavy pressure from the White House, took another hard look at the viability of filing a lawsuit.
That was about the same time that a long-running criminal investigation of the tobacco industry by the department appeared to be losing steam. Observers once had thought that major cigarette manufacturers would be charged with lying to the government about the health risks of smoking.
The expected federal civil lawsuit probably poses a far greater threat to the cigarette manufacturers than previous lawsuits, not only because of its financial size but because the government likely would seek as part of any settlement far tighter regulation of the industry.
LA TIMES-WASHINGTON POST-9/22/99
Boston, for example, is poised to beat everyone in the United States to the New Year by celebrating with fireworks five hours early - at midnight Greenwich Mean Time.
In Maine, they're fighting for the distinction of which town will be the first to see the sunrise of the new millennium.
Boston officials say they orchestrated their 7 p.m. fireworks for the first time this year so children might participate in revels usually well past their bedtimes.
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Around the World
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Authorities called on Taiwan's citizens to contribute food and water to survivors and for caskets to help cope with mounting fatalities, which increased to 2,023 yesterday, with 5,269 reported injured and 268 still missing.
The aftershocks, with preliminary magnitudes of 6.1 and 6.8 respectively, swayed major buildings and rattled nerves, but no casualties were reported.
More than two days after the quake, assistance remained just beyond reach for hundreds of thousands of people in the central counties of Taichung and Nantou, where the temblor struck hardest.
Collapsed bridges, downed power lines and mangled roads still block relief from those who need it most.
Electricity was restored yesterday to many buildings in Taichung and in the capital of Taipei. But as night fell, huge sections of Taichung and Nantou counties were shrouded in darkness again.
Power blackouts in some of the most badly damaged towns and villages _ including Tungshi, Chungliao and Puli _ thwarted efforts to provide anything more than rudimentary treatment for the most
gravely injured. Sporadic phone contact with those areas made it difficult for doctors to assess the extent of victims' injuries.
``If they can get here, we can save them,'' said Chen Wei-kung, a trauma surgeon who runs the emergency room at China Medical Hospital in the city of Taichung.
For now, however, getting there is the problem. Chen, who arrived at his post within a few minutes of the initial tremor and has remained there without a break since, lamented Wednesday night that there
has been an inverse relationship between the speed at which victims stumbled through his doors and the severity of their injuries. First came the bruises, scrapes and gashes; then the compound fractures;
then the severe head injuries.
But in the first show of defiance toward the international force, armed men killed one Western journalist and attacked two others. Many Indonesians accuse the foreign media of stirring up problems in East Timor and conspiring with the United Nations.
to rig the outcome of an Aug. 30 referendum, in which East Timorese voted overwhelmingly to become independent from Indonesia.
"It would appear that the militia have attempted to step up some activities as a show that all is not yet secure. Well, I would agree with that," said Australian Maj. Gen. Peter Cosgrove, commander of the peacekeeping force.
Cosgrove said he did not have enough soldiers to protect all of the residential areas in East Timor's ravaged capital, Dili.
Thousands of East Timorese descended from the hills yesterday morning and stormed a government warehouse, looting 110-pound sacks of rice, sugar and tins of cooking oil. Indonesian guards were overwhelmed, but peacekeepers soon arrived and brought the crowd under control without using force.
Relief efforts, which began again yesterday, were expected to pick up today. Food drops had been suspended since Monday in favor of airlifting peacekeepers and supplies for the multinational force.
Less than half the force, expected to number 7,500, was in the territory by yesterday. Despite the paucity of troops, 150 peacekeepers flew in Blackhawk helicopters to East Timor's second-largest city, Baucau, to secure the airport, said Brig. Mark Evans, land forces commander.
The airstrip in Baucau, 80 miles east of Dili, could be useful in bringing supplies to desperate refugees hiding in the thickly forested mountains. The refugees had fled rampaging pro-Indonesia militias, angered over East Timor's vote for independence.
The militia violence has waned since the peacekeepers' arrival Monday, but in the Dili suburb of Becora, Dutch journalist Sander Thoenes was killed, officials said Wednesday. Thoenes, a 30-year-old reporter for London's Financial Times newspaper, had disappeared after being attacked Tuesday.
In a separate attack, two other journalists were ambushed and managed to escape. Their driver was severely wounded.
At the United Nations in New York, Indonesian Foreign Minister Ali Alatas said he deeply regretted Thoenes' death.
"It shows that we have always to be very, very careful," he said. "Although it appears that things are returning slowly to normal, you still have this security situation. Everything can happen and everybody has to be very, very cautious."
In Dili, peacekeepers drove armored personnel carriers down the devastated streets, searching for anyone who looked suspicious. Within 24 hours, the soldiers had rounded up dozens of suspected militants and confiscated hundreds of guns, knives and machetes.
"We have lost count of the number of weapons," Evans said.
Indonesia's army chief, Gen. Wiranto, claimed the situation was improving.
"Of course there's always a criminal element, one or two people are still fighting and looting - this is always going to happen. But in general, our indications are that things are OK," he said.
However, there were numerous witness accounts that Indonesian troops were burning their barracks and nearby stores as they left the province.
Residents found five bodies in a well in central Dili, in what could be the first sign of a mass killing.
An Associated Press reporter saw one naked, headless corpse floating in the well Wednesday. Witnesses said four bodies were pulled out the day before.
In Indonesian West Timor - the other half of the island north of Australia - Eurico Guterres, the commander of the most notorious pro-Jakarta militia, rejected the results of the independence referendum.
"East Timor will continue to seethe and there will be the possibility of a civil war" unless an acceptable solution is found, he said.
That solution should be the division of East Timor, with pro-Indonesia forces getting part of the territory, he told the national Antara news agency.
"We will fight until the last blood to defend our territory," Guterres was quoted as saying.
09-23-99
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