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Around the Nation
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Around the Nation
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On Wednesday, a team of FBI agents told a Senate committee that Justice Department attorneys had stymied their campaign finance investigation.
On Thursday, at her weekly briefing, Attorney General Janet Reno fielded questions that kept returning to the same unpleasant theme - the unusually hostile relations between Justice and the FBI.
A healthy tension always animates the relationship between the nation's premier law enforcement agency and the lawyers who handle their wiretap requests and decide whether to prosecute their suspects.
But last week seemed different to longtime observers.
"This town seems to be dividing up between supporters of Reno and supporters of Freeh. I think that is unfortunate," said Tim Lynch, a criminal justice expert at the Washington-based Cato Institute.
For years, there was widespread regard around the country for many of Reno's decisions on independent counsels, including her repeated requests for special prosecutors to probe Clinton administration figures that enraged the White House and delighted Republicans. Now, it's almost if those judgments never happened. In the eyes of her most acidic critics, Reno and the lawyers who work for her have morphed into untrustworthy scoundrels at worst, or incompetent bumblers at best.
The climate was brought on by new revelations about the FBI's 1993 Waco siege. For six years, FBI and Justice officials told Congress and the public that during the final assault on the Branch
Davidian compound no devices had been used that could have caused the fire in which scores of sect members perished. But when both agencies had to admit last month that potentially incendiary devices had been used, a new season began. Since then, Reno and the Justice Department have lost nearly every political and policy skirmish as Republicans have blamed her relentlessly, leaving Freeh and the FBI virtually untouched.
With several House and Senate committees launching new investigations of the Justice Department, the political hits that Reno and her department are taking may well continue throughout her term.
The medicine, called Zyvox, appears to work as well as standard antibiotics against garden-variety germs and can also kill those that are resistant to everything else, including vancomycin, now the drug of last resort for stubborn infections.
Researchers presented the results of several large studies on the drug Monday at a conference sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology. Its maker, Pharmacia & Upjohn, plans to seek approval for Zyvox from the Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies around the world by the end of the year.
"There is a crying need for new antibiotics" for use against common but potentially deadly infections, said Dr. Jack Remington of Stanford University. Zyvox "is the first new antibiotic in the world in 35 years."
Doctors say the need for new antibiotics is critical because standard medicines are quickly losing their punch against many common microbes. Zyvox is likely to be reserved for especially ill patients.
Zyvox will join another new antibiotic, Rhone-Poulenc Rorer's Synercid, which was approved by the FDA last week. Although available for the first time in the United States, Synercid is one of a class of antibiotics that has long been used in Europe as an additive to animal feeds.
By contrast, Zyvox is said by its developers to be entirely new, a synthetic compound designed from scratch to attack the bacterial life cycle at an entirely different point from other medicines. Because the drug will be different from anything that bacteria have encountered before, resistance should be rare, at least at the start.
"We believe that resistance will be very slow to emerge," said Dr. George Eliopoulos of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. However, at least three cases of Zyvox resistance have already been seen during experimental use.
Zyvox works only against gram-positive bacteria, so-called because of the way they turn purple when stained. Worldwide, more than half of all serious infections treated in hospitals are gram positive. These include staph, strep and enterococci bacteria that cause pneumonia and infections of the skin, bloodstream and urinary tract.
Often these infections are caught while patients are in the hospital for other things, and they tend to be resistant to many of the standard antibiotics in use since the 1950s.
About 5,000 patients have been treated so far with Zyvox, most of them in a variety of comparison studies. However, the drug has also been given to 550 patients who could not use other antibiotics. Dr. Carol A. Kauffman of the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., said the drug cleared up the infection in three-quarters of them.
''It's important to have drugs with new modes of activity,'' said Dr. William Craig of the University of Wisconsin. ''Most of what have come out in recent years have bee too drugs'' the bacteria are already being resistant t x, wneri as linezolid, the first of a class of drugs called oxazolidinones. Dr. Donald H. Bof, Pharmacia & Upjohn aid the last entirely new category of antibiotics was the qunoloines, discovered 35 years ago.
''I've been waiting for this for a long time,'' said Jerry Leo of Brick, N.J., who took an around-the-island flight. ''Once we were up there we never thought of it.''
Hawaii tourism officials played down the repercussions of Saturday's Big Island Air crash, saying most visitors understand that many island activities, such as flying over volcanoes and waterfalls, are inherently risky.
In Hawaii's deadliest sightseeing accident in 25 years, the twin-engine plane crashed almost two miles up the slopes of Mauna Loa, an active volcano that reaches 13,600 feet.
Federal investigators were trying to find a missing body and the cause of the crash in the burned wreckage. Some pieces of the plane were so charred that they crumbled in the hands of recovery crews.
New Hampshire's corrections chief, Hank Risley, was among the dead, that state's governor said yesterday. Investigators said the families of six victims from the U.S. mainland had been notified, while efforts to contact three victims' relatives in New Zealand and Thailand were ongoing.
John Hammerschmidt of the National Transportation Safety Board said investigators don't have a preliminary cause as to why the plane veered off its course and slammed into the hardened lava.
The plane was not carrying a flight data recorder since federal law does not require one for sightseeing planes. But it did contain a global positioning system that might contain some useful navigational data, Hammerschmidt said.
More than 400,000 people a year take in Hawaii's spectacular sites from the sky. Helicopter and plane tours take them within 1,000 feet of bubbling lava, waterfalls and lush valleys that they would not be able to reach by car or even by foot.
''Any activity you do that has danger in it, you run risks,'' said David Carey, president and chief executive of Outrigger Hotels and Resorts and a member of the Hawaii Tourism Authority.
''But given the vast number of air tours that go out every day from all the islands, it's a very safe activity. I believe it's safer than driving down a freeway in L.A.''
Many tourists apparently agreed and had no qualms about signing up for aerial tours over the Big Island just two days after the crash.
''I haven't had one cancellation due to that,'' said Wendy Hart of Island Hoppers, which offers nine daily plane tours. ''We've had questions, but no cancellations.''
The pilot of Big Island Air's Piper Navajo Chieftain last made contact Saturday at 5:21 p.m., one hour after it took off from the airport. The pilot did not say there were any problems, said Gail Minami, the park's operations supervisor.
The fact there was no distress call means the pilot could have smashed into jagged lava without warning, she said. Rescuers said the plane slid about 75 yards, rolled over and burned, but remained mostly intact.
Big Island Air officials couldn't be reached Monday. The company's phone was busy.
09-28-99
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