Across the Nation

U.S. to meet with North Korean leader

WASHINGTON - The highest North Korean official to visit Washington in a half-century of limited contacts plans a historic meeting with President Bill Clinton today, amid signs the State Department soon may remove the communist country from its list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Clinton will hold a midmorning meeting with the first vice chairman of the country's National Defense Commission, Cho Myong Nok. He is described as the right-hand man to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il.

After a daylong visit to San Francisco, Cho arrived yesterday night for meetings with Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Defense Secretary William Cohen and members of Congress.

Cho did not speak on reaching his downtown hotel, but in a written statement he said: "It is an important task before our two governments to promote the (bilateral) relations onto a new stage consonant with the environment of peace and reconciliation prevailing on the Korean peninsula at this historic moment into a new century."

"During our visit we will do our best to have frank discussions with American leadership so as to remove deeply rooted and age-old distrust and make an epochal change in advancing the relations between our two countries onto a new stage."

Nerve cell research earns two Nobels

Two American neuroscientists and a Swede who helped discover the key mechanisms by which nerve cells in the brain communicate with each other to create moods, memories and mental illness jointly received the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine yesterday.

The prize, awarded annually by the Nobel Assembly of Sweden's Karolinska Institute and worth about $915,000 this year, went to Paul Greengard of Rockefeller University, Eric Kandel of Columbia University and Arvid Carlsson of Sweden's University of Gothenburg.

Their separate but related pursuits, which began in the 1950s and continue to provide the basis for today's hottest neuroscientific discoveries, have gradually drawn researchers' understanding of the brain down in scale from an initial focus on nerve cells to a close-in view of the chemicals those cells secrete and eventually to the molecules and genes that respond to those chemicals inside each of the brain's 100 billion interconnected neurons.

The result has been a vastly improved grasp of the molecular underpinnings of Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, depression and other neurological disorders, and insights into the biochemical basis of learning and memory.

Richardson: Racial profiling a problem

WASHINGTON - Amid lingering resentment among Asian-Americans over the Wen Ho Lee case, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson announced safeguards yesterday to guard against racial profiling within the department or among its private contractors.

Richardson said he would "not tolerate even hints" of racial profiling and ordered his inspector general to investigate whether any such activity has occurred.

"We have made progress addressing concerns of racial profiling, but more needs to be done," Richardson said.