- The Michigan Daily - Wednesday, March 18, 1998
Little Rock
prepares
or ones
civil tria
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) -
With this year's trial of the century
two months away, the city is tearing
up hotels, renovating the courthouse
and raising hotel prices in prepara-
tion for an invasion of reporters.
Much of the work is going on at
the Legacy Hotel, a pink five-story
building across the street from the
federal courthouse where Paula
Jones' sexual harassment suit
against President Clinton is to begin
May 27.
All 116 rooms have been booked
by news organizations, which are
paying thousands of dollars to make
temporary renovations, including
ripping out closets for cameras and
installing windows that offer a
Wlarc-free, wet-or-dry view of the
courthouse.
The 12 rooms with the special
glass have been offered to broad-
casters for $250 a night and an
upfront $15,000 fee - nonrefund-
able in the event the lawsuit is set-
tied.
if the networks can't pay the rates,
they should charge more for com-
mercials, said Linda Ward, the
hotel's general manager.
"They can jack up their prices,"
she said. "I have 12 very vital
rooms."
Not vital enough for CBS.
"I thought it was a little bit exor-
bitant to charge us that for what they
were going to do," said Wayne
Nelson, Dallas bureau chief for the
network. "Also, they wanted a lot of
money up front, which I can't do."
Downtown hotels that this week
are charging between $72.50 and
$121 a night plan to charge between
$90 and $127 a night in late May,
when about 500 journalists are
NATION/WORLD
Congress, Clinton repla
dispute over spending
AP PHOTO
White House spokesperson Mike McCurry speaks yesterday about allegations of
sexual misconduct filed against President Clinton. The lawsuit brought against
Clinton by Paula Jones will go to trial in Little Rock in May.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Twice, congressional
Republicans have tried to win their way by attaching
policy amendments to spending bills that must be enact-
ed -- and twice they've lost to President Clinton.
They're back for a third try.
There are new issues, which could work to the GOP's
advantage in the replay. There also are familiar ones that
undercut them before - appropriations for disaster
relief to aid victims of the El Nino storms and floods
and to pay for U.S. military operations in the Persian
Gulf and Bosnia.
And there is enough in common with earlier rounds
for Clinton's opening salvo on the subject, broadcast this
weekend, to echo what he said last time, 14 months ago.
"These emergency measures are vital to the national
interest," he said in his radio address, "... but unfortu-
nately, some in Congress are prepar-
ing to slip unrelated controversial
provisions into the bill, proposals News
guaranteed to produce gridlock and
delay."
Plus, he suggested, another veto, as
when he vetoed a disaster relief appropriation in June
1997 to block two unrelated Republican provisions and
won a settlement that stripped them from the bill, after
polls showed the GOP was being blamed for the delay.
"Congress would be unwise to head down that same
road again," he said. Clinton said he wants straightfor-
ward emergency money measures.
"No unacceptable provisions. No political gimmicks."
But his side of the argument isn't as simple as it was
in 1997, when the bill was largely for disaster relief after
Midwestern flooding.
The wrangling over Republican add-ons tied it up for
three months.
The tactic is nothing new. It is to use bills that will be
difficult for the president to veto as the vehicles for leg-
islation that would be blocked, by majorities or fili-
busters, were it handled separately.
Democrats used to do the same thing when they con-
trolled Congress and Republicans were in the White
House.
Now storm disaster aid is part of the package, "per-
haps most important of all," Clinton said, but not all.
The broader dispute involves the payment of back
dues to the United Nations and money to replenish the
International Monetary Fund after Asian economic
crises.
Clinton's case may be more difficult on the interna-
tional spending items than it was when his vetoes of
A
Republican spending cuts led to partial government
shutdowns in 1995 and early 1996, and they got the
political blame.
They did, again, in the disaster relief dispute of 1997;
when Clinton's veto was over GOP amendments to bar
the use of statistical sampling as part of the year 2000
census, and to automatically reduce and extend appro-
priations when Congress and the White House can't
come to terms on spending.
In each case, the settlement was on Clinton's terms,
with compromises on the side to deal with the disputes.
Now Republicans are pushing anti-abortion amend-
ments to the international spending measures, seeking a
ban on use of U.S. funds in support of foreign organiza-
tions that work against abortion restrictions, even when
that is done without American money.
That same dispute blocked the
same appropriations late in 1997,
1n lys s S before economic turmoil in Asia,
which the White House said
makes the $18 billion IMF appro-
priation "essential to our own
economic health."
The administration and Congress are working on pro-
visions involving IMF operations - legitimate con-
cerns, according to the White House. But the abortion
issue is the collision point.
And that is further complicated because some of the
same congressional conservatives who advocate the
anti-abortion provision also are opposed to appropriat-
ing nearly $1 billion to pay most of the back dues owed
the United Nations.
There's a separate disagreement over the emergency
appropriations for disaster aid and troops, because con-
servatives are demanding offsetting cuts in domestic
spending to cover the more than $2.4 billion involved. *
That is not required on emergency supplemental
appropriations bills, but they call it a test of balanced
budget discipline.
That would force cuts in programs Clinton is deter-
mined to defend.
And yet another dispute is over a GOP proposal to
keep the Federal Communications Commission from
requiring that television stations offer political candi-
dates free broadcast time, which Clinton advocates in
the name of campaign finance reform.
Clinton wants stripped-down "straightforward emer-
gency measures."
Republicans want to force their issues into the money
bills.
expected to arrive for the trial,
which is expected to last six weeks.
The Excelsior Hotel -- where Jones
said Clinton propositioned her in
1991 --will charge $115 a night.
Tim Tison, coordinating producer
of ABC, turned down the Legacy's
glare-free window rooms and decid-
ed to move his journalists to hotels
farther from the courthouse whose
rates "don't seem to be out of line."
A media consortium is arranging
to rent a warehouse and convert it
into office space. A similar layout
was used at the Oklahoma . City
bombing trials in Denver.
"There's no use reinventing the
wheel, so to speak," said Bob
Trevino, an administrative assistant
in the city manager's office.
In the courthouse, workers are
renovating an old bankruptcy court
to serve as a listening room for jour-
nalists. The main courtroom holds
130 to 140 people; it's unclear how
many of those spots will be reserved
for the media.
Police decided not to close the
four-lane street that runs in front of
the courthouse and connects the
state Capitol to the heart of the city's
business district.
Although Clinton is not expected
to attend the trial, his supporters and
haters will likely line up outside
along with the media.
"We're trying to determine how to
best have the circus go on while
everyday work has to continue in the
area," said Stan Jackson, whose
company wants to rent out risers so
broadcasters can have a view of the
courthouse without fighting for
space on the sidewalk.
Study supports genetic engineering
I
Marching for equality
WASHINGTON (AP) - In an
animal experiment that one day may
lead to repair of human hearts,
researchers showed that genetically
engineered cells can be injected into
cardiac muscle to replace tissue
killed by a heart attack.
The experiment indicates that it
eventually may be possible to cause
new heart muscle cells to grow and
replace muscle tissue killed in a
heart attack, Dr. William Claycomb
of the Louisiana State University
Medical Center said Monday.
It also demonstrates, for the first
time, that mammal heart cells can
be genetically engineered to grow
and reproduce endlessly in a test
tube.
Claycomb said that his lab also
was able to show that genetically
"In theory, this could help us learn
how to repair a damaged heart .., "
- Dr. William Claycomb
Louisiana State University Medical Center
altered mouse heart cells could sur-
vive and beat like normal heart mus-
cle cells when placed into the dam-
aged heart of a pig.
It is not clear, however, if the
implanted cells actually assisted the
work of the heart, he said.
"In theory, this could help us learn
how to repair a damaged heart by
injecting new heart muscle cells into
the scar tissue that forms after a
heart attack," Claycomb said.
He emphasized that the work is
I I I
I
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It's not
easy being
Black & White!
"in a very early experimental stage"
and is many years away from being
ready for trying in humans.
The most important thing, he said,
is that the work proves that mam-
malian heart cells can be forced to
divide and form new cells that have
the pulsating beat and other charac-
teristics of heart cells.
"It is a very important advance,"
said Dr. Kenneth Chien, a professor
of medicine at the University of
California, San Diego.
"The work challenges the dogma
that it is not possible to create a cell
line that displays the unique features
of an intact heart."
le said the work "will embolden
others" to develop human heart cell
lines and to conduct experiments
previously not thought possible.
Heart muscle cells, unlike other
muscles, do not repair themselves.
As a result, when a person suffers a
heart attack, muscle cells that die
are not replaced.
Instead, scar tissue grows where
the muscle once was.
"If too much heart muscle is
destroyed, then the heart can't pump
and the person dies," Claycomb said.
The inability of heart muscle cells
to reproduce prevents them from
becoming cancerous.
But it also means that no new
heart cells are grown in the adult
heart.
in the LSU study, the researchers
used a mouse whose heart tissue had
been genetically changed by the
introduction of an oncogene, a type
of gene that causes cells to repro-
duce and turn cancerous.
Claycomb said the alteration gave
the mouse heart muscle cells the
ability to reproduce endlessly in the
laboratory.
The mouse cells were then inject-
ed into the hearts of pigs that had
been induced to have heart attacks.
Claycomb said the mouse heart cells
were able to live and appeared to
function normally when placed next
to healthy heart cells.
The cells, however, did not sur-
vive when they were placed into the
scar tissue that was caused by the
heart attack.
"The cells appear to couple with
their neighbor cells," Claycomb
said. "They beat with their neighbor
cells."
Injected mouse heart cells also
caused the formation of new blood
vessels near the injection site, he
said.
But Claycomb said that his team
has yet to prove that the injected
cells actually improved the function
of the damaged heart.
Nor has it been shown that the
transplanted cells adopted the same
synchronized beat of normal,
healthy hearts, he said.
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AP PHOTO
A Nicaraguan medical worker holds up a copy of his paycheck showing
that he makes about $150 as an anesthesiologist. Public sector doctors
marched through the streets of Managua yesterday.
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