8A - The Michigan Daily - Thursday, December 3. 1998


NATION/WORLD



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Democratic presidential
rivals lay out proposals
Los Angeles imes
ASIngTON-Vi Pres "There is a difference between using
WASHINGTON -tVice President
Al Gore and three of his possible rivals the rhetoric of the center and actuall
for the next Democratic presidential
nomination traded competing visions of governing from the center..
the party's post-Clinton agenda yester-
day at the first major showcase for the vice President
Democrats' emerging class of 2000. V__e Presider_
Most conventional measures suggest
Gore is the strong favorite to capture the for moving beyond the Clinton time speaking spot - and an extended
nomination. But speaking here to the administration's agenda. standing ovation - Gore called for a
annual conference of the Democratic Strikingly, Gore devoted much of his rew "practical idealism for the 21st
Leadership Council - a centrist politi- address to denouncing the idea of century:' but took only small steps
cal group closely allied with President "compassionate conservatism." That's toward defining the tenn.
Clinton - the vice president's potential the label Gov. George Bush, (R-Texa3) Gore tried to sketch a broad frar*
opponents and even Gore himself sig- the early front-runner for the GOP work for a post-Clinton agenda.
naled that the race may feature a su-pris- nomination in 2000, has applied to his Building on Clinton's argument that
ingly wide-open intellectual debate agenda. Without mentioning Bush by U.S. politics has been polarized by
about sweeping reforms in education, name, Gore argued that Republicans "false choices," Gore contended that
Social Security and the tax code. who support school vouchers, oppose the nation can tackle its most serious
Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and legalized abortion and resist gun con- problems only if it tries to integrate
Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.) and House trol - all positions Bush holds - don't seemingly divergent interests, like the
Minority Leader Richard Gephardt qualify as compassionate or centrist. conflict many parents feel in trying to
(D-Mo.) forwarded ambitious ideas "There is a difference between balance work and home.
in these areas that directly chal- using the rhetoric of the center and Gore criticized urban sprawl, cal
lenged traditional Democratic actually governing from the center," for businesses to provide more flexi
approaches. Their aggressive stances Gore said. ity for parents and insisted that "now
suggest that, if nothing else, Gore As vice president, Gore was more that we have balanced the budget, we
will be challenged in the months cautious in offering his own agenda. should keep it balanced every year."
ahead to lay out his own proposals Given the conference's prime lunch- In a brisk speech, the Nebraska law-

t """

AP PHOTO
U.S. Customs Inspector John France inspects the bags of Beverly Kester at Dulles international Airport in Chantilly,
Va. earlier this month. Last year, the Customs Service seized 858 pounds of cocaine and 803 pounds of heroin
attached to interiatlonal air travelers' bodies or hidder inside them.
Customs Service drug
searches pompt lawsuits

WASHINGTON (AP) --
Returning to Chicago frori Jamaica,
Gwendolyn Richards was plucked
from a line of air travelers by a
Customs Service inspector and
ordered into a bare, windowless room.
Over the next five hours, she was
strip-searched, handcuffed, X-rayed,
and probed internally by a doctor.
The armed Customs officers who
led Richards in handcuffs through
O'Hare International Airport and
drove her to a hospital for examina-
tion suspected she might be smug-
gling drugs. They found nothing.
"I was humiliated -- I couldn't
believe it was happeing," said
Richards, who is back and has
joined a civil rights lawsuit against
Customs. "They had no reason to
think I had drugs."
Richards isn't alone.
Officers last year ordered partial
or full strip searches or X-rays for
2,447 airline passengers, and found
drugs on :7 percent of them, accord-
ing to fgures compiled by the
Customs Service.
Customs officials say tough tactics

are necessary to catch the growing
number of smugglers who swallow
cocaine-filled balloons, insert pack-
ages of heroin into their body cavi-
ties, even hide drugs in a hollow leg
or under cover of a fake pregnancy.
"We still have a major drug prob-
lem in this country," Customs
Commissioner Raymond Kelly said
in an interview yesterday. "We have
to do this."
Kelly said race isn't a factor.
"There are higher risk countries and
higher risk flights," he said. "Those
flights may be more populated by a
particular ethnic group."
Last year, the Customs Service
seized 858 pounds of cocaine and
803 pounds of heroin attached to or
inside international air travelers'
bodies, officials said. More than 70
percent of the heroin seized at air-
ports was smuggled that.
Acknowledging that searches "can
get pretty traumatic," Kelly said
Customs is experimenting with new
technology that might reduce the
number of body searches. The review
comes after seveal lawsuits and com-

plaints from travelers who say they
suffered abusive treatment and hours
of confinement. For instn:e:
® Two Jamaican-bo:-n U.S. citi-
zens each filed a $500,000 claim in
September over body cavity searches
and X-rays in Tampa, Fla. One of the
women learned afterwards she was
pregnant and agonized that her
unborn child might have been
harmed, according to their attorney,
Warren Hope Dawson. The baby was
born healthy. Customs policy
requires a pregnancy test before a
woman is X-rayed, but Dawson said
the pregnant woman was not tested.
0 A 51-year-old widaw returning
from an around-the-wcrld trip was
held for 22 hours at a San Francisco
hospital and given a powerful laxative
while inspectors watched her bowel
movements. Amanda Buritica of Port
Chester, N.Y., won a $451,001 lawsuit
last February against Customs.
0A Boston nurse, Bosede Adedeji,
won $215,000 in a similar lawsuit in
1991 after she was stopped at Logan
international Airport as ;he returned
from visiting her sick son in Nigeria.


y

Gates acknowledges saying
Java' posed potential threat

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Microsoft's top executive, Bill
Gates, acknowledged in videotaped testimony shown yester-
day that he belicved a rival computer language, called "Java,"
could threaten his lucrative Windows franchise.
But rejecting one of the government's most important
claims in its antitrust case, Gates denied that his company
ever tried to discourage software developers from tailoring
their products to use Java rather than Windows.
"Our concern is always to get people to develop Windows
applications," Gates said. "... If we looked at how (Java)
might be evolved in the future, we did think of it as something
that competed with us for the attention of (software develop-
ers) in terms of whether or not they would take advantage of
the advanced features of Windows."
Software programs written using Java, a language devel-
oped by Sun Microsystems Inc., can run on a variety of com-
puters, usually with only minor changes, not just on comput-
ers using Microsoft's dominant Windows operating system.
The government alleges that Microsoft, sensing the threat
from Java, encouraged programmers to use essentially a

Windows-only version of Java, called J-Direct.
"We are just proactively trying to put obstacles in Sun's
path and get anyone that wants to write in Java to use J-Direct
and target Windows directly," Microsoft executive Tod
Nielsen wrote in an August 1997 e-mail to Gates that was
made public Tuesday.
Another employee, Ben Slivka, wrote to Gates in May
1997 that Sun was close to releasing a new version of Jai
"which we're going to be pissing on at every opportunity."
After a lengthy exchange with Justice Department lawyer
David Boies, Gates said of that e-mail: "He might mean that
we're going to be clear that we're not involved with it, that we
think there's a better approach."
The government contends Microsoft sought to illegally
maintain its Windows monopoly among computer operating
systems, a claim that Boies earlier this week described as "the
core of the case."
Microsoft yesterday questioned James Gosling, the com-
puter scientist at Sun who helped create Java during the ea
1990s.

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