NATION/WORLD
The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, September 11, 2001- 5
Grand jury will not hear
case alleging Condit told
aides to lie about affair
I Tragedy in Turkey
Panel rejects complaint by
Anne Marie Smith on grounds it
was filed in wrong jurisdiction
MODESTO, Calif. (AP) - A grand jury
has rejected a flight attendant's complaint
that Rep. Gary Condit obstructed justice by
allegedly asking her to sign an affidavit stat-
ing they didn't have an affair.
The Stanislaus County civil grand jury
reached its secret decision Thursday night
and mailed it to Smith's lawyer, James
Robinson, who disclosed the letter's contents
yesterday.
Panel foreman Robert E. Johnson said in
the letter that the jury voted to take no action
because the complaint was filed in the wrong
jurisdiction.
In her complaint, Anne Marie Smith
claimed that Condit, his chief of staff, Mike
Lynch, and Don Thornton, an investigator
who worked for one of Conditcs lawyers,
conspired to obstruct justice by encouraging
her to commit perjury.
Smith said she and Condit had a 10-month
romance and that his intermediaries tried to
get her to sign a false affidavit denying the
affair.
Condit (D-Calif.) has denied asking any-
body to lie, and he disputes Smith's charac-
terization of their association. His attorney,
Abbe Lowell, said Smith and the congress-
man apparently have different definitions of
the word "relationship."
Robinson took the unusual tactic of filing
the complaint with the grand jury instead of
letting the district attorney investigate and
forward the case, if warranted, to the jury.
The strategy appeared to backfire; the civil
grand jury is not authorized to indict crime
suspects.
Robinson and Judicial Watch, a conserva-
tive legal group, chose that legal avenue to
"To speciously claim
that a California State
Court lacks jurisdiction
in this matter is
preposterous"
-James Robinson
Lawyer for Anne Marie Smith
circumvent District Attorney James Brazel-
ton because they said they don't trust him.
Judicial Watch filed the complaint for Smith
because Robinson is not a member of the
California bar.
Prosecutors have said the complaint does
not allege that any state law was broken, said
Carol Shipley, assistant district attorney.
Robinson said in a written statement that
there was no legal basis for the grand jury's
decision, and that there was clear evidence a
crime was committed in California.
"To speciously claim that a California
State Court lacks jurisdiction in this matter is
preposterous," Robinson said.
Smith said in a sworn statement Condit called
her four times encouraging her to sign the state-
ment sent to her lawyer by Thornton.
Smith's relationship with Condit became
public after the congressman was linked to
Chandra Levy, a 24-year-old government
intern from Modesto who vanished in Wash-
ington on May 1.
Condit is not considered a suspect in her
disappearance, he acknowledged having an
extramarital affair with Levy, according to a
police source, but would not admit to any
specifics during numerous interviews with
reporters.
Police inspect the site of a suicide bombing in downtown istanbul yesterday that killed two police officers. AP PHOTO
Chinese coal mines rove perlOUs
The Washington Post
GANGZI, China - It was raining the
night before the accident, and only those most
desperate for cash braved the weather for the
late shift. By the foreman's count, 105 miners
descended into Gangzi village's privately run
No. 5 Coal Mine after midnight, their helmet
lamps glimmering in the dark.
They were a slice of the modern Chinese
working class, men like Wang Xinpo, who lost
his job at a state coal mine after three decades,
and women like Zhan Yun, a mother struggling
to pay her children's school fees. Many were
peasants squeezed by rising taxes and dwin-
dling harvests. And there was a 16-year-old
boy trying to save money for computer classes.
As their shift stretched into its 10th hour,
dangerous gases in a poorly ventilated shaft
ignited, and the explosion killed 92 of them.
The July 22 accident in this hamlet 400
miles northwest of Shanghai was a reminder
of the deteriorating condition of China's coal
mines, where miners perish at a rate of one
every hour, the highest such rate in the world.
It also offers a study of the plight of the Chi-
nese worker two decades after the Communist
Party introduced capitalist economic policies
while limiting political reform.
Workers in China are still portrayed by
the government as "masters" of a socialist
state. But they often toil in wretched condi-
tions, without independent unions or other
political institutions that might temper mar-
ket forces. Economic reforms have also
weakened China's top-down political sys-
tem; even when Beijing wants to help
workers, it often cannot force obedience
from local officials hooked on profits, tax
revenue and bribes.
Among-those worst off are China's estimated
6 million coal miners. Before the reform era, all
coal miners were employees of the defunct
Ministry of Coal, and they were guaranteed a
steady wage and a pension, as well as housing,
education and medical care. But the industry is
in the middle of a wrenching transition, and
two classes of coal miners have emerged in
China, both suffering hardship.
German
ewish
population
explodes
The Washington Post
CHEMNITZ, Germany - The
soprano voice of a 13-year-old boy
singing in Hebrew rang through the
Jewish center here, signaling the
revival of a community that had once
been nearly extinguished.
Alexander Beribes, who is original-
ly from Ukraine, was celebrating his
bar mitzvah, the first boy to be so wel-
comed into Jewish manhood in this
city since the Nazis burned the syna-
gogue to the ground on Nov. 9, 1938,
and dragged the rabbi off into the
Night of the Broken Glass.
"There is Jewish life in this city
again," said Siegmund Rotstein, head
of the Jewish community in Chemnitz
and one of about 80 congregants, near-
ly all of them immigrants from the for-
mer Soviet Union.
As Rotstein watched, the young
man's voice carried him back to the
gutted synagogue and his own aborted
bar mitzvah, which was to have been
Eheld there on Nov. 30, 1938.
In 1990, the official Jewish commu-
nity in Chemnitz, a small, industrial
city in eastern Germany known as
Karl Marx City under Communist
rule, consisted of 12 aging members.
"I was 55 and I was the youngster,"
said Renate Aris. Eleven years later, it
has 390-more Jews than in all of East
Germany when the Berlin Wall fell -
and a new synagogue under construc-
tion. Men chatter in Russian in the
halls of the community house and the
smell of challah bread wafts from the
kitchen where two Ukrainian women
are baking for a street festival.
With Germany opening a landmark
Jewish museum in Berlin on Sunday
- commemorating 2,000 years of
Jewish life here and recording its
destruction between 1933 and 1945 -
the land that spawned the Nazis finds
itself with the fastest-growing Jewish
population in percentage terms in the
world.
A wave of immigration from the
former Soviet Union has at least
tripled the number of Jews in Ger-
many in 10 years. In 1990, there were
29,000 Jews in West Germany and 370
in East Germany - compared with
500,000 in 1933, the year the Nazis
came to power. Today, the Central
Council of Jews in reunified Germany
has 90,000 members; another 60,000
m