2 - The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, November 20, 2001 NATION/WORLD Bush signs airport security bill WASHINGTON (AP) - The gov- ernment began taking charge of airport security yesterday at the start of the holi- day travel season. President Bush signed legislation that will have more screeners peering in passengers' bags and more sky marshals flying on planes. "Today we take permanent and aggressive steps to improve the securi- ty of our airways," Bush said at a cere- mony at Reagan National Airport. The new law will put airport screening in the hands of 28,000 federal workers and require inspections of all checked baggage. The signing of the most comprehen- sive air security bill in the nation's histo- ry came three days after passage by Congress and three days before Thanks- giving. Lawmakers and the administra- tion were determined to act before the holidays in an effort to convince travel- ers that it was safe to get back on air- planes 10 weeks after the hijacker attacks on New York and Washington. Fewer Americans were planning to travel by air this Thanksgiving, accord- ing to the AAA. The group, formerly known as the American Automobile Association, forecast 4.6 million people traveling by air, a 27 percent decline from last year's 6.3 million. The new law, said Bush, "should give all Americans greater confidence when they fly." For many air travelers, already seeing longer waits on the ground and more restrictions in the air, some of the effects of the law won't be readily apparent. "It's not going to be a dramatic change immediately," said Transporta- tion Department spokesman Chet Lun- ner. "There are thousands of posts to be filled ... ald dozens of mandates and milestones." Federal managers will be moving into position at screening stations, although it will take a while, probably three months, before travelers see uni- formed federal workers doing the screening, said Rep. James Oberstar of Minnesota, ranking Democrat on the House Transportation Committee. The law calls for all screening oper- ations, now run by private security companies, to be under federal control within a year, with all 28,000 screen- ers on the federal payroll. After three years, airports can shift to other non- federal security systems if they meet certain conditions but they will remain under federal supervision. There will soon be more law enforce- ment officers at strategic points: At least one must be assigned to every screening station at major airports. Passengers will face more hand searches of carryon bags, more hand- wand patdowns and more computer- assisted prescreening, including crosschecks with FBI and other watch lists. NEWS INBRIEF ALEXANDRIA, Va . Suspect arrested in driver's license scam An Indonesian man named in FBI documents as a contact for airline hijacker Mohammed Atta was arrested yesterday and charged with helping obtain false Virginia identification for another man listed in the same documents as a contact for Osama bin Laden. Agus Budiman appeared before a U.S. magistrate in this Washington suburb on a criminal complaint charging him with helping Mohammad Bin Nasser Belfas obtain a Virginia driver's license. Both Budiman and Belfas are among 370 names included on a detailed FBI list of people sought for questioning in the investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. The list was released last month by Finnish bank- ing authorities. Budiman is identified on the list as a U.S. contact person for Atta, the pre- sumed ringleader of the 19 hijackers. Belfas is identified as a contact person for bin Laden, the prime U.S. suspect in the attacks. According to the criminal complaint filed yesterday, Budiman and Belfas came to the United States from Hamburg, Germany, in October 2000. Attorney General John Ashcroft has said that Atta and two other hijackers were part of a terrorist cell that operated in Hamburg and the United States. WASHINGTON Leahy and Daschle letters linked by FBI The FBI announced yesterday it believes a letter belatedly found last week was written by the same person who sent an anthrax-laced letter to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle last month. Agents have decided on an investigative strate- gy they hope will lead to the sender. The FBI announcement came as two buildings on Capitol Hill struck by the anthrax scare reopened, and U.S. health experts provided assistance to authorities in Chile who found a new letter that may contain anthrax. Tom Skinner, spokesman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, said the agency was planning to test the substance in a letter found by the Chilean government. Skinner said the test could take several days. Regarding the planned analysis of the Leahy letter, "FBI and Centers for Disease Control investigators hope that this careful, scientifically agreed upon approach will yield clues that will help identify the source," the FBI said in a statement. The Leahy letter was found Friday by the FBI and hazardous materials person- nel from the Environmental Protection Agency in one of 280 barrels of unopened mail sent to Capitol Hill and held since discovery of the letter to Daschle. I U.S. to step up Mideast engagement The Washington Post LOUISVILLE - Secretary of State Colin Powell made his first major rhetorical. foray into the Middle East conflict yesterday, repeating American insistence on an immediate end to the 14-month-old violence between Israel and the Palestinians while raising expectations of greater U.S. engagement in peacemaking. After nearly a year of limited diplomatic involvement by the Bush administration in the region, Powell delivered a much-anticipated speech promising "active American engage- ment" and announcing he would be dispatching two senior envoys to the Middle East this week- end to help broker an elusive cease-fire. It remained unclear, however, whether Powell's remarks, which the State Department billed as a major statement of Middle East policy, herald the debut of a concerted diplomatic push by a wary administration or will soon amount to empty oratory. Though Powell's speech held out the promise of a revitalized U.S. role, it offered no new diplo- matic plan. He instead urged the two sides to fol- low the recommendations earlier this year of an international committee headed by former Sen. George J. Mitchell (D-Maine), calling for an end to violence followed by measures to restore mutual confidence and a return to negotiations over a political settlement. Powell sought to reinvigorate the stymied peace process by reminding Israelis and Pales- tinians of steps they needed to take to rebuild the sense of hope shattered by the unsuccessful Camp David summit last year. And he looked beyond the current bloodletting, asking both sides to take up the long-term issues that divide them, such as the fate of Jerusalem and Palestin- ian refugees, with restored U.S. support. "The Middle East has always needed active Amer- ican engagement for there to be progress, and we will provide it just as we have for over half a century," Powell told 1,200 faculty members, students and community leaders at the University of Louisville. Secretary of State Colin Powell accuses Israel of stalling the Mideast peace process yesterday in Louisville, Ky. U. N.: 6 countries making germ weapons GENEVA (AP) - The United said. "The existence of Iraq's program States identified Iraq and five other countries yesterday as states that are developing germ warfare programs but refused to say whether any may have assisted Osama bin Laden in his quest for biological weapons. John R. Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control, said the existence of Iraq's program is "beyond dispute" and that the United States strongly sus- pects North Korea, Libya, Syria, Iran and Sudan of developing programs. "The United States strongly sus- pects that Iraq has taken advantage of three years of no U.N. inspections to improve all phases of its offensive bio- logical weapons program," Bolton is beyond dispute." Condoleeza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, on Sunday left open the possibility that Iraq could become a target in Bush's war on ter- rorism. "We do not need the events of Sep- tember 11 to tell us that (Saddam Hus- sein) is a very dangerous man who is a threat to his own people, a threat to the region and a threat to us because he is determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction," she said. Bolton also told the 144 nations that have signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention that the United States finds North Korea's biological weapons program "extremely disturb- ing." He said the United States believed North Korea had a dedicated, national- level effort to achieve a biological weapons capability and that it has "developed and produced, and may have weaponized" biological agents. He also said the United States was "quite concerned" about Iran, Libya, Syria and Sudan, all of which appeared to have biological weapons programs. "There are other states I could have named which the United States will be contacting privately concerning our belief that they are pursuing an offensive biological weapons program,"he said. "! Bolton said the United States knows "that Osama bin Laden considers obtaining weapons of mass destruction to be a sacred duty" and wants to use them against the United States." "We are concerned that he could have been trying to acquire a rudimen- tary biological weapons capability, possibly with support from a state." He said the United States was "not prepared to comment whether rogue states may have assisted" bin Laden in the plan. Ali Asghar Soltanieh, the Iranian ambassador to the conference, said the allegation that his country was devel- oping biological weapons was "unjus- tified and baseless." , Stats gv e portrait of reg1onal U.0S livin e 1Vin WASHINGTON (AP) - Nearly everyone who lives in Las Vegas used to call someplace else home. North- easterners are more settled, although more suburbanites live in bigger hous- es farther from the job. The Census Bureau's latest statisti- cal snapshot looks at American stan- dards of living at the turn of the century. Still, the information is a year old, and a lot has changed with the economic downturn and the Sept. 11 attacks. For instance, people in the technolo- gy-rich Silicon Valley in California were among the best-educated and well-paid in 2000; the area's economy has taken. a hit this past year. Three of New York City's five bor- oughs had some of the highest poverty rates in the country last year; it is uncertain how the economic fallout from the terrorist attacks will affect families there over the long term. "We've seen the best of times and we've also seen the worse," said Uni- versity of Michigan demographer William Frey. "But we will come back, and when we come back it will be in these same places." The bureau says the estimates from the wide-ranging Census 2000 Supple- mentary Survey are a preview of data still to come from the official head count. Among the highlights: San Jose, Calif., topped the nation with a median household income of $72,268, with San Francisco second at $57,259. Santa Clara and San Mateo counties in California were among the top 10 counties. Longtime San Jose resident Pat Capper was not surprised that her WASHINGTON NTSB: Crash still looks like accident Neither the pilots' conversations nor any background noises in the cockpit of American Airlines Flight 587 show any evidence that a terrorist attack or sabotage brought down the plane, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board said yesterday. A complete transcript of the cockpit voice recorder, including background noises, showed no indication of a bomb or explosion, NTSB Chairwoman Mari- on Blakey said in an interview "You're seeing evidence that points in the direction of this having been an acci- dent;' Blakey said. "We continue not to have anything that points to terrorism." American Flight 587 plunged to the ground minutes after taking off from New York's Kennedy Airport on Nov. 12. The crash killed 265 people. Coming just two months after four commercial air- planes were hijacked, the crash initially raised fears of another terrorist attack. JERUSALEM Latest violence leaves 1 dead, 3 injured Israeli troops killed one Palestinian and wounded another yesterday as the two were planting a bomb along a road in the West Bank. Earlier, three Israelis were wounded in a shooting attack. The relatively minor fighting - and a brief incursion into Gaza by Israeli tanks - came as Secretary of St4te Colin Powell called on the Palestinians to stop violence immediately and insist- ed that Israel halt settlement construc- tion. Both Palestinians and Israelis wel- comed Powell's comments, part of what was billed as a major policy speech that he delivered in Kentucky at the University of Louisville Palestinian Cabinet minister Nabil Shaath praised Powell's firm stand against settlement construction. Pales- tinians want a state in all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with removal of all Jewish settlements there. WASHINGTON Requests for Capitol flags surpass supply A sign of America's soaring patrio- tism: The Capitol has run out of the flags lawmakers give their constituents. Some, 100,000 American flags are briefly flown from the roof of the Capitol each year for the purpose of providing members of Congress with souvenirs to send home to their dis- tricts. The flags come with a certificate of authenticity usually inscribed to recognize an event or person. About 30,000 orders have not been filled, and Jim Forbes, spokesman for the House Administration Committee, said they are about six months behind schedule. Never before has the Capitol run out of flags, he said. "We view it as a good thing because of the surge of patriotism in America," Forbes said, adding that there were about 50,000 requests for flags in the three days after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. - Compiled from Daily wire reports. 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