4 2A - The Michigan Daily - Monday, January 26, 2004 NATION/WORLD Israel, Hezbollah to swap prisoners NEWS IN BRIEF HEDIE RMAON H OL ^ j w.j.. t 1 't' s i rl i jiU T r ! i ii i lAi l t . I -1L1 L1rGJ1'l1V ~ 1V 1E V 11L BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) - Israel and Hezbollah will exchange prisoners in a two-stage deal in which the mili- tant Lebanese group promises to obtain information about Israel's most famous missing serviceman and Israel releases Lebanon's longest-held pris- oner within three months, the Hezbol- lah leader said yesterday The deal begins with an exchange of prisoners and human remains Thursday and Friday, and will proceed to the case of missing Israeli airman Ron Arad and negotiations for the release of more pris- oners, Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, told a news conference. "After Thursday and Friday, there will be no Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails," Nasrallah said. "But the door is still open and the second stage will be very important, especially for the Palestinians." He spoke a day after the deal, negoti- ated with German help, was announced. After releasing 400 Palestinian pris- oners to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel will bring 23 Lebanese prisoners and 12 prisoners from other Arab countries to Munich where the swap will take place, the officials said. Nasrallah said the Palestinians would include members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the groups responsible for most of the suicide bombings in Israel. AP PHOTO Hassan Balhas, left, and Fatima Azzam Balhas, parents of Lebanese prisoner Ali Balhas, held in Israel for 11 years, sit in front of their house in the southern Lebanese village of Sidiqine yesterday. It will be Israel's most significant release of Palestinian prisoners since Ariel Sharon became prime minister in 2001. The remains of 59 Lebanese killed in battle also will be handed to Lebanese authorities at a border cross- ing in south Lebanon, Nasrallah said. Hezbollah has promised to free Israeli businessman Elhanan Tannen- baum and three Israeli soldiers - all captured by the guerrilla group in October 2000. Tannenbaum is known to be alive. But Nasrallah refused to say whether the three Israeli soldiers were dead or alive. The world will find out Thurs- day, he said. Hezbollah guerrillas captured the Lawmakers work on bills to ease escalating pension woes WASHINGTON (AP) - Lawmak- ers call it a perfect storm, a confluence of events that is forcing financially weak companies to pay billions of dol- lars more into pension plans and threatening the retirement security of millions of Americans. So serious is the situation that busi- ness groups have joined with organized labor and Republicans have allied with Democrats behind a Senate bill to change the formula that determines pension contributions. The measure also provides relief to airlines and steelmak- ers lagging in their pension payments. The Bush administration has issued a veto threat over any bailouts to underfunded plans that would only worsen pension financial woes. But the likelihood is that the House and Senate will move quickly to come up with a bill the president can sign. 'We have a pension time bomb in this country.' - Sen. Tom Daschle, D-South Dakota The House acted on the measure late last year; the Senate is expected to vote on its version this week. "We have a pension time bomb in this country," said Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota). Senate Finance Committee Chair- man Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), a sponsor of the legislation, added, "Just when you think things can't get any worse, they do." Conditions contributing to the per- fect storm include a weak job market, particularly in manufacturing, a slowly recovering stock market and historical- ly low interest rates that have driven up what companies are required to pay annually into their pension plans. Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), also a sponsor of the bill, said pensions are underfunded by $350 billion and that as many as 20 percent of defined bene- fit pension plans are at risk of being terminated or frozen. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., the federal agency that insures the pensions of 44 million Americans, saw its deficit expand to a record $11.2 billion at the end of last year. Its "reasonably possible exposure" from financially weak employers more than doubled last year to $85.5 billion. three soldiers after a shootout on the Lebanese-Israeli border in which the troops were wounded. Israel has declared Adi Avitan, Beni Avraham and Omar Sawaid to be dead. In the deal's second stage, Nasrallah said a committee will be formed to seek information on Arad and four Iranian diplomats who disappeared in Lebanon in 1982 during the Israeli invasion. "Any positive development in the case of Ron Arad will open the way for the release of more Palestinians and Arabs," Nasrallah said. In Jerusalem on yesterday, Prime Minister Sharon said he had been assured Hezbollah would make every effort to find out what happened to Arad, who was captured after his plane was shot down in 1986. "A system was decided on in which all the relevant sides will cooperate fully until we discover the fate of Ron Arad and he returns home - something we all hope will happen in the near future," Sharon told his Cabinet. Arad contacted his family in the first two years of his capture, but nothing was heard after 1988. Nasrallah said further talks are also planned to secure the release of Lebanon's longest-held prisoner in Israel, Samir Kantar. LIBRARY Continued from Page 1A tion)," Wilkin said. The result was the "Making of America" collection - and a new technology that set the Universi- ty apart from its colleagues in regards to digital preservation, Wilkin said. The DGC is not housed in a specific location - it spans the entire Universi- ty library system. LSA sophomore Heather Ross was glad to discover an alternative to searching through microfilm. "I've kind of stayed away from microfilming. It's too time-consuming. This would be more advantageous" she said. The text search feature is distinct from anything the University has offered to date. The Bentley Historical Library has online "finding aids" that are guides to the physical collections. But these are different from the DGC because instead of providing full text, as the DGC does, they only lead students to a box of docu- ments which they must search through. "Online finding aids allow people to do preparatory work to make more efficient use of time when they get here," said Greg Kinney, Bentley His- torical Library associate archivist. The DGC is also available to every- one, including people not affiliated with the University. The collection can be accessed at www hti. umich. edu/g/genpub. "What's important is what we call 'digital inclusion' - making it avail- able to everyone. Everyone in the Unit- ed States, and everyone in the world," said Maurita Holland, a professor in the School of Information. Holland said that School of Informa- tion students engage in developing policies and collections for digital libraries, Holland added. "It certainly challenges students to think, what is the value of a library as a physical place? It is a community gath- ering more often. "In the future, it is important to think of what the library will mean, because the library occupies valuable real estate - it's located right in the middle of the campus. And if we make it digital, your laptop, your iPod, may become just as valuable," Holland said. Students on campus have already begun to weigh the advantages and dis- advantages of the digital collection and have mixed views on the subject. "I think I'll still end up going (to the library). The staff is really helpful," LSA junior Kristen Wisniewski said. LSA junior Chloe Foster said that as a political science major, she would use DGC frequently. "I'm sure that you're missing out without the staff help, but I don't think that's necessarily needed or the most important part of the library. I think it's worth trading in," Foster said. PASA ENA, Caltfd~f NASA gets pictures from second Mars rover NASA's Opportunity rover zipped its first pictures of Mars to Earth early yes- terday, delighting and puzzling scientists just hours after the unmanned spacecraft successfully landed on the Red Planet three weeks behind its identical twin. The pictures showed a surface smooth and dark red in some places and strewn with fragmented slabs of light bedrock in others. Bounce marks apparently left by the rover's air bags on landing were clearly visible in the foreground. "I am flabbergasted. I am astonished. I am blown away. Opportunity has touched down in an alien and bizarre landscape," said Steven Squyres, the mis- sion's main scientist, at a news conference early yesterday. "I still don't know what we're looking at." The National Aeronautics and Space Administration began receiving the first of dozens of black-and-white and color images from Opportunity about 1 a.m. PST, or four hours after its apparently flawless landing. Mars at the time was 124 million miles from Earth. Mission members hooted as the images splashed on a screen in mission control at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "The pictures just blow me away. We've cer- tainly not been to this place before," deputy project manager Richard Cook said. The unmanned, six-wheeled rover landed at 9:05 p.m. PST in Meridiani Planum, believed to be the smoothest, flattest region on Mars. WASHINGTON U.S. and Costa Rica enter free trade deal The Bush administration reached an agreement with Costa Rica yesterday that will allow that nation to join four of its neighbors in creating a Central American Free Trade Area with the United States, officials of the two coun- tries announced. The deal must be approved by Congress. The agreement came after two weeks of intense negotiations aimed at over- coming differences in such areas as telecommunications and insurance that had prompted Costa Rica to back out at the last minute from completing the CAFTA talks last month with the four other nations - Guatemala, El Sal- vador, Nicaragua and Honduras. Administration officials said they were pleased with the market-opening language finally reached with Costa Rica, which had sought to protect its monopoly operations in telephones and insurance. ISLAMABAD, Pakistan Scientists may have leaked weapons info The father of Pakistan's nuclear pro- gram, considered a national hero for giving the Islamic world its first atomic bomb, has been confined to the capital as investigators probe whether scientists leaked weapons technology, an acquaintance said Saturday. Abdul Qadeer Khan has been ques- tioned "many times" in recent weeks, said Zahid Malik, author of the book "Islamic Bomb" on Pakistan's nuclear program. "He's cooperating (with the investi- gation) but he's satisfied that he's done nothing wrong," Malik, who met with Khan on Thursday, told The Associated Press. WASHINGTON Top inspector calls for Iraqi intel probe U.S. intelligence agencies need to explain why their research indicated Iraq possessed banned weapons before the American-led invasion, says the outgoing top U.S. inspector, who now believes Saddam Hussein had no such arms. "I don't think they exist," David Kay said yesterday. "The fact that we found so far the weapons do not exist - we've got to deal with that difference and understand why." Kay's remarks on National Public Radio reignited criticism from Democ- rats, who ignored his cautions that the failure to find weapons of mass destruc- tion was "not a political issue." - Compiled from Daily wire reports. BANGKOK, Thailand Bird flu outbreak hits 7th Asian country Indonesia became the seventh country in Asia to confirm an outbreak of deadly bird flu, as the World Health Organization warned yesterday the virus could be resistant to basic human influenza drugs. The disease has already affected millions of chickens in Indonesia, said Sofjan Sudardjat, a senior agriculture official. But the virus has not yet crossed over to humans, he said. Indonesian officials had earlier denied the diseases' presence, but the Indonesian Veterinarians Association said several independent investigations had revealed that bird flu had already killed millions of chickens over the past several months. Asia is on a region-wide health alert, with governments slaughtering mil- lions of chickens to contain outbreaks in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. Vietnam has slaughtered more than 3 million chickens while Thailand has exterminated some 9 million. Yesterday, the Thai government enlisted hundreds of soldiers and 60 prisoners to help with the mass cull. I I 4 4 WWW.MICHIGANDAILY.COM The Michigan Daily (ISSN 0745-967) is published Monday through Friday during the fall and winter terms by students at the University of Michigan. One copy is available free of charge to all readers. Additional copies may be picked up at the Daily's office for $2. Subscriptions for fall term, starting in September, via U.S. mail are $105. 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