2 - The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, September 27, 2005 NATION/WORLD Teachers NEWS IN BRIEF ,, ' gunned down in L . (EA~IES~~~~~~~em~~~~~~~m~~- FROM--- .----OUND.aa p. - WWRLD r:, .- I ' i lLL lilLll \ LV 1 Li\ILVl L71\V V 1 V L 1 1 Ili VV tlltl.l.l z 41w Co-owners B.J. Lex, left, and Danny Lex of Lex Farms in Shreveport, La. try to repair water pumps in two of their greenhouses yesterday, because of severe damage caused by Hurricane Rita. Rescuers search hard-hil areas looking.- for survvors The death toll from Hurricane Rita rises to seven after rescuers discover five dead in their home CREOLE, La. (AP) - With Hurricane Rita's floodwaters receding along the Texas-Louisiana coast yesterday, rescu- ers pushed deeper into hard-hit bayous to pull out residents on skiffs, crews struggled to clean up the tangle of smashed homes and downed trees, and Army helicopters searched for up to 30,000 stranded cattle. The death toll from the second devastating hurricane in a month rose to seven with the discovery in a Beaumont, Texas, apartment of five people - a man, a woman and three children - who apparently were killed by carbon monoxide from a generator they were running indoors after Rita knocked out the electricity. While residents of the Texas refinery towns of Beaumont, Port Arthur and Orange were blocked from returning to their homes because of the danger of debris-choked streets and downed power lines, authorities in Louisiana were unable to keep bayou residents from venturing in on their own by boat to see if Rita wrecked their homes. "Knowing these people, most of them are hunters, trappers, farmers, they're not going to wait on FEMA or anyone else," said Robert LeBlanc, director of emer- gency preparedness in Vermilion P'arish. "They're going to do what they need to do. They're used to primitive conditions." And many were finding that conditions were, in fact, primitive. Across southwestern Louisiana's bayous, sugar cane plantations, rice fields and cattle ranches, many people found they had no home to go back to. Terrebonne Parish's count of severely damaged or destroyed homes stood at nearly 9,900. An estimated 80 percent of the buildings in the town of Cameron, population 1,900, were leveled. Farther inland, half of Creole, popula- tion 1,500, was left in splinters. "I would use the word destroyed," Army Lt. Gen. Ru sel Honore said of Cameron. "Cameron and Creole ha been destroyed except for the courthouse, which was bui on stilts on higher ground. Most of the houses and publ buildings no longer exist or are even in the same locatio that they were." Houses in the marshland between the two towns we reduced to piles of bricks, or bare concrete slabs with step leading to nowhere. Walls of an elementary school gymn sium had been washed or blown away, leaving basketba hoops hanging from the ceiling. A single-story white hon was propped up against a line of trees, left there by floodw ters that ripped it from its foundation. A bank was opent the air, its vault still intact. "We used to call this sportsman's paradise," said Honor a Louisiana native. "But sometimes Mother Nature wi come back and remind us that it has power over the lan That's what this storm did." In the refinery town of Lake Charles, National Guard men patrolled the place and handed out bottled water, i and food to hundreds of people left without power. Scorese cars wrapped around the parking lot of the city civic cente Dorothy Anderson said she did not have time to get gr ceries before the storm because she was at a funeral outc town. "We got back and everything was closed," she said. Louisiana's Department of Wildlife and Fisheries said i teams used small boats to rescue about 200 people trappe in their homes. In Chauvin, a steady stream of people wer brought by small boats from flooded sections of Terrebonn Parish. Some cried as they hauled plastic bags filled wi their possessions. "This is the worst thing I've ever been through," sa Danny Hunter, 56. "1 called FEMA this morning, and the said they couldn't help us because this hasn't been declare a disaster area." "Texas is a disaster area!" Jenny Reading shouted." guess the president made sure of that, and everyone ju forgot about us." school School shooting considered rare attack despite continuing violence in Iraq BAGHDAD (AP) - Insurgents dragged five Shiite Muslim school- teachers and their driver intowa class- T0 room, lined them against a wall and gunned them down yesterday - slay- ings in Iraq's notorious Triangle of Death that reflect the enflamed sectar- ian divisions ahead of a crucial consti- tutional referendum. The shooting was a rare attack on a school amid Iraq's relentless violence, and it was particularly stunning since the gunmen targeted teachers in a school where the children were mainly Sunnis. Elsewhere yesterday, a suicide attack and roadside bombings killed 10 s- Iraqis and three Americans, bringing to ve at least 52 the number of people killed ilt in the past two days. ic The Iraqi and U.S. governments have n warned that Sunni Arab insurgents are likely to increase their attacks ahead of re the Oct. 15 national referendum. ps Shiite leaders have called on their fol- a- lowers to refrain from revenge attacks ll against Sunnis, fearing a civil war could ne result, though Sunnis have accused Shi- a- ite militias of carrying out some killings to of Sunni figures. But in one of the first public calls for e, individual Shiites to take action, a prom- ill inent Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Moham- d. med al-Yaaqubi, issued a religious edict yesterday allowing his followers to "kill Is- terrorists before they kill." ce "Self-restraint does not mean surren- of der. ... Protecting society from terrorists r. is a religious duty," al-Yaaqubi said. He o- also called on Shiites to "deepen dia- of logue with Sunnis" who are not "terror- ists or Saddamists." ts Earlier this month, al-Qaida's lead- ed er in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, re declared "all-out war" on Shiites and ne vowed to kill anyone participating in th the referendum. Leaders of Iraq's Sunni minority id are calling on their followers to vote y against the constitution and defeat a ed charter they believe will fracture the country and seal the domination of the "I Shiite majority. st U.S. and Iraqi officials tried to rally Sunni support for the referendum by -- releasing 500 detainees from Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad to mark the coming Islamic holy month of Ramadan, a step called for by Sunni leaders. There have been few attacksron schools in Iraq which have little protection_ though children are constant witnesses to, and sometimes victims of, the violence. Classes had just ended at the Al- Jazeera Elementary School in the village of Muelha, 30 miles south of Baghdad, when the shooting took place at about 1:15 p.m. Police Capt. Muthana Khaled said that as five Shiite teachers got into a minivan to head home, two cars pulled up carrying gunmen wearing police uniforms as a disguise. The nine gunmen forced the teach- ers and their driver out of the van in front of students who were mill- ing outside the school. The attackers dragged the six men into an empty classroom, lined them against a wall and shot them to death, Khaled said. The gunmen escaped. Muelha is a Sunni-majority commu- nity in a region of villages with mixed Sunni-Shiite populations. The mix has made the area south of Baghdad a tinderbox of frequent shootings and bombings, mostly by Sunni insurgents targeting Shiite civilians. As a result, the region is sometimes called the Tri- angle of Death. In the same region, a suicide attack- er detonated his car in a market in the town of Iskandariyah hours after the school shooting, wounding six people, Police Capt. Adel Ketab said. A day earlier, a bomb on a bicycle ripped through a market in Musayyib, just south of Muelha, killing at least six. Farther south, gunmen assassi- nated a senior Shiite official from the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revo- lution yesterday in Iraq in the town of Qurna, near Basra, said Haytham al- Hussein, an aide to the leader of the party, one of the main factions in the government. The gunmen kidnapped Azhar Qassem Abdul Wahid as he was leav- ing SCIRI headquarters, Police Cap. Mushtaq Kadhim said. His bullet-rid- dled body was found handcuffed and dumped by a roadside. WASHINGTON Bush asks for late-term abortion ban* The Bush administration is asking the Supreme Court to reinstate a national ban on a type of late-term abortion, a case that could thrust the president's first court picks into an early tie-breaking role on a divisive and emotional issue. The appeal follows a two-year, cross-country legal fight over the law and highlights the power that Bush's nominees will have. Just a few months ago, there would have been five votes to strike down the law, which bars what crit- ics call partial birth abortion. The outcome is now uncertain, with moderate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor retiring and her replacement still unnamed. "This no longer puts the abortion issue in the abstract with the Supreme Court. This is as live a controversy as you can get," Jay Sekulow, chief coun- sel of the conservative American Center for Law and Justice, said yesterday. BELFAST, Northern Ireland Full disarmament of IRA announced International weapons inspectors backed by Protestant and Catholic clergymen announced the Irish Republican Army's full disarmament yesterday, a milestone in Northern Ireland peacemaking that drew skepticism and scorn from the prov- ince's Protestant majority. John de Chastelain, the retired Canadian general who has been working on the issue since 1997, declared that over the past week he had personally inventoried and gotten rid of a mammoth stockpile of IRA weapons, ranging from flame- throwers to surface-to-air missiles. But the outlawed IRA, which for 12 years resisted British and Protestant demands to disarm, barred the inspectors and the two religious observers from discussing details of what had been surrendered, where it happened and the man- ner of its disposal. MADRID, Spain Terrorist cell leader sentenced to 27 years A Syrian-born businessman was sentenced to 27 years in prison yesterday after being convicted of leading a terrorist cell and conspiring to commit murder in the Sept. 11 attacks. But he was cleared of a more serious charge in Europe's biggest trial of suspected Al-Qaida members. Another man accused of helping one of the hijackers set up a key meeting was acquitted of being an accessory to murder but was convicted of collaborating with a terrorist group. Sixteen other people were convicted of collaborating with or belonging to the terror cell. - Compiled from Daily wire reports CORRECTIONS A campus note in Wednesday's edition of the Daily incorrectly stated that the Physics Department would hold a screening for a taped lecture at 7 p.m. The campus note should have said that Oxford Prof. Jocelyn Bell Burnell would deliver a lecture titled "What Astronom' has done for Einstein" in East Hall at 4:15 p.m. A story in Thursday's edition of the Daily incorrectly stated that cease-and- assist letters would be sent out to ex-AEPhi members. The story should have said that cease-and-desist letters would be send to the ex-members. A story in yesterday's edition of the Daily incorrectly stated that the Pearson Education Measurement is the parent company of the ACT. The story should have said that Pearson Education Measurement and the ACT are partners. A story in Monday's edition of the Daily incorrectly spelled the name of the senior provost for academic affairs. He is Lester Monts. A story in yesterday's edition of the Daily incorrectly titled Stephanie Kao as the president of the United Asian American Organizations. Kao is co-chair of the organization. Please report any error in the Daily to corrections@michigandaily.com. 420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1327 www.michigandaily.com UNIVERSITY OF ST. T HOMAS ; im:. $CH sF LAW :top ' JASON Z. 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