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Calif. official seeks security review at nuke labs LOS ANGELES, June 20 (Reuters) - University of California President Richard Atkinson has ordered a review of newly tightened security measures at nuclear weapons labs managed by the university, the Los Angeles Times reported on Sunday. The order comes amid mounting pressure in the federal government over allegations of Chinese espionage at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is managed by the university under a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy. Los Alamos, near Santa Fe, New Mexico, is where the atomic bomb was developed and where many nuclear secrets are ...

Egypt Christians Face Discrimination By JASPER MORTIMER .c The Associated Press CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - On the surface, Egypt's Christians appear to be doing well. They have no qualms about wearing crucifixes in public. They socialize freely with members of the Islamic majority. Their entrepreneurs are among the barons of the private sector. Still, members of Egypt's Coptic Christian Church say they are victimized by discrimination born of favoritism toward Muslims and resentment over Copts' prominence during the days of the monarchy. The law severely restricts the right of Copts to build churches. Schools ignore Coptic history. Local media give ...

Cisneros Case Focuses on Tapes By MICHELLE MITTELSTADT .c The Associated Press WASHINGTON (AP) - To Henry Cisneros' lawyers, 88 tapes of telephone conversations secretly recorded by his ex-mistress are ``unreliable, unauthenticated copies.'' To prosecutors, they back up witnesses who say the former Housing secretary schemed to hide ``hush money'' to her. A federal judge was to hear arguments Monday on whether Linda Jones' tapes can be used at Cisneros' trial, set for September, on 18 felony counts of conspiracy, obstructing justice and making false statements to the FBI. Also, defense lawyers intend to raise questions about Ms. Jones' motives ...

Pawnshop Target of Fed Gun Agency By ARLENE LEVINSON The Associated Press UPPER DARBY, Pa. (AP) - Three, maybe four times each month, one suburban pawnshop on the rough edge of Philadelphia takes a phone call asking it to trace a gun. The caller - the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms - won't say whether the weapon has been stolen, abandoned, or worse. Just as the ATF won't say now whether Lou's Loan, a bustling little shop, is among the tiny percentage of the nation's gun dealers recently cited as the source of a large percentage of weapons ...

Bush Uses E-Mail To Stay in Touch By JACKIE HALLIFAX The Associated Press TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (June 20) - On a plane, in a car, at the office: Gov. Jeb Bush can often be found typing away at his laptop answering e-mail. He's not alone. Governors around the country say they are turning to cyberspace to stay in touch. Bush says he gets 100 e-mails a day - from constituents, lawmakers, and journalists - and responds to most of them personally. The personal contact is vital, he says. ''It is very easy to have a cocoon be built around a public ...

Clinton Wants Tougher Gun Show Laws By JIM ABRAMS The Associated Press WASHINGTON (June 20) - President Clinton appealed Sunday from Europe for the House to reverse course and impose tougher controls on gun show sales. Top congressional Democrats looked to use the issue to the party's advantage in next year's elections. A leading House Republican accused the Democrats of playing politics with the issue. Rep. Tom DeLay, the majority whip, blamed Democrats for defeating the gun legislation even though Republicans agreed to some controls. The Senate's top Democrat, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, said there a ''glimmer of hope'' ...

Chaos in sunny Kosovo - wish you were here? By Douglas Hamilton PRISTINA, June 20 (Reuters) - Away on the empty plain, a pack of dogs feeds on a dead horse. Under fire-scorched trees on a mountain slope, the metal bones of a Yugoslav Army tank transporter bake in the sun, amid a litter of steel helmets and scattered ammunition. Closed car windows cannot keep out the whiff of rotting flesh, animal or human, that drifts up suddenly from lonely corners of the devastated countryside to make the traveller gag. The roads often turn into tricky chicanes of slow-moving refugee ...

KLA Challenges U.N. Authority By DONNA BRYSON The Associated Press PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (AP) - The United Nations raised its light blue flag over Kosovo Sunday, and with it hopes for order and democracy in the bitterly divided region. But the red-and-black flag of Albania, which flies over their headquarters on the hilly outskirts of Pristina and elsewhere in Kosovo, represents a serious challenge to U.N. authority. The separatist Kosovo Liberation Army is occupying town halls the United Nations says it should administer and intervening in disputes the world body says it should mediate, raising concerns that plans for a multiethnic ...

Extremist Bids To Replace Milosevic By DUSAN STOJANOVIC The Associated Press VIENNA, Austria (June 20) - With Slobodan Milosevic's rule shaken by Serbia's withdrawal from Kosovo, an even more extremist and anti-Western politician is bidding to take his place. After quitting Milosevic's government when NATO-led troops marched into the southern Serbian province, Vojislav Seselj is now poised to mount the greatest political challenge to the Yugoslav president since he came to power 10 years ago. If Seselj succeeds, it will put into place a nationalist leadership even more strident and anti-Western than the regime NATO just tried to bomb into ...

Serbs Complete Kosovo Withdrawal By Matt Spetalnick Reuters PRISTINA (June 20) - Yugoslav forces completed their withdrawal from Kosovo 11 hours ahead of schedule Sunday as Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton agreed to put disagreements over NATO's air war behind them. NATO promptly declared an official end to the air strikes launched on March 24 and suspended since June 10, when Belgrade agreed to withdraw from the southern Serbian province and let NATO troops protect returning ethnic Albanian refugees. Behind the departing Serb troops, NATO's arriving peacekeepers were being shown so many sites of alleged atrocities and massacres by ...

After Kosovo, why not East Timor? The challenge for the new Indonesia will be to allow the East Timorese people to decide their own future. Whatever they choose must be recognised by all concerned -- be it Indonesia or the international community, writes Dr Jose Ramos-Horta. The US/Nato bombing of Yugoslavia has ended, perhaps too successfully for American policymakers. We might be witnessing a new phase in the post-Cold War world with actors strutting across the stage in the human rights charade. The premise of good faith, in the so-called claim of the right of ''humanitarian intervention'' in Kosovo, comes ...

They are pursuing suburban voters sick of divisiveness. It helps explain their striking similarities. The issue is not only our standard of living, but our standards in life. The measure is not merely the value of our possessions, but the values we possess. - Al Gore, June 16, 1999 Prosperity must have a greater purpose. The success of America has never been proven by cities of gold, but by citizens of character. - George W. Bush, June 14, 1999 If you've ever wondered whether there was much of a difference between Coke and Pepsi, Evian and Perrier, or Hydrox and ...

If you missed Algore's announcement on Wednesday, C-SPAN will air it again on "Road to the White House" at 10:00 Eastern, 7:00 Pacific time...

Taiwanese, Mainland Official Get Life Terms for Spying BEIJING, June 20 (AFP) - A Chinese court sentenced a Taiwanese national and a mainland official to life in prison for gathering intelligence and revealing state secrets, official reports said Sunday. Xiong Tianjun was convicted of spying and collecting state secrets from 1990 to March 1997 by the Hainan Intermediate People's Court in southern China Saturday, the People's Daily reported. Xiong, who was allegedly paid by the Taiwan military intelligence agency, was convicted of enlisting Hainan provincial official Xi Shiguo in his efforts, it said. Xi worked with Xiong from July 1996 ...

SENATOR ROBERT TORICELLI (D-NJ). Sure, Toricelli gets things done, but sometimes that means intimidating those who work for him. Pity the aide who got lost while driving the senator through the streets of Newark: Torricelli ordered the guy out of the car and left him standing curbside. The senator greets new hires by pointing out his formidable power in Democratic politics and reminding them that he can ruin their lives if they cross him. Office shake-ups like the one he just conducted at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee are common, as are deep sighs of relief from those who have ...

COLOGNE, Germany (June 20, 1999 1:43 p.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) - President Clinton said Sunday that Russian President Boris Yeltsin impressed him in their hour-long meeting as "clear, concise, and direct and strong." With differences on the Kosovo bombing campaign behind them, the United States and Russia may come out with a better relationship than before, he said. In a television interview, Clinton also disclosed that he half expected Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to give up within a week of the start of NATO's bombing campaign that began March 24 against Serb forces. But he said he realized that if Milosevic ...

Thread 3 is so messed up I started a thread 4 in order to keep posting year by year as I type and proofread. Please connect the dots and keep teh comments coming.

Rep. Tom Coburn prides himself on being a "real world" lawmaker. The US House member and physician keeps in touch with his rural Oklahoma district by returning every weekend - to deliver babies. "Last weekend I delivered four," he says nonchalantly in a soft, Midwestern twang. "It helps me keep perspective." Determined not to stay long in Washington, the ideologically conservative Dr. Coburn readily bolts from the Republican mainstream when he feels his homespun principles demand it. In past Congresses, Coburn might have been dismissed as a fringe extremist. But today when he speaks, House Republican leaders can't afford not ...

AP Reporting KLA and NATO reach agreement to de-militarize the KLA, effectively ending the KLA's existence as a military force.

Thread three's in need of repair. Let's start new thread please. Could someone post a link to thread three here? I don't have my html instructions handy. Thank you.