Thursday, April 22, 1999

THE POST

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[prisoners]

Silvia Izquierdo/ AP
Angela Tinoco, 65, cries while holding the picture of her son, Efrain Tarazona, 35, who is serving a 20-year sentence for terrorism, in front of Peru's Palace of Justice in Lima. Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori has pardoned 469 prisoners accused of terrorism in the past two years but recently turned down a recommendation by a commission reviewing cases to free more.

Strickland announces he won't run for Senate seat

U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Lucasville, announced yesterday he will not challenge U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Springfield, for his seat in the 2000 elections.

Strickland plans to defend his U.S. House seat, he said in a news release.

"I am going to remain where I am so I can continue to fight for southern Ohio's working families," he said.

Strickland made his announcement at a Capitol Hill press conference. He was joined by House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt, D- Mo. Strickland announced his interest in helping Gephardt achieve a Democratic majority in the House, according to the news release.

Gephardt said Strickland has accomplished much for the 6th District. He praised Strickland's efforts to improve transportation, education and job growth.

Strickland was first elected in 1992. He was re-elected last November when he defeated Nancy Hollister, R-Marietta, who was Ohio's lieutenant governor at the time of the election.

"(Strickland) and others have come to the conclusion that the best place to fight for Democratic values and ideas is in the House of Representatives," Gephardt said. "Their willingness to stay signals their strong belief that we are on the verge of retaking the House next year."

U.S. Rep Sherrod Brown, D-Lorain, also has announced he will not challenge DeWine in 2000.
High Court: Law might hurt mentally disabled

WASHINGTON - Supreme Court justices worried aloud yesterday that mentally disabled people might be ''abandoned on the streets'' if an anti-bias law is judged to give them a broad right to live in homelike settings rather than state hospitals.

''What bothers me is writing something which, as it works out in the real world, leaves many who need to be in institutions out, abandoned on the streets,'' Justice Stephen G. Breyer said as the court considered a Georgia case that could yield the decade's most important ruling on treatment for the mentally disabled.

Questions and comments from Justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O'Connor suggested similar concerns, and Justice David H. Souter appeared most hostile to Georgia's side of the case, but the hour-long argument session gave no clear indication how the nine-member court will rule.

The court is to decide by late June whether the Americans with Disabilities Act and a related regulation require community placement of the mentally disabled whenever appropriate.

Ruling on a lawsuit by two Georgia women, lower courts said such placement is required unless living up to the 1990 federal law would change fundamentally a state's services to the mentally disabled.

Nationwide, about 70,000 mentally disabled people are in state hospitals.

A 1991 federal regulation requires services provided by state and local governments to be delivered ''in the most integrated setting appropriate to the needs'' of disabled persons, and O'Connor suggested defining that phrase is at the heart of the case.

''It cannot be assumed that because one option is appropriate another is not,'' Downing said in contending that states are free to choose between treatment in community settings and hospitals. She said hospital treatment might be preferred for policy, medical or financial reasons.

But Michael Gottesman, a Georgetown University law professor representing the two women, called their ''isolation and segregation from the societal mainstream of American life'' a violation of the federal ban on discrimination.

Elaine Wilson and Lois Curtis sued Georgia to get out of a state mental hospital. They had been approved for community-based care but faced long waiting lists.

Foreign leaders to mark NATO's anniversary.

WASHINGTON - It took a world war followed by a cold war to get the United States to give up some of its insular ways and look outward.

The nation underwent a remarkable transformation after World War II. Suddenly, faraway crises were America's problem, too. And no more so than in Europe, mother continent to a vast American majority, as she gained protection from her headstrong, grownup offspring in the form of NATO.

This weekend, Washington welcomes 42 foreign leaders for meetings marking NATO's 50th anniversary.

At the start of the alliance, even as the United States was pledging itself to Europe's defense, the country was on the cusp of becoming less European. When NATO started, four in five immigrants came from Europe; that's down to one in five today.

But in the postwar world, America's imperative was clear. No more would the United States hew to a foreign policy line first characterized by the founders. George Washington's caution - ''Europe has a set of primary interests which to us have none or a very remote relation'' - was for the past. Thomas Jefferson's injunction against ''entangling alliances'' would not hold the nation back.

Collective security, so long mistrusted in a nation that didn't enter World War II until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, became ''the foundation stone of all our actions now,'' as Truman put it.

"We have learned that we cannot live alone," President Roosevelt said in 1945. "We have learned to be citizens of the world, members of the human community."

Law school to promote Catholic education

DETROIT - Domino's Pizza founder Thomas S. Monaghan spent nearly four decades making a lot of dough. Then he gave it up to work for someone else: God.

Now, after several years of Roman Catholic philanthropy and support of conservative causes, he is spending $50 million to establish a law school that he says will combine legal advocacy and Catholic morality.

"This is one of the most exciting things I've been involved in my life," said Monaghan, 61. "Certainly, one of the most important. Certainly, a lot more important than selling pizzas, except, of course, that pizza made something like this possible."

Monaghan's planned Ave Maria School of Law has already attracted some legal stars.

One-time Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork signed on as its first faculty member. Rep. Henry Hyde is a member of the board of governors, as is Cardinal John O'Connor, archbishop of New York. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has offered advice.

The school plans to open in 2000 with about 40 students and seven or eight teachers. It will rent space in or around Ann Arbor, where Monaghan lives and Domino's is based.

The law school is part of Monaghan's larger effort to promote Catholic education.

Democrats' best prospects won't run for House

WASHINGTON - Another Ohio congressman took himself out of consideration for next year's Senate race, putting the state's Democrats back into recruitment mode.

Freshman Republican Sen. Mike DeWine is up for re-election in 2000, and Democrats for months had been salivating over the chance to make his active role in the presidential impeachment process a campaign issue.

But two of the best prospects approached about running against DeWine would rather stay where they are, in the House.

Rep. Ted Strickland dropped his flirtation with the idea yesterday, and Rep. Sherrod Brown previously took himself out of consideration.

Both described the decision a reflection of their belief Democrats can regain control of the House in the 2000 elections, something underscored when the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the top Democrat in the House stood in the rain on the Capitol lawn to show their delight with Strickland's choice.

Strickland said he opted against a Senate run because he didn't think he could be a proper candidate without allowing his work in the House to suffer.

Columbus mayor urges analysis of new rules

WASHINGTON - The government should act more like business and do cost-benefit analyses on new regulations, Columbus Mayor Greg Lashutka told senators yesterday.

Lashutka urged senators to pass legislation requiring federal agencies to do such analyses before issuing new regulations that would have a total annual impact of $100 million or more.

Doing that before a regulation takes effect can help avoid surprises, he said. Lashutka pointed to a housing rule that recently was withdrawn in the face of widespread complaints from cities around the nation - complaints that weren't heard earlier because there was no requirement that the cities be consulted.

If this legislation were in place, it would have compelled conversation between federal and local governments before unintended consequences occur, the mayor said.

The legislation generally is supported by business and the Clinton administration but opposed by some environmental and consumer groups.

''It is our belief that this legislation will result in extensive delays in the time it takes for regulatory decisions to be made and will thus undermine federal agencies' ability to protect public health, worker safety and the environment,'' said Patricia Kenworthy of the National Environmental Trust.

David Vladeck, director of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, said the bill would ''do real harm'' and ''work to block or weaken urgently needed safeguards.''

Prominent among the skeptics is Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., a member of the committee considering the bill.

''Trying to reform every type of regulation with a single law poses, it seems to me, too high a risk to the public's health and safety,'' he told fellow members of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.

He said he favored allowing other recent changes in the law more time before deciding whether more changes were in order.

Another committee member, Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, said there's no reason to delay imposing the cost-benefit analysis on future, costly regulations.

He said he would have loved, as governor, to have been able to point to an independent scientific analysis to show why tailpipe testing of cars' emissions was worth the trouble and money.

''What we're talking about here today is something that appeals to common sense,'' he said. ''It's nice to know, whether you're a business or a governmental agency, that the costs that are incurred in order to do what you want to do really make a difference.''

General Electric chairman defends salary at meeting

CLEVELAND - General Electric Co. Chairman John F. Welch Jr. defended his status as one of the nation's highest-paid executives yesterday at the company's annual meeting.

A shareholders' proposal discussed at the meeting would have forced the GE board to "set a reasonable ratio" between the chief executive's pay and incentives and the pay received by the lowest-paid GE worker.

"It's time for a change. It's time we discuss the effect of concentrated wealth on our company, on our country and on democracy," said Scott Klinger, director of Responsible Wealth, an organization seeking controls on corporate executive compensation.

The company recommended that the proposal be rejected, and it was supported by only 5 percent of the shares voted.

According to GE's records, Welch received a base salary of $2.8 million in 1998 and a bonus of $7.2 million, nearly $1 million in other compensation and stock options on 500,000 shares that could be worth $63 million in 10 years at a 10 percent annual growth rate.

Welch pointed out the company gives wealth opportunities to others, too.

"Our hourly employees five years ago had $300 million in their savings plans," Welch said. Those plans are now worth $2 billion.

"We've got 50 hourly millionaires," Welch said.

In all, nine shareholders' proposals discussed at the meeting and opposed by the GE board were rejected.

Among them was a proposal of Dominican and Maryknoll nuns urging GE become more environmentally active and to support an education effort on cancer dangers in the New York-New Jersey region due to polychlorinated biphenyls in fish in the Hudson River.

The nuns want GM to admit to its role in the problem, but Welch said the company complies with environmental standards and that the dangers caused by PCBs might be overstated.

Also rejected was a proposal of retirees to eliminate retirement benefits of outside directors. The proposal was largely an effort of GE retirees to draw attention to their call for improved pensions.

Helen Quirini, 79, of Schenectady, N.Y., told Welch she worked for GE for 39 years and now struggles with a monthly pension of about $570. She argued that the company's pension fund holds $43 billion and that pension increases would not harm GE.

About 1,000 shareholders attended the annual meeting at the International Exposition Center adjacent to Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. It was the first GE annual meeting held in the Cleveland area in 40 years.






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