Elko Daily Free Press from Elko, Nevada • 8

8 ELKO DAILY FREE PRESS, Elko, Nevada Saturday, May 22, 1993 News Capsules favored-nation status, which gives it the same low tariffs enjoyed by most other U.S. trading partners. President Bush vetoed congressional bills that would have put conditions on renewing the trade status. A bill before the House again this year would ties renewal to China's improving its record in human rights, weapons proliferation and unfair trade practices. The Clinton administration has indicated it will give China another year of most favored-nation, but will set conditions for future renewal.

Donald M. Anderson, president of the United States-China Business Council, warned th withdrawing or placing conditions on MFN would mean 150,000 lost American jobs, $8 billion in lost exports and at least $14 billion in higher import prices because of expected Chinese retaliation against American goods. Rep. Tom Lantos, Calif, called Anderson's statement "the cheapest and most transparent scare tactics." It disorders" listed by the government. Ron Honberg, general counsel for the National Alliance for the Mentally 111 said, that while everybody with a mental health problem should get help, the scarce federal money should be concentrated on those with the most severe illnesses.

Trade with Cliina WASHINGTON (AP) Lawmakers, criticizing U.S. businesses that contend it would be a mistake to restrict trade with China, say it's wrong to sacrifice principle for profit. "There are no markets so immense and no profits so large that we should set aside the values that hold us together as a nation," Rep. Sam Gejdenson, said Thursday at a panel of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The debate came two weeks before President Clinton must decide whether to renew China's most- XJ it Agents honored WASHINGTON (AP) The four federal agents who died in a Feb.

28 gun battle with David Koresh and his followers were public servants who stood up to a violent criminal. "These were the good guys just wanting to go after the bad guys," Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen said Thursday in an emotional eulogy for the slain Tobacco and Firearms agents. The names of Conway C. LeBleu, Todd W. McKeehan, Robert J.

Williams and Steven D. Willis will be engraved on the wall of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial next year joining those of the 178 ATF agents and 13,078 other law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty. Meanwhile, The Houston Chronicle reported that Steven Emil Schneider, second in command in the Branch Davidian compound, fired the shot that killed Koresh, according to a theory being advanced by pathologists. Schneider then turned the gun on himself minutes before fire engulfed the compound on April 19, the newspaper reported, citing unidentified sources. Mental illness WASHINGTON (AP)-The federal government has broadly defined mental illness to give states wide latitude in deciding who is eligible for public help.

The government this year is giving states about $280 million for mental health services, which represents 5 percent to 10 percent of what individual states spend on mental health. The list of definitions include people with severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, along with those who suffer from disorders such as attention deficit and kleptomania. Alzheimer's is covered, but substance abuse and mental retardation are not. But one advocacy group for the mentally ill said that money could be spread too thinly for the "zillions of Unscramble these four Jumbles, one letter to each square, to form four ordinary words. WROCE 1 PUJEL 1 tyh Sicilian Paolo Cuntrera (foreground) was escorted upon his arrival at Rome's Leonardo da Vinci Airport last September after being extradited from Venezuela.

Paolo and his brother Gaspare were charged with laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in drug smuggling profits. Behind sun-and-fiin: Mafia drugs, money laundering THAT SCRAMBLED WORD GAME WHAT VOUMISHT CALL THIS VAR5ER'5 ESTABLISHMENT. Now arrange the circled letters to form the surprise answer, as suggested by the above cartoon. LA JLLA (Answers Monday) CHOKE TANGLE DOUBLY HAIRCUT $40 SHAVE $20 SHAMPOO $30 BLITAR si SJ MAINEA I I a I LJ besides the tide which the moon THE UNTIED Residents of Sarajevo fear building of ethnic ghettos ORANJESTAD, Aruba (AP) A bout of political mudslinging in this sunny Dutch dependency has revealed a glimpse of the Caribbean's shady side: organized crime's extensive presence in the region. In the bitter aftermath of a hotly contested January election, Prime Minister Nelson Oduber and his opposition are tarring each other with allegations of ties to a notorious Sicilian Mafia family that moved into Aruba in the late 1980s.

The charges are unusual only in that they are public. Many officials in the Caribbean are loath to discuss crime and corruption openly, lest the region's carefully cultivated reputation as a vacation paradise be tarnished. But under the sun-and-fun surface of many islands, from the Caymans to Curacao, is a criminal underground laundering money and stolen goods, running drugs or guns. Law enforcement experts say the Caribbean's politics, economics and even geography have combined to make it especially vulnerable to the mob. Its small governents, often less than professional, are ill-equipped to cope with the problem.

Organized crime is hardly new to the region. Pirates and buccaneers plied the blue-green waters centuries ago. Havana was rife with mobsters before Fidel Castro's revolution (Associated Prwsl and tourism businesses on the islands of Aruba, Bonaire, Curacao, St. Maarten," Parks said. The mudslinging in Aruba involves the Sicilian brothers Pasquale, Paolo and Gaspare Cuntrera, who according to Dutch and Italian press reports made extensive investments in Aruba in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Foes of Oduber allege that members of his Cabinet had dealings with the Cuntreras, who were arrested in Venezuela in September. They were sent to Italy to face charges of laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in drug smuggling profits. "Corruption was not part of our daily life, it was an exception," said opposition leader Hendrik Eman. "Now that's changing." Oduber claims it was Eman who let the Cuntreras into Aruba when he was prime minister in 1986-1989. He says Eman and his aides overruled lower-ranking officials who recommended the Cuntreras be kept out.

"If Mr. Eman wants to talk about the Mafia, he should look in his own backyard," Oduber said in an interview. The Dutch islands are not alone. Money-laundering scandals periodically arise, and often are quickly hushed up, in the current or former British dependencies of Antigua, the Bahamas, the Caymans, Montserrat, and Turks and Caicos. U.S.

drug enforcement officials refer to larger Caribbean nations Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica as "aircraft carriers" for the drug cartels. Even Cuba allegedly has served as a transshipment point for U.S.-bound cocaine. Other types of organized crime also have taken root. In the Dominican Republic a year ago, FBI agents and local police raided an international bookmaking ring that served high-stakes sports bettors in the United States. The operation, which used toll-free "800" numbers, also worked out of Jamaica's Montego Bay, where it was raided in December, and is believed to continue elsewhere in the region.

U.S. investigators say the ring has ties to Mafia groups in the. United States and to casinos in Las Vegas and elsewhere. "They had weekly transactions in excess of $3 million" in the Jamaica office alone, said Jamaica's deputy police commissioner, Bertram Milwood. Milwood said another major racket is the sale of stolen cars from the United States and Europe.

Montserrat's chief minister suffered political embarrassment in 1992 when he had to surrender his BMW. It had had been stolen in Britain, then passed through a ring that shipped cars to Montserrat, Antigua and other islands. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and FBI, Britain's Scotland Yard and French and Dutch detectives all have pushed for tighter crime controls in the Caribbean. Assembly panel votes to draft legislation on defamation suits in 1959.

Thieves and con men like fugitive financier Robert Vesco, now living in Cuba, traditionally have found safe haven in the Caribbean. According to law enforcement experts, events in the last two decades created an even more powerful magnet for big-time crooks. As the cocaine industry developed in nearby South America to feed the American and European markets, some British and Dutch islands were becoming independent and others were achieving greater political and economic autonomy. With few natural resources, the new governments turned to tourism, gambling and tax sheltering as sources of income. "They plighted their troth with the convenience of offshore banking and casino gambling," said Merrill Parks, operations chief of the FBI organized crime-drug branch.

Tourist services "are all cash-intensive businesses," he said in a telephone interview from Washington. "It's easy to hide money in them." More recently, Italian crime groups began forging alliances with Colombian cocaine cartels, often working from bases in Caracas, Venezuela. They found the Dutch islands, just off Venezuela and not far from Colombia, especially attractive. "They've infiltrated casinos, hotel against Edwin Durand, who recently testified in an Assembly Judiciary subcommittee hearing about revisions in Nevada's corporation laws. The suit was filed by Laughlin Associates, a resident agent firm that once helped two California entrepreneurs who claim to communicate with a creature from outer space to set up hundreds of corporations in Nevada.

Eddyjo and Doris Ekker of Teha-chapi, claim to have contacts with someone called Commander Hatonn, who Ekker has described as a tall, nordic extraterrestrial who wears star-trek garb. The Ekkers' Phoenix Institute publications state Hatonn orbits the earth warning people about interga-lactic strife and encouraging them to take advantage of Nevada's lax corporation laws. The suit alleges that Durand defamed Lewis Laughlin and other executives of Laughlin Associates by saying they set up corporations "with the specific goal to defraud states and the federal government of taxes." Laughlin Associates, which no longer represents the alien-directed companies, has registered thousands of new corporations in Nevada. Lewis Laughlin says the company's activity, which is promoted by advertisements in locations such as the Reno airport, is above board. the ones responsible for the war in the first place." Such trends are already evident in the pattern of "ethnic cleansing," where ethnic groups use terror to drive away others from ethnically mixed areas.

ARCHITECTURE STEPHEN PRUITT, AIA Professional Architectural Design for Residential and Commercial New Construction and Remodeling Licensed Architect IdahoNevadaCalifornia Elko references upon request 208.726.3583 SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) Residents of this city that has suffered more than a year of siege think talk of "safe zones" in a new Western peace initiative means Serbs have won the battle to divide the republic. Reports from Washington and other Western capitals said Friday the United States and Russia were moving toward allowing Bosnian Serbs to keep territory they seized in the 13-month war, and drawing Britain and France into the plan. International forces would guard "safe havens" for Muslims in the fraction of Bosnia-Herzegovina that the government controls. But many Sarajevo intellectuals fear that by foregoing military force, the West is moving toward simply establishing ethnic ghettos in a European country a half-century after the Holocaust. "These 'safe zones' are only ghettos," said Josip Engel, a Jew marr-ried to a Muslim.

"It is a policy of determining where people can live on the basis of ethnic origin. It is only going to be more and more painful in the future." Such a strategy may save lives. But critics believe it also rewards aggression, abandons principles of liberal democracy and sanctions factionalism which may spread throughout Europe. "It is not dangerous for us anymore, the war is over," Gordana Knezevic, editor of the Sarajevo newspaper Oslobodjevje, said in an interview. "But Europe is going to pay a high price.

They have encouraged a rebirth of fascism and racism in the heart of Europe." Most of the disappointment has been focused on Western Europeans for discouraging American intervention. Knezevic, a Croat, said she believed the Europeans would rather see the country divided between Orthodox Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats than have a Muslim-dominated state in Europe. Last month, President Clinton appeared to be moving toward air strikes against Bosnian Serbs and lifting an arms embargo against the Bosnian government because of the Serbs' refusal to accept the Vance-Owen peace plan. That plan would have divided the country into 10 aut Answer here: A A Yesterday's Jumbles: Answer; IMBUE onomous regions along ethnic lines. But Clinton backed off because of a lack of support from his European allies, especially France and Britain.

The Bosnian Serbs rejected the plan because they would be required to give up much of the territory they conquered. Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic has suggested a confederation of Serbs, Muslims and Croats. "If the Muslims are not ready to accept this, I believe we will see separate Serb and Croat states," Karadzic said. Critics of confederation believe it would allow Bosnian Croats and Serbs to break with the Muslims and unite with Croatia to the west and Serbia to the east. Even if it does not go to that extreme, the critics believe any formula that encourages ethnic and religious differences discourages development of Western principles of democracy, tolerance and free expression.

"The interests of the individual will be completely subordinated to the ethnic groups," Zijada Krvavac, spokeswoman of the opposition Liberal Party, said in an interview. "These ethnic extremist groups are 1 fer If- VA7 iniwi. Something affects you CARSON CITY (AP) Members of an Assembly panel voted Friday to draft a bill protecting people from defamation suits when they testify in the Legislature, less than a week after such a suit was filed. Judiciary Chairman Bob Sader, D-Reno, asked the committee to introduce a bill clarifying that testimony given in legislative hearings is protected, and that people can't be sued for defamation because of what they say. Sader said he thinks testimony is protected by common law, which means although there isn't a specific Nevada law on the books, there's a judicial assumption protecting such testimony.

"A person who testifies, I always thought, is protected," he said, adding that he wants statutory protection to clarify the position and help people avoid being dragged through court in meaningless cases. Some lawmakers worried the measure might provide too much protection. "Would that be opening it up for somebody to come in and blast anybody any way they want?" asked Assemblyman John Carpenter, R-Elko. Carpenter's fears were calmed, and only Assemblyman John Bo-naventura, D-Las Vegas, voted against drafting the bill. Sader brought up the issue in response to a lawsuit filed this week MAKE IVES.

HlOIFFIitil For City Council Take the a fresh statement with our Post Impressions perm. It's easy style can live with at a price you'll love. Just $47.99 for a limited time. 738-4060. 'Chaek your focal talon lor datalla.

Hair atyla ahown by JCPannay Styling Salon Styllat Jodl Phillip. Rochtalar, N.Y. Long hair or daalgn wrap additional charga. JCPenney Styling Salon 2190 Idaho Stret Loving people seeking to deepen their relationship to Cod and each other. Spiritual Awareness Center Sunday, May 23, 1993 Holiday Inn Speaker: Dorothy Starlite Topic: "The Journey Home" Afternoon Workshop from 2-6 p.m.

"Shamanism" Meditation 10:30 a.m. Regular Meeting 11:00 a.m. I A STRONG AND SENSIBLE VOICE VOTE JUNE 8 Lee Hoffman.