' 4The Daily Tar HeelWednesday, February 20, 1991
MBIT
Bridge collapses; large
holiday crowd blamed
HONG KONG A suspension
bridge collapsed under a Lunar New
Year crowd, killing at least 23 people
and injuring more than 100 others near
the ancient Chinese city of Xian,
newspapers reported Tuesday.
The newspapers, quoting China's
semi-official Hong Kong China News
Agency, said authorities blamed
Friday's accident on a large holiday
crowd that crammed the bridge to get a
better view of a popular Taoist temple.
There were no foreigners reported
among the casualties.
Xian, a former Chinese capital in the
central province of Shaanxi, is a popu
lar tourist city, famed for its terra cotta
warriors.
The report did not say how many
people were on the bridge southwest of
Xian when it collapsed, dropping the
crowd into a valley. The report gave no
further details.
Employees arrested for
aiding prostitution sale
BANGKOK, Thailand Police ar
rested 1 1 staff members ofThai Airways
International who were accused of
helping to sell women into prostitution
in Japan and other countries, officials
said Tuesday.
The 1 1 were accused of falsifying
identification cards, marriage certifi
cates and other documents to make it
look as if the women they were escorting
abroad were wives or daughters, said
the airline's executive vice president,
Chatrachai Bunya-Ananta.
Using these documents, the staff
members requested airline staff tickets
and endorsement from the airline in
applying for visas, he said.
Once abroad, the women were sold
into prostitution by a gang, he said.
Chatrachai said the national carrier
aided the police investigation by gath
ering information on staff members who
had asked for tickets to Japan or who
went there often. The 1 1 were arrested
Monday.
Gay activists violate law
in HelmsGantt election
WASHINGTON Several gay
rights groups may have broken the law
by organizing boycotts of Miller beer
and Marlboro cigarettes to try to defeat
Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C, according to
Federal Election Commission docu
ments. FEC lawyers said there was "reason
n
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Times may
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to believe" that the groups violated fed
eral election law by apparently acting as .
political action committees but not
registering with the commission as re
quired. One of the groups the District
of Columbia chapter of the AIDS Coa
lition to Unleash Power may have
spent at least $500 "for the purpose of
influencing the North Carolina Senate
election" last year, the FEC found.
"Accordingly, further investigation
is necessary," the FEC wrote in papers
filed earlier this month. The documents
were provided to The Associated Press
by Katherine Meyer, a lawyer for the
gay groups, and Michael Petrelis, a
Washington gay activist involved in the
case.
"We're very disappointed," Meyer
said Tuesday. "We were hoping this
thing would be nipped in the bud, but
they have made the decision that there's
a reason to believe that there's a viola
tion." She said the FEC had asked for ad
ditional information and documents,
which the groups will provide.
Va. governor pardons
man sentenced to death
RICHMOND, Va. Gov. L. Dou
glas Wilder today decided to spare the
life of Joseph Giarratano, who was
scheduled to die in the electric chair
Friday night for the 1979 slayings of a
woman and her teenage daughter.
The governor issued a conditional
pardon that commutes Giarratano's
sentence to life in prison with parole
possible after serving a total of 25 years,
and allows him to seek a new trial if he
wishes.
Giarratano, 33, says he doesn't re
member committing the killings, though
in the past he confessed several times.
He says that they occurred in a period of
his life when he was abusing drugs
heavily and that he has turned his life
around while in prison.
He has become a prominent
"jailhouse lawyer" whose writings ap
peared in such places as the Yale Law
Journal.
He was convicted of the February
1979 murder of Barbara Kline, 44, and
the rape and murder of her 15-year-old
daughter, Michelle.
The two were neighbors of his in
Norfolk, where he was a part-time
fisherman.
His case has drawn the support of a
variety of celebrities, including con
servative columnist James J. Kilpatrick
and liberal entertainers Joan Baez and
Mike Farrell.
The Associated Press
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Yeltsin calls for ' Gorbachev resignation
The Associated Press
MOSCOW Boris N. Yeltsin made
an unprecedented televised appeal
Tuesday for the resignation of Mikhail
S. Gorbachev, accusing the Soviet
president of sacrificing reforms in a
drive for personal power.
Yeltsin has been a strident and fre
quent critic of Gorbachev, but never
before called for him to step down. The
attack seemed certain to exacerbate the
enmity between the two men and to
heighten the Soviet political crisis.
"I warned in 1987 that Gorbachev
has in his character a tendency to ab
solute personal power," Yeltsin said.
"He has done all that and has led the
country to a dictatorship, giving it a
pretty name: presidential rule."
As president of Russia, the largest
Soviet republic, Yeltsin enjoys immense
personal popularity but has had diffi
culty parlaying that into the kind of
political power Gorbachev wields.
Gorbachev has run the Soviet Union for
nearly six years but has been widely
criticized for the failing economy and
the increasing disorder in society.
Yeltsin's nationwide broadcast a
40-minute live appearance was a
World medlia withstand censorsMp9 arson
The Associated Press
Censorship supported in U.S.S.R.
The head of Soviet broadcasting on
Feb. 1 1 defended continued news cen
sorship and said he altered news reports
for political reasons.
Since Leonid Kravchenko took over
Soviet broadcasting in November, the
main news program has sometimes re
verted from wide-ranging political re
porting to little more than readings of
government announcements. The most
daring shows have been pulled from the
air.
"On state television, we can have
censorship," said Kravchenko, citing
limits on coverage of the Persian Gulf
War that have been imposed by other
governments.
Kravchenko also said that in his
previous position as head of the official
Soviet news agency Tass, he altered
news reports for political reasons dur
ing last year's ethnic violence in
Azerbaijan.
"We could not report that two Ar
menians died until an equal number of
Azerbaijanis died," Kravchenko told a
news conference.
Western journalists noticed at the
time that Armenian and Azerbaijani
casualty figures remained remarkably
equal over the course of weeks, and
speculated that the two sides were en
gaged in eye-for-an-eye killings.
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first for the Soviet Union: never before
had an opposition leader been granted
so much time on state-controlled tele
vision. His remarks came after most gov
ernment offices closed but prior to peak
viewing hours. There was no immedi
ate reaction from Kremlin spokesmen.
In the broadcast, Yeltsin said his
biggest mistake since becoming presi
dent of the Russian Federation parlia
ment last May was placing too much
trust in Gorbachev's promises of eco
nomic and political reform.
The heart of Yeltsin's argument was
that power should be shifted from the
central government, led by Gorbachev,
to the 15 Soviet republics.
"I distance myself from the position
and policies of the (Soviet) president, I
am in favor of his immediate resignation,
with the power being transferred to a
collective organ, the Federation Coun
cil of the republic(s)," he said.
The Federation Council, consisting
of the Soviet president, vice president
and heads of the republics, was created
at Gorbachev's initiative.
Reformers' fears of a shift toward a
harder line were heightened in Decem
"I shall do my best not to help certain
mass media to intensify political tension
in society," Kravchenko asserted.
Kravchenko said television and radio
should be limited to the official gov
ernment line because they are using
state-owned transmission facilities.
When the popular and daring politi
cal talk show Vzglyad was pulled off
the air in late December, Gorbachev
was still in the process of forming a new
Cabinet at the time, Kravchenko said.
"This political program cannot be
aired if they are not aware of the political
program of the president and his team,"
he said.
Publication resumes after fire
El Salvador's oldest newspaper re
sumed publication on Feb. 12, four days
after it was shut down by an arson
attack. The abbreviated return edition
bore the banner headline "Onward."
The headquarters of the century-old
Diario Latino, the only local paper that
regularly included the perspective of
leftist rebels in its pages, was nearly
destroyed in an arson fire before dawn
on Feb. 9.
Editor Francisco Valencia blamed
the attack on extreme rightists in the
military, who presumably were angered
by the newspaper's pluralist editorial
policy. The armed forces rejected the
accusation.
The nearly 100 employees of the
uo
Company.
S95
ber by the resignation of Foreign Min
ister Eduard A. Shevardnadze, who
warned of a coming "dictatorship."
Shevardnadze attributed
Gorbachev's shift away from reform to
pressure from the military and the
Communist Old Guard, but Yeltsin laid
the blame squarely on Gorbachev.
The centrally controlled media, par
ticularly the state broadcast monopoly,
have criticized Yeltsin relentlessly in
the past month because of his denun
ciation of Gorbachev's crackdown in
the Baltic republics.
The official Tass news agency carried
a 230-word report on Yeltsin's demand
for Gorbachev's resignation. However,
there was no mention of Yeltsin's TV
appearance on the popular national TV
news program "Vremya."
Yeltsin said it was difficult to obtain
the time for his broadcast. Previously,
he has accused the broadcast media of
an "information blockade" against
himself, the Russian legislature and
separatist movements in the Baltics.
A former member of Gorbachev's
Politburo, Yeltsin was ousted from the
ruling body in 1 987 and has feuded with
Gorbachev since over the pace of reform.
afternoon daily used improvisation, in
genuity and the solidarity of academic
and other institutions to put out a four
page edition. Because the Latino's
presses were left charred by the blaze,
the Feb. 12 paper was printed at the
University of El Salvador.
The edition contained only photo
graphs and captions, most showing the
destruction caused by the fire.
The arson attack was roundly con
demned by politicians, diplomats and
academics as an erosion of the democ
racy that the rightist government says it
is cultivating.
U.S. Ambassador William Walker
visited the gutted plant on Feb. 11.
"Until there is an end to this kind of
thing, I would not make a flat-out
statement that there's a democratic
process in this country," he said.
The National Endowment for De
mocracy, which is funded by the U.S.
Congress, pledged $20,000 to contrib
ute to the newspaper's recovery.
Journalist group protests sentences
An international journalists' group,
in a letter Feb. 13 to the Chinese gov
ernment, is protesting the harsh sen
tences given to two democracy activists
and is appealing for their release,
i "We believe Chen Ziming and Wang
Juntao are being persecuted for their
right to free expression," wrote the
Committee to Protect Journalists.
The letter from the New York-based
group was addressed to Chinese Premier
Li Peng and General Secretary Jiang
Zemin of the Communist Party.
Chen and Wang were convicted Feb.
1 2 of sedition and counterrevolutionary
propaganda and incitement. They were
Allies will use air power
to support ground effort
The Associated Press
DHAHRAN, Saudi Arabia If a
ground war starts, the allies plan to fill
the skies over Iraq with fighters to keep
the remnants of Saddam Hussein's air
force from joining the battle, military
sources said Tuesday.
The plans also include an unusual
joint Marine-Army assault in which U.S.
ground forces will punch north into Iraq
and Kuwait, said the sources, speaking
on the condition of anonymity.
As speculation ran rampant about the
start of an allied invasion, the logistics
chief for Operation Desert Storm de
clared U.S. forces ready despite a few
spot supply shortages. Ground maneu
vering, artillery barrages and other ac
tion offered even more signs an allied
offensive could come within days.
With a Soviet peace proposal declared
unacceptable by President Bush, some
senior officers believe an assault in
evitable unless there is a diplomatic
breakthrough in the next day or so.
"We don't need any more time; we'll
Peace activist
The Associated Press
AMHERST, Mass. A man who
died by setting himself afire had shown
strong interest in politics, but local ac
tivists said Tuesday they did not notice
him at previous rallies against the Per
sian Gulf War.
The man, identified as Gregory D.
Levey of Amherst, doused himself with
a flammable liquid and set himself
ablaze Monday afternoon on the
Amherst common, the site of many re
cent protests against the gulf war.
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Last summer the two men appeared to
agree on a so-called 500-day plan to
shift to a market economy.
But Gorbachev balked, and Yeltsin
said Tuesday he regretted not pushing
harder to win support from leaders of
other republics.
Yeltsin, 60, has quit the Communist
Party and recently has been under at
tack by hard-liners. His aides say oppo
nents have collected enough signatures
in the Russian parliament to call for a
special session at which they are ex
pected to press for a vote of no-confidence.
During his television appearance,
Yeltsin answered questions from two
Soviet journalists who reflected the
Kremlin line that Yeltsin is among the
main causes of instability in the Soviet
Union.
Yeltsin saved his harshest words for
the end of the broadcast.
"The first two years after 1 985," when
Gorbachev was elected general secretary
of the Communist Party, he "instilled
some hope in many of us and practically
from that time, his active policies began
of, I apologize, his deception of the
people," Yeltsin said.
each sentenced to 13-year jail terms.
Chen was director of a private social
studies research institute that published
the now-banned Economic Studies
Weekly. Wang was the newspaper's
editor.
Both activists worked behind the
scenes during the 1989 democracy
movement, holding regular meetings to
advise protest leaders and trying to
maintain control over the increasingly
chaotic seven-week movement.
Both were arrested in the fall of 1 989
and held until their closed-door trials.
Their sentences were announced only
an hour after the conclusion of their
separate trials.
Turks begin publishing again
Ethnic Turks have published a news
paper in their native language for the
first time since a mid-1980s persecu
tion campaign under ousted Commu
nist leader Todor Zhivkov.
The first edition of the weekly paper
Rights and Freedoms was distributed
Feb. 12 in the capital of Sofia and other
cities, said its editor, Zlatko Angelov.
"It may seem like a small victory,"
said Angelov. "But this has been fought
for very hard by the country's Muslim
people. We want to make it a national
newspaper that focuses on Bulgaria's
ethnic problems."
Most of the nation's 1.5 million eth
nic Turks are Orthodox Christian. There
are about 500,000 Muslims in the na
tion of about 9 million people.
The newspaper is being published
with the consent of the coalition gov
ernment, led by independent Premier
Dim i tar Popov.
cut right through them on the ground,"
one senior officer said privately. "If the
Gorbachev plan doesn't work, you'll
see something soon on the ground."
Still, this officer said he did not ex
pect the "G-day" orders before the
weekend. Several others suggested the
assault could come as early as Thurs
day. But with the allies saying they are
destroying more than 100 Iraqi tanks
and dozens of lethal Soviet and South
African-made artillery pieces each day,
others believe the air assault will go on
at least into next week before Bush
sends ground forces into combat.
A ground battle isn't the only con
tingency for which allied forces are
planning. They're also getting ready for
an Iraqi withdrawal.
Most allied officers are skeptical any
peace agreement will be struck, but
they are preparing nonetheless to re
spond if Saddam suddenly pulls his
troops from the oil-rich emirate he
conquered Aug. 2..
sets self ablaze
Witnesses said Levey refused help
from onlookers who tried to smother
the flames with their coats. A police
officer put out the flames with a fire
extinguisher.
Dental records were used to confirm
that the victim was indeed Levey.
He was the son of Boston Globe
restaurant critic Robert Levey and the
stepson of the Globe's Pulitzer prize
winning columnist Ellen Goodman.
They had no immediate statement on
Levey's death.
run