®lff Saily ®ar Uppl
Senate Looking to Regulate
Kids’ Access to Cyberpom
LA. TIMES/WASHINGTON POST NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON Patricia Shao, a
mother of two who lives in Bethesda, Md.,
is the first to say that she’s “not a 1950s
kind of mother.” But she was shocked last
month to discover that her 13-year-old
daughter had been propositioned electroni
cally while using America Online.
Shao was one of two parents who testi
fied Monday before the Senate Judiciary
Committee in what Sen. Charles Grassley,
R-lowa,said was the first congressional
hearing on regulating indecent and ob
scene material on the Internet.
Last month, Grassley asked Congress
to outlaw “computer system operators
(who) knowingly transmit indecent mate
rial to a child ...(and) ‘willfully’ permit
their system to be used as a conduit for
indecent communications intended for
children.”
Monday Grassley said, “Suddenly not
even the home is safe.... We in Congress
can’t just sit by and sit this one out." The
testimony, however, illustrated how even
the seemingly protecting kids on-line can
become easily entangled in controversy
and in wrangling over definitions.
For example, one Florida 15-year-old,
Donelle Gruff— who had been described
at the hearing as a “victim” of on-line
abuse told a reporter, “I wouldn’t tell
anyone not to go on-line. It’s fun. You
leant a lot. You’ve just got to be careful.”
Early this year, Gruff was invited to
peruse a local electronic bulletin board.
Paris Tense
ASSOCIATED PRESS
PARIS Police increased patrols of
Paris subways Wednesday after a bomb
killed five people and injured more than 80
on a rush-hour train. The interior minister
told citizens to be on the lookout for suspi
cious people and packages.
Despite the increased police presence,
a man committed suicide today at the ex
act spot of the bombing by jumping in front
of a train at the St. Michel station in the
Latin Quarter.
The man was not immediately identi
fied.
There was no claim of responsibility for
the attack, but speculation most often fell
on two possibilities: a militant Islamic group
fighting the government in Algeria, which
has the tacit backing of France, its former
colonial ruler; oir on Bosnian Serbs in re
taliation for a reported French attack Sun
day on their positions in the rebel strong
hold of Pale.
About 1,800 extra police were sent to
train stations, airports and large shopping
centers around the country amid fears that
a string of terrorist attacks might occur as
they did in 1986, the year of the last fatal
bombings in Paris.
Open Meetings
ASSOCIATED PRESS
DOBSON —A Surry County Superior
Court judge has ruled that the county com
missioners violated the state Open Meet
ings Law by refusing to release informa
tion about land that the board discussed in
a closed session May 15.
Judge Judson D. Deßamus Jr. ruled
Monday that the owners, locations and
purposes of the properties should have
been discussed in public. He ordered the
county to pay half of the legal costs for the
newspaper that brought the lawsuit.
The ruling meant that the closed meet-
Agent Challenges
Clinton’s Claims
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON, D.C. ln an account directly at odds with
the White House, a Secret Service officer testified Wednesday
that he saw Hillary Rodham Clinton’s top aide leave Vincent
Foster’s office area with a stack of documents the night of Foster’s
death.
Margaret Williams, the first lady’s chief of staff, “was carry
ing, in her arms and her hands, what I would describe as file
folders," Secret Service officer Henry P. O’Neill told the Senate
Whitewater Committee. “She walked past me ... and started to
enter her office. She came out a few moments later and locked her
office,” he said. O’Neill said he witnessed the incident after he
returned to Foster’s office suite to secure the doors after learning
of Foster’s 1993 suicide.
Williams has denied removing anything from the office, and
the White House has said she passed a lie detector test. The White
House has said three aides, including Williams, briefly searched
the late deputy counsel’s office for a suicide note but that none was
found, and no papers were removed.
The Senate committee is tiying to determine whether the
White House tried to hide police sensitive files in Foster’s office,
including documents involving the Clinton’s Whitewater deal.
On Tuesday, presidential aide Patsy Thomasson, who accom
panied Williams on a brief search, testified that neither she nor
Williams nor anyone else removed anything from Foster’s office.
Thomasson testified her boss, former presidential aide W. David
Watkins, called her from a restaurant after learning that Foster,
the deputy White House counsel, had shot himself in a park.
Thomasson insisted there was nothing sinister about the visit
and that no evidence was hidden or destroyed. “I was in shock. I
was in disbelief,” she testified. “I thought that if someone was
going to leave a suicide note, they would leave it where it could be
easily found.”
Thomasson said she found nothing after checking the top of
Foster’s office furniture, glancing into desk drawers and quickly
peeking into a briefcase under the desk. Six days later, aides found
a tom handwritten note from Foster lamenting his troubled times
in Washington in that briefcase.
The person who ran it, “Bill,” soon began
asking her personal questions, and elec
tronically following heT as she went to
other bulletin boards. Bill knew where
Donelle lived because she had supplied her
address when she signed up to use his
bulletin board.
He later showed up in person at her
house and even followed her as she went to
a local bowling alley. Although Donelle’s
family calls the case on-line “stalking,’'
Sgt. Stephanie Campbell of the Pinellas
County (Fla.) Sheriffs Department said
that the occasional contact between the 20-
year-old bulletin board operator and
Donelle did not fall under the state’s stalk
ing law.
Barry F. Crimmins, a writer and
children’s rights advocate in Lakewood,
Ohio, said that the number of pornographic
images he has seen on-line horrifies him.
“What has recently taken place is nothing
short of the de facto decriminalization of
child pornography,” he told the senators.
“I think the laws about transmission or
trafficking in child pornography are fine,”
he said later, although he advocates more
money be spent enforcing them. “But per
haps we need anew law, dealing with
accessories and facilitators—like America
Online in particular,” he added.
Industry representatives argued that the
market was beginning to address such prob
lems by creating software that parents could
use to filter out objectionable material.
According to America Online’s counsel,
After Subway Bombing
Police were searching coin-operated
lockers atParis train stations, Interior Min
ister Jean-Louis Debre said.
“You must help us,” Debre said in an
interview on the radio network France-
Inter. “You must be vigilant about pack
ages you notice, about people who act
suspiciously.”
He said he hoped “all citizens will rally
to fight terrorism.”
Two French-based Muslim groups con
demned the attack. The Union of Islamic
Organizations in France and the National
Coordination of Muslims of France called
the bombing “a barbarous act aiming to
disrupt the peace and security of our soci
ety.”
The bomb exploded at 5:30 p.m. as the
train pulled into the Samt-Michel station
along the Seine River near Notre flame
cathedral. The explosion set off a smoky
fire inside the train, shattered glass and
tangled metal.
The train was part of the RER system
that serves Paris’ suburbs and is separate
from the Paris Metro underground system.
One of Paris’ busiest tourist areas, St.
Michel quickly became an open-air hospi
tal. More than 500 police, medics and
Law Violated By Surry County
ings were illegally called. Under state law,
people can ask the court to invalidate any
thing done at an illegally called meeting.
After the ruling, Piedmont Publishing
Cos., which publishes the Winston-Salem
Journal, withdrew its request for the court
to void the action the board took in the
closed session.
The newspaper’s attorney, Hugh
Stevens, said this was the first time to his
knowledge that the issues concerning land
acquisition and the state open-meetings
law have been ruled on in court.
Piedmont Publishing filed the lawsuit
OJ. Trial Drafting
Another N.C. Prof
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WINSTON-SALEM OJ. Simpson’s lead attorney will
travel to North Carolina to argue for enforcement of a subpoena
against a screenwriting professor.
Attorney Johnnie Cochran Jr. will appear Friday in Forsyth
County Superior Court in Winston-Salem to argue that Laura
Hart McKinny should surrender videotaped interviews of Detec
tive Mark Fuhrman.
Cochran also wants McKinny to come to Los Angeles to testify
at Simpson’s trial.
McKinny, a professor in the filmmaking school at the North
Carolina School of the Arts, is resisting the subpoena, which was
filed July 20.
She and her attorneys will hold a news conference at 3 p.m.
Wednesday.
“We’ll be discussing why she was served, why she’s opposing
the execution of the subpoena,” attorney Matthew Schwartz of
Los Angeles, who is in Winston-Salem, said Tuesday.
McKinny could not be reached for comment. She did not
answer a message left at her home and calls to her office were
referred to Schwartz.
Simpson’s defense team hired Robert Craig, a lawyer in
Burlington, N.C., as the local attorney. Craig said Monday that
McKinny interviewed Fuhrman and other Los Angeles police
officers about their jobs between 1985 and 1994.
"She’s got certain tapes and transcripts that the defense thinks
can show that Fuhrman has made numerous statements in the
past that are racist,” he said.
Simpson’s attorneys have characterized Fuhrman as a racist,
and their attacks on him have questioned whether he might have
planted evidence.
McKinny told the Winston-Salem Journal last week that she
uses her interviews as a basis for writing screenplays.
Cochran also wants one ofMcKinny’s screenplays, she told the
paper. She said she expects her attorney will resist the subpoena
under the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech and a
free press.
A reluctant Judge William Wood will hear Cochran’s argu
ment to enforce the subpoena. “I had no desire to be a part of that,”
Wood said of the Simpson trial.
STATE & NATIONAL
William Burlington, the company now
has 24 people monitoring the creation of
“public chat rooms,” where many sala
cious comments have been exchanged.
“We’re going to double that number (of
monitors) again,” Burrington pledged.
Both Burrington and Jerry Berman,
executive director of the Center for De
mocracy and Technology, a civil liberties
organization, argued against the need for
additional legislation.
Although Grassley has argued that his
bill is narrowly focused on reducing por
nography aimed at children, Berman con
tended that “the statute is in fact strikingly
broad, ” potentially applying to any organi
zation that “merely” provides minors with
a way to tap into the Internet.
Berman said that, “Confusion as to pro
viders’ legal duty will create a tremendous
chilling effect on all on-line communica
tions,"
“Any attempt to impose centralized
content control in a bureaucratic manner
on this fundamentally decentralized me
dium is bound to stifle the growth of the
medium (and) squander the democratic
potential of the Internet,” Berman con
tended.
But to mothers, including Shao and
Susan Tillman Elliot, of McLean, Va., the
unpleasant experiences their teenagers had
when they encountered obscene materials
and propositions on on-line networks out
weigh concerns about the growth of the
Internet.
firefighters were at the scene.
A cafe was turned into a rescue base,
where some victims with minor injuries
were treated.
They straggled out of the subway sta
tion, some with tears streaming down their
smoke-blackened faces, their clothes tat
tered and bloodstained.
Many were carried out on stretchers,
motionless and covered in blood.
Four people died on Tuesday and a
fifth person died today of injuries suffered
in the attack.
Two of the dead, both residents of the
Paris region, were identified early today as
Isabelle Costa, a Portuguese national, and
Veronique Brocheriou.
Thirty-four of the people injured in the
bombing were hospitalized overnight and
three remained in critical condition today,
authorities said.
It was the first fatal bombing in Paris in
nearly a decade. A series of bomb blasts
around Paris in 1986 left 13 people dead
and more than 100 injured.
An Iranian-backed Lebanese group
claimed responsibility for the attacks, which
targeted department stores, the City Hall
and other sites.
June 2 against the Surry County Board of
Commissioners and County Manager Den
nis N. Thompson.
The lawsuit said that in the closed ses
sion May 15 the commissioners agreed to
buy options on five pieces of property. The
board refused to disclose before the closed
meeting what land they wanted to buy and
after the meeting county officials refused
to release any information or records about
the properties until May 31.
Then officials released information
about only tw6 tracts which the owners
had already signed option agreements.
UNCI
Your New
Alternative
Textbook Source
is wn
UU nw
.HAM,
SUPPLY I
CASH
For Your Books!
Sell Bade Those
Summer School
Textbooks!
Top $$ paid for used textbooks!
We buy ALL
books with market value!
Old TGIF Location!
w
Q f
Monster Records | Wicted Burrito | | E fr^k „ nS ,
u
[GranvilleTowers 1 UNC Campus
Buy Back Hours 9-5 Everyday
306 W. Franklin St. • Free Parking Available!
5
Thursday, July 27,1995