Saturday, March 16, 2002
Tipper Gore weighsrun for Senate seat
WASHINGTON -- Tipper Gore cut short a trip to California to return to Tennessee, where she planned to spend the weekend talking with associates about a possible run for the Senate, people close to her said Friday.
The people, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Mrs. Gore wants to make a decision quickly about whether to seek the seat from Tennessee that her husband, Al Gore, held from 1985 to 1993. One said a decision should come by the middle of next week.
Among the issues Mrs. Gore must weigh is whether she can win a state that shockingly rejected her husband in the 2000 presidential election, costing him the White House.
In addition to confidantes, Mrs. Gore is expected to talk with Rep. Bob Clement, D-Tenn., who has expressed interest in running for the Senate seat.
Paper: Church must face issue of celibacy
BOSTON -- In an extraordinary editorial on the city's child-molestation scandal, the official newspaper of the Boston Archdiocese says the Roman Catholic Church must face the question of whether to drop its requirement that priests be celibate.
But Cardinal Bernard Law, Boston's archbishop, said in a statement late Friday the editorial wasn't intended to question the church's position on clerical celibacy. He said it was to reflect issues raised by others because of the scandal.
"It is one thing to report the questions of others, it is quite another thing to make those questions one's own," Law said.
The editorial, published Thursday in a special issue of The Pilot, says questions raised by the scandal include whether there would be fewer scandals if celibacy were optional for priests and whether the priesthood attracts an unusually high number of homosexual men.
It offers no answers, but says: "These scandals have raised serious questions in the minds of the laity that simply will not disappear."
U.S. diplomat accusedof spying by Yugoslavia
BERLIN -- The Yugoslav military arrested a U.S. diplomat and a former Yugoslav general at a restaurant just outside the capital Belgrade Thursday evening and charged them with espionage, according to Yugoslav and Western officials.
The detentions, in which the American reported being bundled into a police wagon with a jacket over his head, roughed up and held incommunicado for 15 hours, has triggered a furious diplomatic row with the United States and western allegations that the military is trying to destabilize democratic institutions.
According to reports in the Yugoslav media, officials in Belgrade contend that the former general, Mocilo Perisic, had given the American secret documents that could help in the United Nations' war-crimes prosecution against former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
Western officials rejected that charge and said that the Yugoslav army planted military documents labeled "top secret" in the diplomat's bag. Western officials also said military police ransacked the home and office of Perisic, who was commanding general of the Yugoslav army until Milosevic fired him in 1999.
The Yugoslav military identified the diplomat -- who was set free on Friday -- as John David Neighbor.
Air Canada bansauthor Rushdie
OTTAWA -- Air Canada has banned author Salman Rushdie from its flights because the extra security required for him to fly could mean long delays for other passengers, airline officials said Friday.
Rushdie, whose book "The Satanic Verses" was considered blasphemous by some Muslims, was threatened with death by Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in a 1989 edict. While the Iranian government has since said the edict had ended, hard-line groups have renewed calls for Rushdie to be killed.
According to Air Canada, a U.S. Federal Aviation Administration directive requires special security measures if Rushdie is on an airplane entering the United States.
Air Canada spokeswoman Laura Cooke said the airline concluded the same measures would be required on flights within Canada. It chose to keep Rushdie off its planes instead.
Those measures, which she declined to describe, could delay flights up to three hours.