Court martial begins

Court martial begins
DONGDUCHEON, South Korea -- The court martial of a U.S. soldier accused of negligent homicide in the road deaths of two South Korean girls opened today at a U.S. military base.
Outside, about 100 anti-U.S. protesters burned an American flag and hurled eggs over the fence.
Sgt. Fernando Nino faces up to six years in a U.S. prison if convicted in a case that triggered an outcry in South Korea, which hosts 37,000 American soldiers but does not have jurisdiction over them if they are accused of crimes while on duty.
The name of Nino's hometown was not released at his request. Once a verdict is delivered, another soldier, Sgt. Mark Walker of Acworth, Ga., will go on trial on the same charge. Each trial is expected to last three days.
Both men, who belong to the 2nd U.S. Infantry Division, were on a training mission near the border with North Korea on June 13 when their armored vehicle struck two 14-year-old girls, Shim Mi-son and Shin Hyo-sun.
Bush hosts Carter,other Nobel winners
WASHINGTON -- Jimmy Carter left the Oval Office in January 1981 with a foreign-policy nightmare, the Iran hostage crisis, unresolved. The former president returns to the White House as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and guest of President Bush, whose administration he has sharply criticized.
Carter was one of several American winners of Nobel Prizes being greeted today by Bush, who was also meeting with Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
Carter, 78, won the Nobel last month for his "untiring effort" to peacefully solve international conflicts and to advance democracy and human rights. The prize came with an extraordinary rebuke aimed at Bush by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which contrasted Carter's success in finding Mideast peace through diplomacy with Bush's vow to oust Iraq's Saddam Hussein, by force if necessary.
In September, Carter said he was disturbed by administration threats to take military action against Iraq without the blessing of the United Nations, and he said he would have voted against the congressional resolution allowing the president to use force against Iraq. But he has praised Bush's leadership on Iraq in recent days.
Report: Time spent inhospice care declines
WASHINGTON -- Terminally ill patients are spending fewer of their last days in hospice care, advocates of better care for the dying said in a report today.
Last Acts, a coalition of health and aging groups, looked at the availability of good end-of-life care. One central measure is hospice care, which provides dying patients with such services as pain relief and assistance in putting their affairs in order. It usually is offered in patients' own homes, and Medicare pays for it.
More people are turning to hospice care, the report said. Enrollment jumped from about 1,000 a year in 1975, when hospice care began, to 700,000 in 2000.
But they are entering hospice care ever closer to the time of death. Patients spent an average of 70 days in hospice care in 1983, but that dropped to 36 days by the late 1990s, the report said. In 1998, 28 percent of hospice patients were enrolled for one week or less before they died.
Hospice care varies widely by state. In 2000, hospice was most popular in Arizona, where between one-third and half of patients over age 65 used it during their last year of life. It was least popular in Alaska and Maine, where less than 10 percent of the dying elderly used it.
Protesters arrested
COLUMBUS, Ga. -- With supporters cheering her on, Caryl Hartjes squeezed through a 10-inch opening in a chain-link fence to risk jail for her beliefs.
The frail, 67-year-old Roman Catholic nun from Fond du Lac, Wis., was among nearly 100 demonstrators, including at least 7 nuns, who were arrested for entering Fort Benning to protest a U.S. military program that trains Latin American soldiers.
About 7,000 protesters gathered Sunday for the 13th annual demonstration by the School of the Americas Watch, which conducts the protests to mark the killings of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador on Nov. 19, 1989.
Some of the killers had attended the Army's School of the Americas, which moved from Panama to Fort Benning, an Army training center, in 1984.
"I go in solidarity with the men and women -- especially the children -- of South America who were just whisked away and continue to be whisked away," said Hartjes, a hospice worker. "I feel some anger at the outrage of it all. I feel angry at the deliberate treachery and violence."