News In Brief
President Clinton was working "full time," in the words of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, to get Mideast officials back to the negotiating table. She said no final decision had been made on holding a summit in Cairo between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, but she indicated the idea was one of several in play. More than 80 people, most of them Palestinians, have been killed in 10 days of violence in the Middle East.
Clinton told the new president of Yugoslavia, Vojislav Kostunica, that he'd work with the European Union to lift economic sanctions against the Balkan country, a National Security Council spokesman said. He added that Clinton pledged to seek warmer relations between Washington and Belgrade. Kostunica took the oath of office Saturday, after Slobodan Milosevic conceded defeat in elections held last month. As for the latter, an indicted war criminal, any efforts to press for his accountability will be put on hold until Yugo-slavia is more integrated with Europe, Albright said.
The Ford Explorer has a higher rate of tire-related accidents than other sport utility vehicles, even when fitted with Good-years and not Firestones, The Washington Post reported. Automotive analysts told the newspaper that the findings, which were based on an analysis of national and Florida crash statistics, suggested something about the Explorer may be contributing to 101 deaths that have been blamed on Firestone tires. Ford and Goodyear officials criticized the analysis, arguing among other things that the survey sample was too small.
Two Americans and a Swede won the Nobel Prize in medicine, a $915,000 award. Arvid Carlsson, Paul Greengard of New York's Rockefeller University, and Eric Kandel of Columbia University were recognized for their discoveries concerning "signal transduction in the nervous system," the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, which determines the prize, said in a statement. Their research laid the groundwork for developing treatment for Parkinson's disease and contributed to the development of some antidepressants including Prozac.
Bessie, a cow near Sioux City, Iowa, may become the first surrogate mother to give birth successfully to an endangered species through cloning, a study published Sunday in a specialty journal indicated. Scientists used techniques developed at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass., to impregnate Bessie with a kind of ox, a rare Asian gaur, who is expected to be born next month. Developers said the procedure could be used to repopulate endangered species, but others warned the technology shouldn't replace efforts to protect those animals.
(c) Copyright 2000. The Christian Science Publishing Society
