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GWEN IFILL: Good evening. I'm Gwen Ifill. Jim Lehrer is on vacation. On the NewsHour tonight, Margaret Warner and Marcia Coyle analyze today's Supreme Court actions on campaign finance and other things; Fred de Sam Lazaro looks at how India is coping with the AIDS epidemic; Ray Suarez examines the move to make Slobodan Milosevic stand trial for war crimes; Terence Smith discusses a lost-- and found-- Mark Twain story; and essayist Richard Rodriguez considers the face of an ever-growing America. It all follows our summary of the news this Monday.
NEWS SUMMARY
GWEN IFILL: The U.S. Supreme Court today upheld campaign spending limits from the post-Watergate era. The 5-4 decision involved caps on spending by political parties tied to candidates' campaigns. It does not directly address the future of so-called soft money contributions, which are not supposed to be linked to campaigns. Congress is now considering a ban on soft money. In other decisions today, the Justices ruled 7-2 that large media companies must get permission from freelance writers before reprinting their work online; it said 5-4 that legal immigrants with criminal convictions cannot be deported without a court hearing; and it sided with a lower court that ended affirmative action programs at Texas colleges and universities. We'll have more on these rulings right after this News Summary. The head of the United Nations called today for frank talk on the global AIDS epidemic. Kofi Annan addressed more than 3,000 politicians, scientists, and activists at the UN's first special session on AIDS in New York. Annan said AIDS had erased a decade of progress in many nations, and he urged the world to unite against it.
KOFI ANNAN: We cannot deal with AIDS by making moral judgments or refusing to face unpleasant facts, and still less by stigmatizing those who are infected and making out that it is all their fault. We can only do it by speaking clearly and plainly about the ways that people become infected, and about what they can do to avoid infection.
GWEN IFILL: Annan has said the new UN AIDS fund needs nearly $10 billion annually. The U.S. has contributed $200 million, and Secretary of State Powell said today that amount was only a beginning. We'll have more on the AIDS crisis later in the program tonight. Yugoslavia moved today to extradite former President Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes. The government requested a Belgrade court to transfer him to the Hague in the Netherlands. He'd face a UN tribunal on charges of atrocities in Kosovo. A government decree Sunday made the extradition possible. Milosevic has appealed that decree. We'll have more on this story later in the program tonight. Thousands of Peruvians searched for food, clothing, and shelter today after a killer earthquake. It hit Saturday, off the country's Pacific Coast, with a magnitude of 8.1. At least 71 people were killed and more than 1,200 injured. Some 20,000 are homeless. We have a report from Kevin Dunn of Independent Television News.
KEVIN DUNN, ITN: Two days after Peru's worst earthquake for more than 30 years, rescuers are only now reaching some of the worst affected areas. As they do, the toll of the dead, injured, and homeless continues to rise. Some coastal villages were swamped by a tidal wave triggered by the quake. It is feared at least 20 people from this village were swept out to sea. It was, this woman said, like the end of the world. (Speaking Spanish) The Pan-American Coastal Highway, Peru's main road, simply cracked open. Hospitals in and around the historic city of Arequipa have been struggling to cope with the influx of the injured. The city's 17th-century cathedral lost one of its towers. The building was so badly damaged, Mass was moved outside. Peru's appealing for urgent assistance from the United States and Europe. While it waits, thousands are preparing to spend a third night in the open.
GWEN IFILL: The American ambassador to Peru said Sunday that aid from the U.S. is expected to arrive within days. Peru's former spy chief was flown home today to Lima to stand trial for corruption. Vladimiro Montesinos was captured over the weekend in Venezuela with the help of the FBI. In Peru, he allegedly ran a criminal network that involved money laundering, drug trafficking, arms dealing, and death squads. He went into hiding late last year after the allegations came to light. The scandal led to the downfall of President Alberto Fujimori. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to today's Supreme Court decisions; AIDS in India; extraditing Milosevic; a Mark Twain mystery; and a Richard Rodriguez essay.
FOCUS - SUPREME COURT WATCH
GWEN IFILL: Margaret Warner has the Supreme Court story.
MARGARET WARNER: Today the U.S. Supreme Court took action in several closely watched cases having to do with campaign financing, immigration law, affirmative action, and copyright law in the electronic age. Here to walk us through today's decisions is Marcia Coyle, Supreme Court correspondent and Washington bureau chief for the "National Law Journal." NewsHour regular Jan Crawford Greenburg is on maternity leave. Marcia, as we near the end of the term we have a blizzard of cases. They're all very different. Let's start with the one with the biggest political punch. The campaign spending case which came out of a Senate race in Colorado some 15 years ago. Explain today's ruling.
MARCIA COYLE: Well, the Colorado Republican party had challenged federal limits on the amount of money it could spend in coordination with political candidates. The party claimed that these limits on political parties basically violated the First Amendment. The Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling, the majority opinion was written by Justice David H. Souter disagreed with the political parties. Justice Souter said basically two things: First, he disagreed that political parties and political candidates are joined at the hip, such that if you put limits on party expenditures in coordination with their candidates, you're putting a heavy burden on the political party's ability to send a message as to what its beliefs and ideology are. But he agreed with the federal government that these limits were important because, without limits on party expenditures, you would have individuals and others attempting to by-pass the limits we now have on political contributions and use the parties to funnel money to their favorite candidates.
MARGARET WARNER: Out of this same case some years ago, the court had said that the federal government could not limit the expenditures by the party if they were independent versus coordinated. How does Justice Souter explain the distinction and make the distinction. Why are some caps unconstitutional and another cap constitutional?
MARCIA COYLE: Independent expenditures by political parties are very much like the position that individuals, PAC's, Political Action Committees, and other organizations are in. They're viewed as... there's no real potential for corruption, so there he saw there was no constitutional requirement to limit those. But coordinated expenditures are different because of... you have this connection between the party, the candidate and possibly a third party who would be the donor who could use the political party to evade the limits on individual contributions.
MARGARET WARNER: In other words, the court was saying that really that kind of expenditure is more like a contribution and it's perfectly legitimate and doesn't violate the First Amendment to limit those contributions.
MARCIA COYLE: This goes back to an early ruling by the Supreme Court, Buckley versus Vallejo in which the court created this division between limits on contributions and limits on campaign spending - and contributions, the court felt, you could limit without really hurting the first amendment values because you're not limiting a message. But expenditures you look at a lot more closely because there are you are talking more about core political speech.
MARGARET WARNER: Now there was a very vigorous dissent by Justice Thomas writing for four Justices.
MARCIA COYLE: Justice Thomas, Scalia and Kennedy and Chief Justice Rehnquist dissented but Justices Thomas, Scalia and Kennedy for some time have been very unhappy with Buckley versus Vallejo. And they would like to eliminate the distinction between spending and contributions. They say, this is political speech. Why the distinction? It's a distinction without significance and we should examine any kind of limits very closely under the First Amendment. Justice Thomas felt that political parties and candidates are joined at the hip and they should be free to spend what's necessary in order to get their message across. And he also felt that there were other ways for the government to protect against corrupting the political process than by limits.
MARGARET WARNER: Now, this case did not address so called "soft money" which this McCain-Feingold bill seeks to address and seeks to outlaw. Yet Senator McCain said today he saw this for strengthening the case for his less lags. Is there a connection?
MARCIA COYLE: I don't think there's a direct connection but this case was very closely watched politically. It really in essence sends something of a message that I think Senator McCain would find very helpful. And that is that the court, one, is maintaining this distinction between contributions and expenditures but is also very concerned about corruption of the political process and evading current limits. And soft money, that's essentially what it does.
MARGARET WARNER: Move on to another case. When we talked earlier you said you thought the most significant ruling today in terms of being ground breaking was the one involving pitting newspaper and magazine publishers against freelance writers and saying that these publishers have to pay or at least get permission from these freelance writers before they can reproduce their articles on the internet and various databases. Why did you see this as so important?
MARCIA COYLE: Well, I think the copyright act which was the act at issue in the case was enacted back in 1976, and at the time Congress did not envision-- in fact, most of us-- did not envision Lexis-Nexis databases, the Internet and how articles would be republished in electronic form. This was really an open question for the court: How should the law treat athlete articles? Six freelance writers sued a number of publishers of both print publications and electronic publications claiming that their copyrights in those articles were infringed when their articles ended up in electronic databases. The publishers said, oh, no, we didn't infringe your copyrights because the electronic publication is really a revision of the original publication. And under copyright law the publisher has his own copyright in that work. So the court had to really examine what is a revision and what is this electronic animal that it was facing.
MARGARET WARNER: So it was a whole new area you're saying.
MARCIA COYLE: Yes it was.
MARGARET WARNER: As opposed to many other cases that have been litigated and litigated. This was a 7-2 ruling. Briefly what was Justice Stevens who wrote for the majority? What was his view?
MARCIA COYLE: Well, Justice Stevens wrote for the dissent. Justice Ginsberg wrote for the majority.
MARGARET WARNER: That's right.
MARCIA COYLE: Justice Ginsberg looked at electronic publication databases and said, well, what you have really here is a bare bones article. You don't have the page that it appeared on in the newspaper.
MARGARET WARNER: Microfilm, for example.
MARCIA COYLE: Exactly. So how can you say this is a revision? She said it's not a revision. And so the author should prevail. Justice Stevens wrote the dissent. He looked at the medium very differently. He said, well, you're really confusing the medium with content. When the "New York Times" sends articles to an electronic database, it's sending the entire content of an edition. That's what you're getting. So really this is a revision and the publishers should be protected here.
MARGARET WARNER: What's the likely impact of this?
MARCIA COYLE: Immediately for articles that were contributed by free lancers to electronic databases and they were not paid for those articles, the publishers are going to have to remedy that by paying them. I think there are at least three class-action suits around the country by freelance authors seeking payment. Right now-- and I think since about 1995-- most publishers have written agreements or contracts with freelance writers that authorize the electronic publications. So going forward you're going to see that. Some publishers are saying, how can we track down all these freelance authors over the years? What we'll have to do is pull the articles out of the electronic database.
MARGARET WARNER: Briefly on the affirmative action today the Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling that outlawed Texas's former affirmative action admission policy. Just a few weeks ago, however, it let stand a lower court ruling that upheld university of Washington law school's pro affirmative action policy. I mean, one, what are universities to make of this? Why would the court let two conflicting rulings stand?
MARCIA COYLE: I think universities can make little of it. I think they have very little guidance on how to proceed when they want to use race as a factor in their admissions policies. The only thing I think you can take away from what the court did, leaving two conflicting rulings in place, is that they just haven't found the right case to resolve the issue. Now that there are conflicting rulings, the court probably will resolve the issue. That's one of the criteria that it looks for. But there were maybe special problems with each case that didn't make it the right vehicle for resolution of the issue.
MARGARET WARNER: We didn't have time to get to the immigration cases but there's a third one coming this week so we'll get back to it then. Thanks, Marcia, very much.
MARCIA COYLE: My pleasure.
SERIES - TARGETING AIDS
GWEN IFILL: UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan began today's special session on AIDS with a call to action against a disease that has already killed 22 million people worldwide. While much of the focus has been on the devastation in Africa, Annan also talked of the frightening speed with which the disease is spreading elsewhere. One especially worrisome country is India. Fred de Sam Lazaro of Minnesota's Twin Cities Public Television was there recently. Here is his report.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: In a country that has had to mobilize against massive earthquakes and killer floods, AIDS has seemed to get much less attention. Yet the toll from AIDS will soon dwarf decades of natural disasters. Already the official count of HIV-infected people is four million, a small number amid a billion population. But many experts say in little more than a decade, India could have more AIDS cases than the entire continent of Africa. Already, those who work with patients, like Dr. Ishwar Gilada, say in reality, India's HIV tally has skyrocketed well past the official figure.
DR. ISHWAR GILADA: Currently, it is doubling at the rate of 18 months, or the rate of every 24 months. And I'm estimating something like ten to 12 million HIV infections today. So we find ourselves in a tight spot.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Reporter: Since the early '90s, Dr. Ishwar Gilada has been one of India's most prominent voices on AIDS, a fixture in the red-light areas of Bombay, India's commercial capital and the likely birthplace of India's AIDS epidemic.
DR. ISHWAR GILDA (translated): We're not here from any condom company. We are doctors here to tell you about AIDS, and why it is important to pay attention to AIDS.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: We first met Gilada seven years ago, as he pounded the streets as a safe sex apostle to clients of the commercial sex industry. At the time, he estimated that half the city's 50,000 sex workers were positive for the AIDS virus. Bombay now has an estimated 350,000 HIV-positive cases, and Gilada says the problem has spread nationwide. The vast majority of those infected don't know they are HIV-positive. Those who do know usually find out when they become ill and seek health care, like Lata, a 30-something mother of two. She is one of thousands of desperately poor people who live on the streets of Chennai, the southern city better known as Madras.
LATA (translated): I had no support from anyone in his family. I was just lost.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Lata was infected by a man she began seeing after her husband, a habitual offender who was incarcerated for burglary.
LATA (translated): He would spend one month on the outside and six months in jail. When he was in jail, it was just so difficult to get by. I was so vulnerable, and that's why I got caught with this man, who gave me this disease.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Most male HIV cases can be traced to the commercial sex trade-- cases like 28-year-old Srinivasan, who used to drive a scooter rickshaw before coming down with full- blown AIDS symptoms. Today his elderly mother has taken a job as a domestic worker to support her only son. She's also the only person aware of his condition.
SRINIVASAN (translated): Nobody knows. If anybody asks, I tell them it's typhoid or jaundice. My mother is the only person who knows that I have AIDS.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Srinivasan says he knew nothing about HIV or AIDS when he became infected about eight years ago. Experts say that awareness has improved. Still, India, with traditionally conservative sexual mores, remains one of the harshest social and health care environments for HIV patients.
DR. ISHWAR GILADA: The difference between the response to HIV And response to other calamities is, they are all visible calamities. HIV is invisible calamity.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Well over a decade into the epidemic, India's public response to AIDS has been a small one, the domain of a few non-governmental organizations offering education programs, such as this mobile van in Bombay. The government has offered very little money, and even less sympathy. For example, it's not illegal to fire someone from their job for being HIV-positive. It is, in fact, against the law for carriers of the AIDS virus to marry. This commercial, featuring film star Shobana Azmi, is one of the few efforts on AIDS to come out of India's hugely popular movie industry. The ad preaches that HIV Cannot be caught through touching or breathing. Dr. Gilada complains that the stars could do much more to prevent the marginalization of AIDS sufferers.
DR. ISHWAR GILADA: India has not yet seen the replica of Rock Hudson, Magic Johnson, Freddie Mercury, though we have a lot of big people having HIV and dying of that, dying of the infection. Unless some of those people come out openly and say that, yes, I have this problem, it is... it will be seen as a disease of sex workers, drug addicts, economically unfortunate. It will not be seen as a disease of everybody.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: In fact, India's HIV-positive population comes from across the social spectrum. Dr. Janak Maniar has a thriving private practice in Bombay. He has several thousand paying patients, most-- like this 38- year-old man-- from the middle or upper middle class.
DR. JANAK MANIAR: How are your parents? You're living with your parents and your brother along with you?
PATIENT: Yes.
DR. JANAK MANIAR: How are they taking this problem of HIV? Supportive? Or are they just...
PATIENT: Well, they're not aware about it.
DR. JANAK MANIAR: Who knows in your house?
PATIENT: Nobody.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Experts say the health care system is ill- equipped to deal with HIV And AIDS, and even helps feed the general denial by not recording both cases and deaths. Dr. Shilpa Merchant is an AIDS advocate.
DR. SHILPA MERCHANT: They've been reported as deaths, which is also true-- deaths due to tuberculosis or one of the opportunistic infections-- but nobody writes "AIDS," with the result that people say, "where are the people dying of AIDS?" Because of the stigma, people are covering up, and then that's becoming a vicious cycle.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Ironically, just down the street from the epidemic's ground zero is the headquarters of Cipla, one of several Indian pharmaceutical companies that produce anti- retroviral drugs that can greatly extend the life of people with AIDS.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Give us a sense of how much you can produce this for, versus what they would cost on the market in the West.
MAN: (Sighs)
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Even approximately?
MAN: One-fortieth?
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: Reporter: Indian companies like Cipla have called for easing patent restrictions so they can export the AIDS drugs to African countries at a fraction of their price in the west. Yet patients in their own backyards, like Lata, are unlikely to ever benefit. Even discounted prices are out of reach in a country where the public health expenditures on AIDS are about three cents per person per year, and where the per-capita income is less than $400 a year, about what Lata earns from selling jasmine flower arrangements. Also, anti-retroviral therapy calls for a solid diet and a disciplined regimen of up to 20 pills each day for life. Patients like Lata clearly lack the wherewithal. Perhaps even more depressing, Dr. Maniar says even those patients who do manage to find the money lack the commitment to the therapy.
DR. JANAK MANIAR: The compliance rate at the end of one year is not even 50 percent. It's not because they have not been explained. They're enthusiastic to start with. When they feel well - in three months time or six months time - they say, "Dr. Maniar, I don't think I need the drug anymore. My appetite is good, my working capacity good, I've gained a lovely weight and I look nice." And then, in another six months time, one year time, they come back to me sick and they stopped the treatment. And they are really sick.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: So they've completely squandered the opportunity at this point?
DR. JANAK MANIAR: Yes, and the whole family is ruined because they've spent out the money in this; there's no money left.
FRED DE SAM LAZARO: AIDS isn't the only health care crisis India now faces. It also has one of the world's largest outbreaks of tuberculosis. HIV fuels TB and vice versa. The UN estimatesthat India could have up to 35 million HIV-infected people by 2010. Many at the epidemic's front lines say that grim landmark could arrive much sooner.
GWEN IFILL: We'll be looking at various aspects of the AIDS problem this week. Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, extraditing Milosevic; a Mark Twain mystery; and a Richard Rodriguez essay.
FOCUS - MOVE TO EXTRADITE
GWEN IFILL: Ray Suarez has the Milosevic story.
RAY SUAREZ: The Yugoslav parliament had been deadlocked for weeks over extraditing former President Milosevic and 15 other Yugoslavs indicted for war crimes by an international tribunal. The cabinet of President Vojislav Kostunica took the matter in its hands Saturday, and issued a decree that paved the way for Milosevic and others to be sent to the Hague tribunal for a trial.
MIROLJUB LABUS (translated): I think that there has to be a line of extraditions, a line of surrendering our people to the Hague. The indictments that are out, there is no arguing about them. The indicted people have to go to the Hague.
RAY SUAREZ: The UN War Crimes Tribunal at the Hague was established in 1993 to prosecute crimes against humanity committed during the wars in former Yugoslavia. Milosevic was indicted in 1999, in the midst of the Kosovo war, for alleged war crimes against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. More than 3,000 Kosovar Albanians are still missing. Milosevic was ousted as President last October after a disputed election brought mass protests. Initially, his successor, Kostunica, and other Serb nationalists in parliament had been reluctant to force the extradition of Milosevic and other accused war criminals in Yugoslavia to the Hague Tribunal. For months, the new President said Milosevic should be tried in a Yugoslav court. Milosevic was jailed in April, officially on corruption charges. But internal pressure for his extradition has been growing in Yugoslavia, especially since the recent discovery near Belgrade of the bodies of some 800 ethnic Albanians killed in Kosovo. Those atrocities are now being investigated by a former chief of the Serb secret police. And pressure from the outside world also was intensifying: International donors, including the United States, called for the extradition of Milosevic in return for at least $1 billion in aid to rebuild the devastated and bankrupt economy. An international donors conference is scheduled to begin later this week. Today Milosevic's lawyers filed a challenge against the Yugoslav government's extradition decree. They said the Yugoslav and Serb constitutions don't allow for such a decree.
TOMA FILA (translated): There is no legal backup for this decision. Our laws and constitution do not recognize this. We appealed against this to the constitutional court, but we have to see what will happen, not only in this case, but also in the other cases against Serbian citizens.
RAY SUAREZ: Currently the Yugoslav constitution doesn't allow for extradition of its citizens for trial by a foreign government, but the Hague court is an international tribunal.
RAY SUAREZ: For more on sending Milosevic to the Hague, we turn to Charles Ingrao, Professor of History at Purdue University. He is currently writing a book about ethnic conflict in central Europe. And Nina Bang-Jensen is special counsel for the Coalition for International Justice, a private group with offices in Washington and the Hague that assists the international war crimes tribunal in its work. Charles Ingrao, months after Milosevic was jailed, even further months after his government fell, why now?
CHARLES INGRAO: Well, it really has a lot to do with money. When we bombed Serbia in 1999 during the Kosovo War a lot of damage was done to the infrastructure. Serbia needs to rebuild. Of course ten years of sanctions before that have had a cumulative effect. The United States and its allies have agreed to help rebuild, but the principle of conditionality. The Serbs have to cooperate with the international criminal tribunal. The first deadline was March 31, and the Serbs met that by arresting Milosevic just a few minutes after the deadline and by sending two Bosnian Serb indictees to the Hague. This donors conference will be attended by the Europeans but the United States has a firmer position in saying we will not participate unless something substantial happens, whether he is delivered to the Hague or other major Serb war criminals.
RAY SUAREZ: Nina Bang-Jensen, do you think it's just the money or is the internal situation changing with revelations like the mass graves, the revelations concerning Milosevic and the huge bankruptcy?
NINA BANG-JENSEN: I certainly think that those are huge factors that people believe it or not didn't really understand what was done in their name by Milosevic. I agree with Charles that the principal factor is the donor's conference coming up. They are desperate for this money.
RAY SUAREZ: And was there a political evolution on the part of the current government when Kostunica took office he seemed to insist that this was something that could be handled internally?
NINA BANG-JENSEN: There is an evolution. Certainly there's been a battle between the alliance, between the coalition government -- increasingly as these dates have approached. For example the March 31 date was a date under something called the McConnell-Leahy law, a law enacted by those two Senators, which said that the U.S., could not vote yes or give bilateral aid unless certain things happened. Now we're at the next deadline, which is the donors' conference and there will be other things coming up, other votes of the international financial institutions. But they know that taxpayers around the world are not going to hand over hundreds of millions or billions of dollars unless they see that they like any UN member will honor their obligations under international law.
RAY SUAREZ: But, Charles Ingrao, did Kostunica's insistence that this could be handled by Yugoslavia crumble under the pressure that he got when he ventured outside the country to the rest of the world?
CHARLES INGRAO: Well, he did go to Washington a few weeks ago and up until then he had been lambasting the ICTY. When he came back those criticisms stopped. So, that certainly is one of the reasons. By I think you have to realize he's a rational actor, he's a Serbian patriot. He understands that Serbia needs to make changes. Because of the financial incentives and the opposition as Nina has pointed out within the democratic coalition he was the last person in the coalition to sign off on delivering Milosevic to the Hague but he went along with it because he understands that that's necessary.
RAY SUAREZ: Let's talk a little bit about the practical effect. I notice that there was no airplane at a Belgrade runway waiting to whisk him away to the Netherlands. This decree opens the door but didn't deliver Milosevic. How long might this take?
CHARLES INGRAO: Well, I think the absolute longest is 23 days. I was told there are a series of appeals he can make. But the conventional wisdom is sometime in the next week or two that he would be delivered. Let me say that delivering Milosevic is only onepart of the puzzle. There are other major war criminals who are on Serbian soil who have not been delivered and the Serbs could deliver other individuals and still qualify for the donors' conference for U.S. participation. But Milosevic is obviously the one person who would have the cash to bring the U.S. Money in.
RAY SUAREZ: You've read the decree, Nina. Are you as optimistic as Charles Ingrao about the timetable?
NINA BANG-JENSEN: Regrettably I'm not. There's already been a constitutional challenge by Mr. Milosevic's lawyer. So that in itself will cause delays before they even get to the timetable which is any order from the tribunal can be challenged, sent to a five- court... five-judge panel and then sent in 15 days from there to the Supreme Court. But the whole issue of this decree, while we're all celebrating it and certainly there's very good language about urgent cooperation, there are tremendous number of obstacles in this decree.
RAY SUAREZ: Like what?
NINA BANG-JENSEN: Well, for example, it says that, this decree, which is supposed to address the issue that Yugoslavia contended that its constitution does not permit the extradition of Yugoslav citizens. The decree says that the cooperation is dependent on cooperation not contravening the Constitution. So it's a totality that is a very important provision. There are other things in it that suggest substantive scrutiny of the underlying indictments. For example, it says that if a proceeding has begun in a Belgrade court for any reason against any of these defendants, the tribunal presents its indictment. There is a review first to see, a reasonable review to make sure that the indictment is within the jurisdiction of the tribunal and they have the right person. But then there is a review as to the substance of the indictments by these five judges. No court, whether in Croatia or Bosnia, has that authority. Under the Security Council resolution that established the tribunal, which has a limited jurisdiction, every member state of the United Nations and really every state in the world is supposed to honor the orders of the court without intervention by their own system.
RAY SUAREZ: Do you share some of these concerns?
CHARLES INGRAO: Yes, in fact, one of the stumbling blocks is the Yugoslav Justices who will pass judgment on these appeals are themselves Milosevic appointees. So what we're depending on now is you have Milosevic at the top of the pyramid and the people who actively supported him over the last decade are being called upon to switch sides. My bet is that enough of them will because they want to be co-opted by the new system to stay in power. One of the good things that I think Kostunica has done is he's reassured many of the people under Milosevic that if they play ball with the new democratic coalition that there will be a future for them in Serbia. So I think we're banking on getting that cooperation. But one thing is for sure. If we don't get that cooperation, Serbia gets no money from the United States. The bottom line is, therefore, there will be cooperation and it's only a matter of time.
RAY SUAREZ: Let me return to your pessimistic read of the decree because also contained in it are provisions that almost reassure the reader that they're dealing with a very normal country. It welcomes the tribunal to examine forensic records, looks for assist innocence the interview and gathering of evidence from Yugoslav citizens, allows the tribunal investigative and police powers on Yugoslav soil.
NINA BANG-JENSEN: Those provisions are good. But thoroughly unnecessary. The problem is when you enact a law that's unnecessary you provide all sorts of opportunities for lawyers to challenge and to slow things down. There's absolutely crystal clear....
RAY SUAREZ: But these are the kinds of things up couldn't get from Yugoslavia not that long ago. Why do you say unnecessary?
NINA BANG-JENSEN: Because it isn't necessary as a matter of law. They could have done these things and they should be doing them right now. All you do... It's a political document. It's not a judicial document. We have to accept that political documents are important and helpful. But in this circumstance it's going to cause further delays. Unfortunately the concern is it's going to cause delays that will only be resolved after the donors conference. So in other words, we'll see this as a demonstration of good faith, which we should. There's certainly people within the government who are doing the right thing. But unless we have concrete proof prior to the donors conference, I certainly hope that the United States is not going to participate.
RAY SUAREZ: Charles Ingrao, you mentioned the fate of other suspects and other people accused of war crimes. Probably the best-known unarrested people from that part of the world are Mladic and Karadzic from the Bosnian civil war. Does this change their situation at all, if you can catch a big fish like Milosevic?
CHARLES INGRAO: Well, it may not directly affect Karadzic and Mladic. Incidentally the two of them recently in a poll in Serbia topped out as two of the most popular Serbs to the Serbian people which leads us to another point about what the problem beneath the problem is. But Karadzic is in Bosnia, and his arrest will depend on the United States and the s-for forces that he's been living under the noses of for the last five years. Mladic may be in Serbia as being protected by the Serbian military, the Yugoslav military. The others are the former President of Serbia, the interior ministry had, the former head of the army during the Kosovo war. There were five total among the major figures who have to be delivered. I would say of all of these individuals, I'd like to see Mladic go first and we have to find out where he is, but these people are just at the top of the pyramid. What we need to realize is that this is an historian or a social scientist would say the really important impact is at the bottom of the pyramid. The 10 million Serbian people who elected Milosevic, who re-elected him, who supported him at every stage in all of these conflicts. And the war crimes trials will eventually bring them around, as will press coverage as it has already begun to do. That's the real pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
RAY SUAREZ: Your thoughts in response?
NINA BANG-JENSEN: I would say yes that they've been lied to for so long that press coverage of these trials will be extremely important. I also am more optimistic that there's a big change in Serbia, if there's demonstrated cooperation in Serbia, the Serb entity within Bosnia will follow because they usually follow the lead in Belgrade. In the past they followed a bad lead. We hope now they follow what turns out to be a good lead, I hope.
RAY SUAREZ: But a guy like Karadzic who is believed to be in the Bosnian-Serb area, does this as a practical matter turn up the heat on him?
NINA BANG-JENSEN: I would think so. I would think he should be frightened now. I would think that if there's positive development in Belgrade it will worry some of his body guards, worry some of his supporters that they will not get the financial and political support that they had been relying on maintain their power.
RAY SUAREZ: Nina Bang-Jensen and Charles Ingrao, thank you both.
FOCUS - THE TWAIN MYSTERY
GWEN IFILL: Now, a Mark Twain mystery solved: Media correspondent Terence Smith has the story.
TERENCE SMITH: 125 years ago, Samuel Clemens, AKA Mark Twain, wrote a mystery story that was never published and disappeared from public view. The story, "A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage," was written for the "Atlantic Monthly." It is finally being published by the "monthly" in the magazine's current edition, more than a century late, and thereby hangs a tale. For more on the story and how it resurfaced, we turn to "Atlantic Monthly" Editor Michael Kelly; and to University of Virginia English Professor Stephen Railton, who is writing a book about twain and produces a web site entitled "Mark Twain in his Times." Michael Kelly...
MICHAEL KELLY: Hello.
TERENCE SMITH: An unpublished story by Mark Twain is not an everyday event. How did this come about?
MICHAEL KELLY: It wasn't for us either. Well, the short answer is, wee had it at one point, and we sort of lost it. The longer answer is a little more complicated. It begins with one of the great literacy friendships between Williams Dean Howells and Mark Twain. Howells is editor of the "Atlantic Monthly" in the 1870s, was America's foremost literacy arbiter. He was a great friend, supporter, promoter of Mark Twain and of other what they called regional writers, wild west writers. And in 1876, in March, Howells went to visit Mark Twain in his Hartford estate, and Mark Twain proposed an idea. It was, I think for both men, frankly commercial, an attention-getter, a market- attention-getter, and that was that Mark Twain would write a skeleton plot, working in the new, relatively new genre of a murder mystery, and he would give that to William Dean Howells, and Howells would find half a dozen other famous writers, tell them the plot, and they would write versions of the novelette while twain wrote his own version.
TERENCE SMITH: And then the "Monthly" would publish them all?
MICHAEL KELLY: The "Monthly" would publish them all. It's called a blindfold novelette. Both men got terrifically excited about it, thought it was a great idea. Twain liked it so much that he sat down and wrote his version of the novelette in two days, sent Howells a letter, said that Mrs. Clemens had looked at it and thought it was good, which he said was high praise from her. But he apparently, as far as we can tell, didn't show it to Howells because he really wanted it to be blindfold. Howells went off and tried to get various writers-- Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Bret Harte-- to do what twain had proposed. None of them would do it, and as twain himself said a few years later, he realized the problem. He said, "the other authors don't want to trot along in my procession," which I think was probably precisely it. But Twain didn't give up, and Howells didn't give up, and they kept it up for several years, trying various ways to put this contest together. Howells eventually did lose interest, but twain kept it up for years. Some 20 years he tried in one way or another to put this together.
TERENCE SMITH: So he really wanted to do this.
MICHAEL KELLY: He really wanted to do it, and he approached various editors, various magazines, and various versions of the contest-- never happened. The manuscript, if it ever was in the possession of the "Atlantic Monthly," disappeared. Neither was it in Twain's papers when he died in 1910. It surfaced in 1930 in the estate of an English bookseller named Clemens. As it happens, no relation, James Brentano Clemens. Clemens left it to his wife. She in turn, when she died in 1943, left it to her estate. Her estate sold it to an American bookseller named Lou Feldman. Feldman tried to get it published. The Twain estate enjoined publication, successfully sued. Feldman then sold it, oddly enough, to the two men who make up or made up the two halves of Ellery Queen. They were interested in it as a genre story, a mystery story. Their estate left it to the University of Texas in the 1950s, and it stayed there until 1998, when a man named Patrick Martin, who's the lawyer for the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, heard about it, heard about its existence, talking with the people at the Mark Twain Foundation, whom he worked with, and he got the blessing from the Mark Twain Foundation, if he could put it together, to see if this could be published again. His idea from the beginning was to publish it in such a way that it was analogous with Twain's original intent, involving a contest published in the "Atlantic." He worked on this for a couple of years, to get all sorts of ducks in a row-- permission from the Twain Foundation, permission and blessing of the Twain Papers; eventually did get it all done and came to us in the fall of 2000 and owned the rights to the story and offered them for sale.
TERENCE SMITH: And you have in fact bought it, and you're publishing it.
MICHAEL KELLY: We bought it on the spot.
TERENCE SMITH: What did you pay for it?
MICHAEL KELLY: I can't really say, I think, under the terms of the agreement, but I'll say we paid a fair market price for it, and a good deal more than we would have paid in 1876.
TERENCE SMITH: (Laughs) I suspect so. Stephen Railton, did you find the story interesting?
STEPHEN RAILTON: I think it's going to be very interesting to people who've read a lot of Mark Twain. There will be some surprises in it. People think of Twain as growing cynical about life in the small southwestern village where this is set and "Tom Sawyer" is set, but there's already a good deal of cynicism about that small- town world that you don't see in "Tom Sawyer" and that even "Huck Finn" doesn't find its way to. That's when the story was written, between his finishing "Tom Sawyer" and his starting "Huck Finn," and that's another really interesting feature. It's hard to get a handle on the whole story. It has some of Twain's greatest strengths, and it has some of his greatest weaknesses, too. It has a love story that just sits there. The mystery is really interesting. It anticipates a lot of his late fiction. This mysterious stranger who comes to town, who behaves a little bit like the king and the duke in "Huck Finn." One of the most interesting or telling things about it is the way that Twain was determined to try to make money, not just by writing his own story, but by marketing it.
TERENCE SMITH: He was a good marketer.
STEPHEN RAILTON: He was always trying to maximize his financial returns from the work of his imagination.
TERENCE SMITH: All right. Now, Michael Kelly, I understand that the Buffalo and Erie County Library is doing today what twain proposed 126 years ago.
MICHAEL KELLY: That's right. They put up on their web site, back in March, I think, a contest, open worldwide, of course, anybody can enter it. They got some thousands, I think, maybe even tens of thousands of inquiries, and some 300 applications, I think. People actually wrote versions of the story, and those entries are allin now. They're going to be judged by a panel of writers, including Joyce Carol Oates and Garrison Keillor and Roy Blount, and a winner or winners decided in October.
TERENCE SMITH: And are you going to publish the winner?
MICHAEL KELLY: We're going to sure take a look at it. It depends what price we can get it for.
TERENCE SMITH: Stephen Railton, is there other unpublished twain work out there?
STEPHEN RAILTON: Still, yes. The Mark Twain project at the university of California has been digging through the many boxes that twain left full of manuscript at his death, but I doubt there are many completed unpublished twain manuscripts out there. That's one of the special features of this text.
TERENCE SMITH: Has anybody come to you with anything else?
MICHAEL KELLY: No, and we'd be interested, but I think the professor's right. To get a complete, finished, polished, a reasonably polished piece of writing probably must be fairly tough to come by.
TERENCE SMITH: It's something exceptional.
MICHAEL KELLY: And it's of length. It's 8,000 words. So it's a real....
TERENCE SMITH: Right. Did you enjoy the story?
MICHAEL KELLY: I did. I have to agree that the love story is not his long suit. It doesn't even really get... Develop much of an obvious interest. The humor in it is funny. It's got a surprise ending, which is very modern, involving Jules Verne. It is... And the mystery is interesting. But to me the most interesting thing was the darkness that is in there that is not in the earlier works, and that... The people he's describing in this small town, there's a lot of what comes up later in "Huckleberry Finn," a really new and honest and in some ways very tough view of what people do.
TERENCE SMITH: So, very quickly, it's something of a literary bridge between "Tom Sawyer" and "Huck Finn"?
STEPHEN RAILTON: ..."Tom Sawyer" and the realism of "Huck Finn." I think you could read it that way.
TERENCE SMITH: All right, then. Thank you both very much.
STEPHEN RAILTON: Thank you.
MICHAEL KELLY: Thank you.
ESSAY - AS THE WORLD TURNS
GWEN IFILL: Finally tonight, essayist Richard Rodriguez of the Pacific News Service considers the face of a growing America.
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: "Of every hue and cast am I," sang Walt Whitman in 19th-century America. Nowadays when we hear America described, it is not usually by the poet, but by statisticians at the census bureau. We hear about a segmented America. Millions of Hispanics are distinguished from millions of African Americans; whites from non-whites; Asians from pacific islanders. In truth, America exists entire despite the segmented descriptions offered by our Census Bureau, and a far more interesting numerical portrait of America was recently made by United Nations' demographers. In a study this spring, the UN predicted that America's population would continue to grow, grow so markedly that by 2050, America would be the only developed economy within the 20 most populous nations on earth. The easy explanation for this growth is immigration. So many of the faces one sees in the crowd, suddenly, now, are from the world's every corner. The new American city, Dallas or Chicago or Boston, resembles the world. Here in California, the state with the nation's largest immigrant population, whenever anything goes wrong, the easiest explanation among nativists is that California is becoming a third-world country. The commonplace is that third- world despair and high mortality rates create large families, but what we do not understand so well is how optimism creates large families. The middle-class Asian American with a large family lives in a spanking-new house in suburban Virginia. Indeed, Americans who trace their ancestry back to Europe tend to have more children than their European cousins. German Americans in Chicago have more children than their cousins in Munich. And while America keeps growing, Europe is shrinking. More interesting than why and when a country has so many children is why a nation begins to have a negative birth rate. Why is Spain giving birth to fewer children now? And Italy, and Austria? Were it not for immigrants, Europe would be disappearing. There are, doubtless, some Americans who will look fondly, look greenly toward Europe, but our destiny lies in another direction. We find ourselves no longer a green exception, but within the great brown world, and our lessons for survival will come within the experience of density. A few years ago here on Market Street in San Francisco, from a block away you could hear a blaring boom box carried by a teenager, the boom proclaiming his presence. Now kids pass wearing discreet Sony walkmans invented in Tokyo. Tokyo has become a model for living in San Francisco. The Japanese skill of living within crowded cities, in small spaces, is becoming a California skill after heedless generations of boom. The most interesting speculation I've heard about America's numerical place in this new world comes from Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer at the American Enterprise Institute. In a newspaper interview, Eberstadt wonders if there might not be some correlation between America's high fertility rate and our nation's religiosity. After all, the churches of Europe are cold, empty. Cathedrals have become tourist attractions. In Rome, the Pope scolds Europeans for becoming too secular. In Salt Lake City, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a church famous for large families, is now the fastest-growing religion in the country. In this new century, the earth's energies, its despair and ambitions and hopes, its hungry children and dreaming poets will belong more to the Southern Hemisphere than the North. Increasingly in the 21st century the United States will find itself uniquely positioned. As the wealthiest nation on earth we will find ourselves in Davos, in Paris, in Tokyo, sitting with government ministers of prosperous nations of the North; but as a country of great population, we will be linked by common concerns, common solutions, preoccupations, fictions, songs, and linked by common prayers with the vast new cities of the South: Bombay, Lagos, Sao Paolo, sister cities indeed. O, brave new world. I'm Richard Rodriguez.
RECAP
GWEN IFILL: Again, the major stories of this Monday: The U.S. Supreme Court upheld campaign spending limits from the post- Watergate era; UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan called for frank talk, not moral judgments, on the AIDS epidemic; and Yugoslavia moved to extradite former President Milosevic for war crimes. We'll see you online and again here tomorrow evening. I'm Gwen Ifill. Thank you, and good night.
Series
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
Producing Organization
NewsHour Productions
Contributing Organization
NewsHour Productions (Washington, District of Columbia)
AAPB ID
cpb-aacip/507-dv1cj8888s
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Description
Episode Description
This episode's headline: Supreme Court Watch; Targeting AIDS; Move to Extradite; The Twain Mystery; As The World Turns. ANCHOR: JIM LEHRER; GUESTS: MARCIA COYLE; CHARLES INGRAO; NINA BANG-JENSEN; MICHAEL KELLY; STEPHEN RAILTON; CORRESPONDENTS: KWAME HOLMAN; RAY SUAREZ; SPENCER MICHELS; MARGARET WARNER; GWEN IFILL; TERENCE SMITH; KWAME HOLMAN
Date
2001-06-25
Asset type
Episode
Topics
Social Issues
Literature
Global Affairs
Race and Ethnicity
War and Conflict
Health
Employment
Politics and Government
Rights
Copyright NewsHour Productions, LLC. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode)
Media type
Moving Image
Duration
01:03:58
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Credits
Producing Organization: NewsHour Productions
AAPB Contributor Holdings
NewsHour Productions
Identifier: NH-7056 (NH Show Code)
Format: Betacam: SP
Generation: Preservation
Duration: 01:00:00;00
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Citations
Chicago: “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” 2001-06-25, NewsHour Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed March 28, 2024, http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-507-dv1cj8888s.
MLA: “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” 2001-06-25. NewsHour Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Web. March 28, 2024. <http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-507-dv1cj8888s>.
APA: The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Boston, MA: NewsHour Productions, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://americanarchive.org/catalog/cpb-aacip-507-dv1cj8888s