Thursday, March 19, 1998
The University Daily Kansan
Section A • Page 7
Kennedy memorabilia sold for $39,000
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — One scribbled line of John F. Kennedy's inaugural address and nine photocopied pages of the speech sold for $39,000 yesterday as a two-day JFK memorabilia auction began.
Before the bidding opened, the collector selling most of the 500 or so items reached an agreement with Caroline Kennedy and John F. Kennedy Jr. to return some of their father's personal items.
Among the items Robert L. White agreed to return were two of their father's handwritten journals and a clock the president kept
in the Oval Office.
As part of the agreement, the Kennedy children surrendered all claims to ownership of the other auction items, including JFK's St. Christopher medal money clip; photographs; correspondence between their father and mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis; and clothing worn by their parents.
The agreement did not cover the watch Kennedy was wearing on the day he was assassinated and the briefcase he carried with him on that trip to Dallas — both of which his children had asked for.
White's lawyer, Robert Adler,
said his client was glad to have the
controversy behind him.
watch, which was being offered by an unknown seller.
White was offering the briefcase for sale. He no longer owns the
Tom McNaught, a representative of the Kennedy Library in Boston, said the returned items would be given to the library. The Kennedys did not return messages.
The start of the sale at Guernsey's auction house drew about 150 bidders to Manhattan's Seventh Regiment Armory.
gural speech: "An inaugural is a beginning and an end —"
The speech package had been expected to bring $4,000 to $6,000.
Also included was a nine-page photocopy of Kennedy's handwritten draft of the full speech, which is best known for the line, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
Evelyn Norton Lincoln, who was the president's secretary, bequeathed White a trove of Kennedy's personal items when she died in 1995. The Kennedy children have said they felt betrayed by Lincoln.
Earlier this week, White agreed to remove 21 items from the auction after negotiating with the National Archives. Among the items were a White House writing desk and notes Kennedy made before a 1961 meeting with Nikita Khrushchev.
"The number of items she took for herself and the intensely personal character of many of them is overwhelming," the Kennedys said in a statement.
Two years ago, in a sale at Sotheby's to benefit the Kennedy family, bidders paid $34.5 million for 5,000 items from the estate of Mrs. Onassis.
Gore pushes U.S. Senate to pass IRS reforms
Plan could begin this tax season
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Bent on claiming the popular IRS-reform mantle, Vice President Al Gore championed anew the administration's plan for a customer-friendly tax collector yesterday.
He pushed the Senate to pass legislation restructuring the Internal Revenue Service for this tax season and for all seasons.
Emergency tax refunds issued in hardship cases within one business day and new technology to route taxpayer telephone calls more efficiently were among the 200 administrative changes that Gore formally unveiled in a Roosevelt Room ceremony. He first disclosed many of those same ideas in the same room at the White House last fall.
"They will help us ensure that we have an IRS that is not just taken off people's backs but put on their
side," the vice president said. A task force of IRS employees compiled the recommendations into a 92-page report.
Some Republicans suggested that Gore, a certain contender for the presidency in 2000, was trying to exploit the popular issue of IRS reform.
"He talked about all of this last fall. It's hard to see what's new here," sniffed Ari Fleischer, spokesman for the House Ways and Means Committee.
The committee crafted legislation — subsequently passed by the House on Nov. 5 — that, in any dispute, shifts the burden of proof from the taxpayer to the IRS, protects innocent spouses from mistakes made on joint returns and creates an independent board to oversee the IRS.
"The congressional IRS reform train had already left the station, and today the administration hopped into the caboose," Ways and Means Chairman Bill Archer, R-Texas, said yesterday.
"They will help us ensure that we have an IRS that is not just taken off people's backs but put on their side."
Vice President
Al Gore
who was in Las Vegas, Gore claimed credit for getting House approval of the Republican bill.
"The Senate has been studying it for the last five months. It's time for the Senate to pass it so the president can sign it and help give the American people an IRS that is more fair, more efficient and more responsive for this tax season and for all seasons." Gore said.
Senate Finance Committee Chairman William V. Roth Jr., R-Del., said he would introduce his own IRS reform package within the next few weeks. House Republican leaders hope to have joint agreement on a bill before Congress adjourns this year.
Businessman Steve Forbes, who is likely to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, issued a statement knocking the administration's customer-service reforms.
"Does anyone really believe Bill Clinton and Al Gore can make the IRS a kindier and gentler place? It's ludicrous." Forbes said.
His political action committee launched a multistate radio ad campaign advocating a complete overhaul of the IRS and the federal tax code by 2001.
"They are corrupt to their core. You need to abolish them and replace them." Forbes said.
To compile their report, called Reinventing Service at the IRS, task-force members picked the brains of front-line IRS workers and taxpayers about how to improve service at one of the government's least popular agencies.
One finding was familiar: Taxpayers want minimum contact with the
To that end, the IRS will drop unnecessary notices by the end of 1998, meaning the elimination of 45 million pieces of IRS mail per year.
IRS.
The Clinton administration also plans to report to Congress this year on the fairness and effectiveness of all penalties, which is in tune with growing congressional interest.
The IRS slapped taxpayers with $18.3 billion in penalties and interest in 1996 and collected $4.4 billion of that amount. Roth plans to include penalty reform in his bill—an idea backed by some Democrats, including Sen. Bob Graham of Florida.
The report found that IRS performance measures now are production driven, overvalue enforcement, focus on isolated steps and may inadvertently encourage unfair treatment of taxpayers.
One of the administration's most far-reaching changes would reward IRS workers for good customer service instead of the numbers of cases processed.
The Associated Press
Turkish court orders retrial of activists; protests ensue
The court said there was not enough evidence to convict the students on the charges of belonging to an illegal leftist organization.
ANKARA, Turkey — An appeals court ordered a new trial yesterday for eight student activists sentenced to 18 years in prison, sparking violent clashes between police and supporters of the students.
The case is being monitored closely by human rights groups as a test of the government's promise to curb human rights abuses.
The students, arrested in 1996 when they unfurled banners inside the Parliament building protesting tuition hikes, were members of the leftist Revolutionary Youth organization.
Prosecutors claimed the group was a successor to the banned People's Salvation Party-Front.
But appeals Judge Demirel Tavil said it was not clear whether Revolutionary Youth was actually an illegal group and ordered police to investigate further.
The new trial will begin Wednesday. If the police fail to come up with convincing evidence against the group, the students could be acquitted.
After the hearing, a stone-throwing melee broke out in Ankara when police moved in on hundreds of students gathered to demonstrate their solidarity with the defendants. At least 12 officers, a reporter and a cameraman were injured.
In Istanbul, student protesters destroyed a police car with clubs and stones and attacked a police booth outside the Greek consulate. Police fired in the air to disperse the crowd. No injuries were reported.
The Anatolia news agency said about 300 people were arrested in the protests.
Body's natural painkillers could lead to new medicine
The Associated Press
Researchers test drugs that could replace morphine
Such drugs might work against pain that does not respond well to morphine, such as some pain from cancer, from diabetic nerve damage and from the disease shingles.
NEW YORK — Researchers have discovered two painkillers produced naturally by the body, a finding that might yield hints for designing new medications to treat a variety of conditions.
Scientists previously have identified other natural painkillers, called endorphins, that act in the brain and spinal cord much like morphine.
So far, the new painkillers
have shown promise in mice. One substance, dubbed nocistatin, (pronounced NO-suh-STAH-tin) is described in today's issue of the journal Nature by Seiji Ito of the Kansai Medical University in Osaka, Japan, along with colleagues there and elsewhere in Japan and Singapore.
"This is pretty big news," said Gavril Pasternak, who studies the biology of pain at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
He and colleagues found the other new painkiller, which they call QFQ2. A report on their work will appear in the journal NeuroReport in a couple of weeks, he said.
Both painkillers are made from the same protein. Both act on the central nervous system, which includes the brain and spinal cord.
In the Nature paper, the Japanese scientists injected nocistatin along with a pain-producing substance into the spinal cords of mice. Normally, this second substance is so potent that mice find it painful when their flanks are stroked by a paintbrush. But nocistatin blocked the substance's effect.
The researchers also put mice on hot plates to test sensitivity to heat pain after injections with the pain-promoting substance. Nocistatin largely blocked the substance's effect.
Pasternak's team exposed the tails of mice to a hot light to see how long it took before the mice flicked the tails away. Results showed OFQ2 blocked pain when injected into either the spine or the brain, he said.
Drugs that block pain in such tests also relieve pain in people, Pasternak said.
Scientists find defective gene
Genetic testing could give family members warning
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — Scientists have identified a defective gene that can make a young person's heart stop beating for no apparent reason.
The heart starts quivering instead, unable to pump blood efficiently. The person collapses, unconscious, and dies quickly unless treated with an electric shock to get the heart working correctly again.
Such episodes are called ventricular fibrillation and kill more than 300,000 Americans each year, but the majority of those cases are caused by a prior heart condition. The new finding pertains to cases with no apparent explanation, or idiopathic ventricular fibrillation.
It is not clear how common IVF is. But past reports suggest it might kill 15,000 to 36,000 Americans a year, said Qing Wang of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. He reported identifying the gene with other scientists in today's issue of the journal Nature.
The victims cited in the Nature paper were men stricken in their 20s, 30s and 40s, but IVF can appear in either sex and can strike even teenagers.
Frank Markus of the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson, Ariz., who maintains a registry of IVF cases, said the findings might lead to new treatments for IVF and more common disorders that cause ventricular fibrillation.
IVF now is treated by implanting a device to shock the heart back into pumping rhythm if it detects an episode occurring.
The newly identified gene does not cause all cases of IVF, but it indicates a particular family of
genes that could be studied for other cases, Wang said.
Gene testing in the family of a person who has had an IVF episode might identify others at risk. Those people then could be warned to avoid intense physical activity or emotional stress, Wang said.
The gene previously had been implicated in another unusual heart disorder called long-QT syndrome, which also can kill young, otherwise healthy people by disrupting heartbeat. Wang said different flaws in the gene lead to either that disorder or IVF.
The gene is called SCN5A. It tells heart cells how to build channels to take in charged particles of sodium from outside the cell. That is a crucial step in generating the electrical signals that regulate heartbeat.
Wang and colleagues looked at six families with a history of IVF and at two other people with the disorder. The SCN5A gene was mutated in three families.
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