WEDNESDAY, AUG. 29, 2001
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN - 7A
Peace keepers confiscate weapons
The Associated Press
DEBELDE, Yugoslavia — Deep in the flinty mountains that separate Kosovo from Macedonia, American GIs in face paint and full combat gear lurk in the thick brush and peer out through night-vision goggles.
When suspected ethnic Albanian militants pass, the U.S. troops take full advantage of the element of surprise. "Freeze and drop your weapons!" they scream, bursting from their hiding places to seize arms and make arrests.
American forces may be playing a behind-the-scenes role in Macedonia, where only a few hundred are involved in support roles in NATO's British-led mission to collect arms from the insurgents. But they're on the front lines just over the border in Kosovo, intercepting hundreds of suspected rebels and thousands of weapons — a key demand of the Macedonian government.
"You cannot fight without weapons, and we'll take away as many as we can from the rebels," said U.S. Army 1st Lt. Charles Canon, 25, of Clarksville, Tenn.
During the past few days, U.S. troops with the NATO-led peacekeeping force in Kosovo have detained and questioned about 200 suspected rebels believed to have crossed into Kosovo from Macedonia, spokesman Howard Rhoades said.
The detainees are brought to Camp Bondsteel, the sprawling U.S.military base in Kosovo, for questioning. Most of those recently arrested were unarmed, Rhoades said, suggesting that militants of the National Liberation Army are keeping their pledge to hand over their weapons.
Macedonians have accused NATO of not doing enough to stop rebels and arms from moving between Kosovo and Macedonia. But Canon, whose men control a four-mile stretch of the border, concedes they can't stop every rebel.
"There are hundreds of small paths and tracks in my area of responsibility," he said. "Our disadvantage is that they know all the trails, since they made them for years. You walk on a trail, and then that trail leads to another trail, and that one leads to a third trail. Since we are here, and they can see us, they have stopped using these roads."
The work can be dangerous and exhausting, involving lots of surveillance work done overnight under cover of darkness.
In the Kosovo town of Vitina, just five miles north of the Macedonian border, Staff Sgt. Kenneth Chaney sat with other red-eyed soldiers from Charley Company after a night of hiding in the brush for "non-lethal ambushes" of suspected rebels.
"They know that if we catch them, they're going to prison," Chaney said, proudly displaying photos of a recent interdiction: 27 AK-47 machine guns, a 90mm cannon with six rounds, 43 rocket-propelled grenades, 19 small rockets, 140mm high explosive rounds, cell phones, cigarettes and clothes.
Since the operation began, the peace keepers have seized more than 155 assault or sniper rifles, 59 heavy machine guns, 65 anti-tank weapons and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition, said Maj. Randy Martin, spokesman for the 5,400 U.S. troops currently in Kosovo.
"We are not here to help any war," Canon said. "We are here to promote the peace."
Deaths attributed to overworked research staffs
The Associated Press
BALTIMORE — Johns Hopkins University, one of the world's top medical research institutions, has come under fire regarding a deadly asthma experiment and a lead-paint study on poor city children.
The incidents have raised questions about whether medical institutions undertake more research than they can safely monitor.
After healthy, 24-year-old volunteer Ellen Roche died after inhaling a drug in the asthma study in June, the federal Office for Human Research Protections said, among other things, that Hopkins' review board was overworked.
The government shut down most of Hopkins' 2,400 federally funded experiments for five days, an action the university called unwarranted. Regulators are allowing the studies to resume one at a time.
Two weeks ago, the Maryland Court of Appeals condemned a study testing levels of lead-paint exposure in poor children by the Kennedy Krieger Institute, a Hopkins affili
ate. The ruling permitted lawsuits filed on behalf of two children who allegedly suffered brain damage to go forward.
In the study, landlords were paid to recruit about 100 families with healthy children to live in their homes during the early 1990s. Children—who can develop brain damage if they eat lead paint chips—were to be tested periodically to see how well methods developed to reduce the levels of lead-based paint were working.
All U.S. research institutions are required to have review boards by the federal government, which sets and oversees the guidelines
The review boards -which consist largely of university-affiliated doctors and administrators -are there to weigh the potential risks and benefits of various experiments and to make sure that subjects have been properly informed and have given their consent.
When an institution applies for a federal grant for the research, the federal agency — the National Institutes of Health, for example — generally does not get involved in oversight
of risks. An exception is when an experimental drug is tested on humans. The Food and Drug Administration then must approve the use.
Tom Tomlinson, a Michigan State medical ethics professor, said more resources needed to be devoted to reviewing institutional research.
"With the tremendous increase in the sheer number and complexity of research going on, it's becoming harder and harder for these committees to find the time they need to really look at these protocols carefully," he said.
Despite the university's problems, Dr. Jordan Cohen, president of the Association of American Medical Colleges, said Hopkins' reputation—and federal funding—were not threatened.
"I think, in the aggregate, Johns Hopkins is such a spectacularly successful research institution that it certainly deserves all the respect that it gets," he said. "There are always risks involved in any research, and bad things happen from time to time."
Museums don't display all specimens to public
The Associated Press
LAWRENCE—A wreath of human hair found in Lawrence's downtown museum, more than 100 stuffed warblers and a jar of preserved flat fish found in 1960 in the Persian Gulf.
Thousands of such oddities and rarities are kept at Lawrence museums but are rarely or never displayed to the public.
Atany one time, less than 20 percent of the University of Kansas Natural History Museum's 7 million specimens are on display in Dyche Hall.
Brad Kemp, the museum's assistant director of public affairs, said "There are some items that are never intended for the public to see.
"I'm not sure if everyone would want to see them, either."
For example, in the ichthyology collection there's a brown, 3-foot-long fossil fish called a coelacanth that lies preserved in a metal tank of water and 70 percent ethanol.
Andy Bentley, the collection manager, said the American Museum of Natural History recently donated the rare fish, found off the South African coastline. He said the species was 50 million years old and was thought to have been extinct if not for its discovery a few years ago.
"Now nobody is able to take the coelacanth from the Comoro Islands, except the French, because of an embargo," he said.
But Bentley said researchers hundreds of years from now could study the preserved fish and other fresh and salt-water fish in the collection's 28,000-plus jars. There also are skeletons, slides, drawings and X-ray plates of fish.
"In order for people to conserve the species, we have to look at them," he said. "We have a collection for people to use so they can stop diluting the population out there."
The museum's two exhibit aquariums of Kansas fish pale in comparison to the more than 400,000 fish specimens in the collection. On the tall storage shelves, a person can find a pipe fish found in Texas in 1908, Alaskan fish, including sting rays, sand sharks and puffer鱼 collected near Belize in 1991, as well as several uncataloged fish donated from a researcher's trip to Nepal.
There also are 100,000 specimens in the ornithology collection, a number that ranks the museum in the 10 largest university collections in the world.
Mark Robbins, who manages the ornithology collection, said he was starting to study more migratory and tropical birds in Central and South America. The collection already contains a large number of birds from the Great Plains, northern Mexico and the western United States.
The collection also includes birds dating back to late 1800s and early 1900s that are now extinct. He pulled out rows of drawers containing several passenger pigeons that became extinct in 1911, and green and yellow Carolina parakeets that became extinct in 1930.
"People would be surprised to know we once had a native parakeet population that nested in sycamores and cottonwood trees along the Kaw," he said.
The public will get a sneak peek of the museum's collection during the University's first-ever All-University Open House from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Oct. 6.
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