6A
Tuesday, April 30, 1996
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Lebanese dead to be mourned at funeral
Beirut may seek reparations for April 18 shelling
The Associated Press
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Wearing masks against the stench, Red Cross volunteers washed and wrapped corpses yesterday for the mass funeral of 91 refugees killed in the deadliest attack of the Israel-Hezbollah fighting.
Today's government-organized funeral is expected to draw throngs of mourners, including government officials, to the southern village of Qana, where the refugees were killed April 18 by Israeli artillery shelling of a U.N. base.
The Red Cross team spent the day unloading the badly burned and mutilated bodies from a refrigerated truck parked near the beach in the coastal town of Sidon, 25 miles south of Beirut.
They sprayed them with chemicals to quell the powerful odor. The remains then were wrapped in white shrouds with Lebanese flags pinched in place before each was laid in a simple pine coffin.
Many of the bodies were little more than charred pieces of flesh. Fewer than half could be identified, and Haytham Solh of the Lebanese Red Cross said only a few could be washed as Muslim tradition dictates.
"I feel frustrated. I feel disgusted," said Solh. "It's a total slaughter."
Officials remain unsure of the exact death toll since some bodies were completely obliterated, but estimates range from 91 to more than 100.
It is Islamic custom to bury bodies within 24 hours of death, but the funerals were delayed until fighting ended and relatives could return.
The dead include two Lebanese-American brothers, Abdul Mohsen Bitar, 11, and Abdul Hadi Bitar, 9, said Red Cross official Mohammed Bizri.
The brothers had been sent by their family in Detroit to visit their grandmother in Qana when the fighting broke out, Bizzi said. The grandmother was not hurt.
The Qana attack accounted for most of the 162 people killed in the 16 days of fighting, and Prime Minister Rafik Hariri declared April 18 a day of remembrance in Lebanon.
Israel has said the artillery fire was not intended for the U.N. base but was directed at Hezbollah guerrillas who had fired Katyusha rockets nearby.
Hariri, meanwhile, said Lebanon may take Israel to the International Court of Justice to seek reparations for damage in the war. He said Israel targeted the Lebanese nation and its economic infrastructure more than it did the Shite Muslim guerrillas of Hezbollah.
The prime minister did not indicate when Lebanon would decide whether to seek legal action. Such a case almost certainly would be contested by Israel, which said it was provoked by
"I feel frustrated. I feel disgusted. It's a
total
total slaughter."
Haytham Solh Lebanese Red Cross
guerrilla attacks on its northern towns.
U. N. officers in southern Lebanon said the cease-fire that took effect Saturday was holding. However, Hezbollah guerrillas traded fire briefly yesterday in south Lebanon with members of Amal, a rival Shiite group, according to security sources.
Both groups have supporters in south Lebanon, and an argument about planting party flags at a cemetery led to an exchange of machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades, the sources said.
There were no injuries, and both sides appeared to be intentionally shooting over the heads of their rivals, the sources said.
Lebanese engineers also worked for a third day yesterday to repair power stations, water pipes and road networks destroyed in Israel's blitz.
Officials said only 15,000 of the 500,000 people who fled the south remained displaced, waiting for the military experts to finish clearing their villages.
Study says eat less, live longer
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Reducing calories by 30 percent appears to slow aging in monkeys, providing new evidence that primates, such as humans, could live longer by eating less.
A National Institutes of Health study using about 200 monkeys has shown that a well-balanced diet that includes a sharp reduction in calories caused the animals to have a lower body temperature, a slower metabolism and fewer changes in biochemical markers for aging.
"This shows that what has been demonstrated in mice also can apply in primates," said George Roth, a scientist at the gerontology research center of the National Institute on Aging.
"We have known for 70 years that if you feed laboratory mice less food, they age slower, they live longer and they get diseases less frequently," he said. "We find that monkeys respond in the same way as rodents and that the same biological changes may be in play here."
Roth is co-author of a study to be published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Joseph Kennitz, a researcher at
"We have known for 70 years that if you feed laboratory mice less food,they age
slower."
George Roth
National Institute on Aging scientist
the primate center at the University of Wisconsin, said that changing the diets of monkeys in his lab had had similar effects but that the study was not finished.
"The findings to date from several labs do suggest that the intervention (diet restriction) has beneficial effects on health and on reducing age-related diseases and may ultimately extend the life span for primates," said Kemnitz.
Barbara Hansen, a researcher at the obesity and diabetes research center at University of Maryland, Baltimore, said her lab had been
studying the effects of dietary restriction on the life span of rhesus monkeys for almost 15 years, and the results, to date, showed that monkeys had less illness and obesity.
She said it would take at least 10 years to prove that reducing calories extends life but results up to 1995 were promising. Hansen said that half of monkeys on unrestricted diets had died prematurely, while only 12.5 percent of those on calorie-restricted diets had died at an early age.
Restricting calories, she said, reduced the rate of cancer, heart disease and diabetes in the test animals.
in the NIH study, Roth said that monkeys had adapted to restricted calories by dropping their normal temperature by about one degree and slowed the metabolic demands of the body.
Roth said that the diet of each monkey included all required vitamins and nutrients but that half the monkeys received about 30 percent fewer calories than a control group.
Roth said other biochemical measurements, such as the process of blood sugar, also showed that eating less was healthy among the monkeys.
Dec. 1987
Rusauville,
Arkansas:
Man shoots 14
including his wife,
and seven children
Aug. 1986
Edmond,
Oklahoma:
Postal worker
kills 14,
wounds 6
4 decade of random killings
The Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, where a lone gunman killed 34 people, is the worst incident of random violence by a lone gunman in the last 10 years. A look at selected random killings:
Oct. 1991
Killeen,
Texas:
Gunman kills
22 in a restaurant,
20 people wounded
Sept. 1995
Sollies-le-Pont:
France:
Teen kills 14
1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996
April 1996
Timika,
Indonesia:
Army lieutenant
kills 19,
wounds13
at an airport
Aug. 1987
Hungerford,
U.K.:
Gunman
kills16,
wounds 11
July 1989
Luxiol,
France:
French
farmer
kills 14
Dec. 1989
Montreal,
Canada:
Man kills
14 women,
wounds 13
June 1994
Falun, Sweden:
Army shooting
instructor kills 7,
wounds one
March 1996
Dunblane, U.K.
Gunman kills16
school children
and their teacher,
in the school's
gym
Police sources and the Australian Broadcasting Corp. identified the gunman as Martin Bryant, 28, who had no criminal record but a history of mental problems. He was hospitalized, sedated and put under
By the time he was done, at least 34 people were dead: Some were shot down in their seats at a tourist cafe, their forks still raised to their mouths; others sat slumped in their cars. One little girl died struggling to hide behind a tree.
Knight-Ridder Tribune
Neighbors say gunman experienced mood swings
Man who killed 34 threatened others in Tasmanian town
The Associated Press
The blond man cruised Tasmania's towns in a mustard-yellow Volvo hatchback with a surfboard strapped on top. He shared his bed with a pet pig. He once threatened to shoot two neighbors who dropped by his farm and offered to buy raspberries.
PORT ARTHUR, Australia — He slept by day, prowled by night, threatened visitors with his beloved guns and nonchalantly cut the grass minutes after being told of his father's drowning.
On Sunday, muttering to himself about "WASPs" and "Japs," he rolled in to one of the area's most popular tourist sites, unpacked automatic rifles from a tennis bag and started shooting.
police guard yesterday in the same hospital where 18 of his victims were treated for gunshot wounds.
In the aftermath of the massacre, workers carried the dead to a morgue, citizens gathered for evening prayer vigils and police puzzled over why someone would use assault rifles to methodically pick off victims ranging from 3 to 72 years old.
Local media reported that Bryant had suffered mental problems and mood swings after a car accident three years ago that killed the woman with whom he was living.
But his neighbors said his threatening behavior was apparent since his arrival four years ago in the farming community of Copping, outside the southeastern Tasmanian town of Hobart.
Veina Featherstone, 41, whose property abutted the man's farm, said that when her husband first went over to introduce himself, Bryant told Featherstone's husband to keep off his property or he would shoot him.
The man, whom neighbors called only Martin, told two women who wanted to buy raspberries from him as they had from the previous owner to get off his property and not to come back or he would shoot them, said a local woman.
"I was terrified of him," said the
"He used to sleep all day and walk around his property and other people's properties at night," she said. "He was pretty scary. He fired a gun off at night."
woman, who did not want her name used. She said that one minute he would act calm and sane, and the next he would act wild.
"He would go off — he would be a totally different person," she said. About three years ago, the man's father drowned on the property, she recalled. His death was declared a suicide. Her neighbor's reaction to the death was strange, she said.
The woman said within half an hour of the body being brought out of the house, Bryant was out cutting his lawn with a Weed Whacker.
"I don't think he was at all upset by his father's death." she said.
Featherstone said Bryant originally moved onto the property with a woman in her 50s.
"She told us she had looked after him for years, that she was like a mother to him and that his parents couldn't handle him," Featherstone said. "She used to calm him down."
The woman told neighbors how she had given the man a pet baby pig, which he used to sleep with, Featherstone said.
The woman died a year later in a car accident in which Bryant was her passenger. She left her money and property to him. Bryant sold his inherited property 18 months ago and was known to own a house in Hobart, Featherstone said.
Across the region yesterday, people struggled to cope with the carnage. Prime Minister John Howard said the slayings had shaken the nation to the core.
THE NEWS in brief
The Associated Press
Four French army specialists ski to North Pole
PARIS — Four French army endurance specialists, making a rare trip on foot to the top of the world, have reached the North Pole after a 55-day trek on skis, the Defense Ministry said.
The four, pulling sleighs of up to 290 pounds, skied about 600 miles from the northern edge of
Siberia and arrived at the North Pole on Wednesday.
"It was a daily battle — a battle against time," Adjanton Bernard Virelaure told France Info radio on Sunday at the end of his trip.
Setting out Feb. 29 after being dropped off by a Russian military helicopter, the four members of the High Mountain Military Group also included Lt. Antoine de
Choudens, Adj. Francois Bernard,
And Chief Sgt. Antoine Cayrol.
Another helicopter airlifted them from the North Pole, a Defense Ministry representative said on condition of anonymity.
Norwegians Borge Ousland and Erling Kagge became the first team to ski to the North Pole in 1990, and Ousland was the first to do it solo four years later.
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