Etc.
Section B • Page 8
The University Daily Kansan
Nation/World
Thursday, April 5, 2001
For comments, contact J. R. Mendoza at 864-4810 or e-mail editor@kansan.com
Bush regrets plane collision
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration offered Beijing a chorus of regrets but no apology for the collision between a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese jet fighter. China, still detaining 24 American crew members, said it was a step in the right direction amid signs both sides wanted a face-saving resolution.
President Bush, who issued a stern warning to Beijing a day earlier, had his advisers extend the olive branch yesterday.
"We regret the loss of life of that Chinese pilot, but now we need to move on," Secretary of State Colin Powell said. "We need to bring this to a resolution, and we're using every avenue available to us to talk to the Chinese side to exchange explanations and move on."
White House press secretary Arl Fleischer echoed Powell's remarks, saying "we have expressed our concern and our regrets about that incident," but he declined China's demand for an apology. In China, a similar regrets-but no-apology formulation was offered to the nation's foreign minister by the U.S. ambassador.
"The United States doesn't understand the reason for an apology." Fleischer said. "Our airplanes are operating in international airspace, and the United States did nothing wrong."
An apology would imply wrongdoing by the U.S., officials said, something Bush has not been willing to concede.
Powell, in a little-noticed comment, had said Tuesday the crash was "fatal for the pilot of the Chinese plane, and I regret that."
set the course for a middle ground that could lead to the crew's release and allow both sides to escape dangerous diplomatic territory, officials said.
But the remarks yesterday were the administration's most emphatic expressions of sympathy, designed to
Since the first day of the standoff, the president has steadily increased rhetorical pressure on the Chinese while leaving room for a diplomatic settlement. Bush and his foreign policy team debated whether he needed to make a personal statement similar to Powell's, but there were no plans for one as of yesterday afternoon.
Despite the signs of progress, both sides held publicly to contradictory positions: China called itself the "injured party" and blamed the United States for the crash, and the White House called it an accident. Pentagon officials said the Chinese pilots buzzed the lumbering spy plane.
"If it's just a simple apology that's
On Capitol Hill, the sister of 31-year-old detained Petty Officer Kenneth Richter said a carefully crafted apology might be in order.
going to get them back, then that should be fine," said Barbara Ditsefano of Staten Island, N.Y. "But if it's an apology with conditions, then the United States government has to decide what they're going to do."
Day four of the standoff began with Chinese President Jiang Zemin demanding an apology for the collision between the Navy EP-3E Arles II electronic surveillance plane and a Chinese jet.
He also said the United States should "do something favorable to the smooth development of China-U.S. relations," a statement taken by administration officials as a sign that Beijing would welcome any act of contrition from the United States.
Their hopes were fueled shortly afterward when Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan echoed Jiang's call for an apology in a meeting with U.S. Ambassador Joseph Prueher but also said China hoped to see the incident "resolved as soon as possible" with China protecting its sovereignty and dignity.
House attacks Postal Service plan
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Lawmakers came down hard on the U.S. Postal Service's plan to explore eliminating Saturday mail delivery, with one House member calling it a "fatal mistake" that could destroy the agency.
"This is one of the most self-defeating proposals I've heard in my life," Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., said yesterday. "If there's one thing the Postal Service could do that would guarantee its demise, it's eliminate service on Saturday."
Facing $2 billion to $3 billion in projected losses this year, the Postal Service has announced numerous cutbacks during the past months. On Tuesday, agency officials said they would investigate the possibility of ending virtually all Saturday mail delivery and closing some post offices and facilities. The changes would require congressional approval.
Postmaster General William J. Henderson told the House Government Reform Committee
yesterday the poor economy and declining mail volume had hit the agency hard.
He urged changes in the law to give the post office more flexibility in setting rates and services to contend with rising costs. It now takes almost a year to change rates. Postal managers are preparing to apply this summer to postal overseers for a rate increase, to take effect in 2002; in January, the price of first class mail went up a penny, to 34 cents.
"If we take the necessary steps now to fix the problems, maybe we can avoid a full-blown crisis in the next few years," said the committee chairman, Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind. "More cost containment options must be examined. Nothing should be off the table. Another rate increase should be the last option, not the first."
While most committee members agreed overhauling the Postal Service was long overdue, several criticized the idea of ending Saturday delivery.
"Reducing the number of delivery
"This is one of the most self-defeating proposals I've heard in my life "
Bob Barr
R-Ga
days will have a devastating impact on our economy," said Rep. Constance Morella, R-Md.
Henderson, who is leaving the Postal Service next month, said his agency was just conducting an internal study to determine possible savings from a five-day delivery schedule.
"A decision to curtail Saturday delivery has not been made," he said. "We have a problem that our customers are saying, 'Don't raise rates. Don't raise rates.' And we have to look at every possible alternative."
Barr said even the study was a bad idea.
"I think you are making a serious mistake even suggesting that you're
going to open that can of worms," he said. "You would be fundamentally altering what the Postal Service means to American citizens if your do that and I think that would be a fatal mistake."
Agency critics and groups representing postal workers also condemned the study.
Sam Parmelee, a vice president of the National Rural Letter Carriers Association, said reduced service could cause other problems.
"The day you don't deliver mail it stacks up," said Parmelee, whose group represents about 100,000 rural and suburban carriers. "Then you've got this huge volume of mail that some carriers won't be able to fit in their vehicles when they go out on Monday."
The American Postal Workers Union, which has 366,000 members nationwide, also said it would oppose such changes.
The Postal Service receives no taxpayer money for its operations. It remains a government agency and operates under laws set by Congress.
MIT to offer course materials on Web
The Associated Press
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — At a time when online knowledge can be a valuable commodity, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology plans to offer nearly all its course materials on the Internet for free.
The $100 million project aims to make information from MIT's 2,000 courses accessible to everyone within 10 years. The Web site will include lecture notes, course outlines, reading lists and assignments.
Visitors to the site will not earn college credit.
The plan counters a trend toward the "privatization of knowledge," where ideas are owned by companies or institutions, said professor Steven Lerman, chairman of the
MITfacultv.
The school is still considering ways to use the Internet to generate revenue, such as selling research updates to alumni, said MIT President Charles Vest. But this venture is essentially alruistic, he said.
"It expresses our belief in the way education can be advanced by constantly widening access to knowledge and inspiring participation," he said.
The project is voluntary, and some professors may decide not to participate. said Hal Abelson, a computer
Other universities offer course materials on the Internet, but the information is often available only to students, and no school has proposed offering all of its course materials online.
science professor involved in the project.
The Web site will fall short of the student experience at MIT, where tuition costs about $26,000 a year. The site will contain just the "raw materials" of the courses, not the teaching, Abelson said.
The project could provide course models for colleges around the country and help developing countries improve their higher education systems, Vest said. The school's reputation also gets a boost, he said.
"There's no sense in covering it up," said Manuel Roth, 27, a graduate student. "If it's general stuff about math and physics, why not?"
Students were receptive to the idea of the school giving away the knowledge they pay for.
coming from private, philanthropic sources.
Vest said he envisioned the fund
Andy Rosenfield, chief executive of the Internet education company UNext.com, said MIT's move would not increase competition with services such as UNext, but would instead stimulate interest in the courses they offer.
As for other schools following suit, Kenneth Green, a visiting scholar at Claremont Graduate University in California who researches high tech in higher education, said the questions of funding, planning and faculty involvement that MIT had already addressed were major hurdles.
Press analysis of ballots expands Bush's margin
"The MIT initiative will be watched with varying degrees of public and private envy," he said. "Envy and angst."
The Associated Press
MIAMI — George W. Bush's narrow margin of victory in Florida would have as much as tripled had the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a hand recount of the undervotes to be completed, a newspaper review of the ballots concluded.
Bush would have expanded his 537 vote victory to a 1,665 margin if the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court had gone ahead under the most inclusive standards, The Miami Herald and USA Today reported yesterday. Those standards
would have included as votes even partial punches and dimples on the punch-card ballots.
When the process was stopped, recounts using a variety of standards had already had been completed in seven
counties — Palm Beach, Volusia,
Broward, Hamilton, Manatee,
Escambia and Madison — and in 139
Miami-Dade County precincts.
Bush's 1,665-vote margin was based on the assumption those numbers would stand, but that in all the rest of the state the most generous standards would be applied. The newspapers also gave Bush the advantage under two more restrictive standards.
But the Herald reported that the balance would have tipped to AIGore if a recount of the undervotes had been started from scratch in all 67 Florida counties using the most inclusive standards. Under that hypothetical recount, free from the fragmented chronology of the post-election contest, Gore would have won the White House by 393 votes, the paper found.
An undervote is a ballot on which no preference for president registered; an overvote is a ballot on which more than one preference registered.
USA Today's analysis focused exclusively on what might have happened if the recount had been allowed to continue.
The results bucked the expectations of the Democratic and Republican teams during the Florida recount contest, finding that the more inclusive recount standards sought by Gore would have helped Bush. And the strictest standard sought by Republicans — that only clean ballot punches be counted — would have given Gore an extremely narrow three-vote victory. Both newspapers said that was too close to withstand the possibility of errors.
"Many Americans were asking the question 'What would the result be if the Florida Supreme Court's order to conduct hand recounts in all 67 counties were carried out?' Martin Baron, the Herald's executive editor, said Tuesday. "We felt it was our responsibility to answer questions that so many people had."
The review of 61,195 undervotes—a joint project involving the Herald, USA Today and Knight Ridder— did not examine the approximately 110,000 overvotes cast in the election. Both papers are planning a separate analysis of the overvote next month.
A group consisting of The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, The Palm Beach Post, St. Petersburg Times, The Wall Street Journal and Tribune Publishing, which owns The Orlando Sentinel and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, is analyzing all uncounted presidential ballots cast in the Florida election, including overvotes.
That ballot review, which is being conducted by the Chicago-based National Opinion Research Center, is expected to be released next month.
inducted by the Chicago-based Horn Quinn Research Center, is expected to be released next month. The Florida Supreme Court order to conduct the hand counts specified only undervests should be counted. However, the U.S. Supreme Court decision halting the recount noted that overvotes were being excluded.
Gore supporters were quick to interpret the newspaper findings as evidence the vice president should have won the election — and thus Florida's 25 electoral votes and the presidency.
"What this shows is that if you count the voter's intent, Gore wins. If you look for excuses not to count votes, Bush does better," said Doug Hattaway, Gore's national campaign spokesman, now working as a Democratic consultant in Boston.
But the White House said the 537 vote victory is the correct tally.
"The president has thought that the case was closed for months," spokesman Ari Fleischer said yesterday. "He thought the case was closed last year. The American people spoke and George W. Bush was elected the president. And he thinks that the American people have moved way beyond this. He certainly has."
While media reviews of the election are interesting, they do not answer the question of what constitutes a vote, said Philip Zelikow of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, who is helping craft a federal commission on election reform.
"The problem the Supreme Court found was that there was no consistent standard and no time to devise and fully apply one. So newspapers are now answering the 'What if' questions without having to settle any of the problems the Supreme Court confronted," he said.
The analysis found it was virtually impossible to conduct a mistake-free election.
The Herald and USA Today said only eight Florida counties were able to produce for inspection the exact number of undercount ballots they reported on election night.
And the Herald noted mistakes occurred both in machine and hand counts. It said Pasco County had acknowledged that multiple machine recounts produced a different number of undervotes — 1,776 on Nov. 8,1,712 on Dec.9 and 1,744 on Feb.5. And Duval County, which reported 4,967 undervotes on election night, ended up delivering 5,106 such ballots for inspection by the Herald after a hand recount.
The Herald and USA Today hired the national accounting firm BDO Seidman to conduct the review. At least two people — a reporter and a BDO Seidman auditor — looked at each undervote and recorded what they saw, including dimples, pinpricks and hanging chads on punch-card ballots and all discernible markings on optical scan ballots.
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