NATION/WORLD
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
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Tuesday, January 21, 1997
8A
'Mourning in America' for GOP on angst-filled Inauguration Day
Leader's ethics woes make swearing-in harder to swallow
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — For Republicans there was little celebration, just the start of a bleak week. They had to sit back yesterday and watch the beginning of their second term of exile from the White House while preparing to punish their leader at the Capitol.
Except for GOP lawmakers involved in the inauguration itself, the Grand Old Party basically closed down for the day.
A tape recording answered the phone at the Republican National Committee headquarters. Most GOP congressional offices were closed while many Democratic offices were open, even though it was a federal holiday.
The party's 1996 standard-bearer, Bob Dole, did not attend the inauguration.
Shut out of the many balls and celebrations around town, one group
Newt Gingrich
of young Republicans even planned a "Mourning in America: We Feel Your Pain" alternative ball.
It also was the eve of the day House Republicans must swallow hard and vote to discipline their speaker for the first time in four decades. The House votes today on a resolution to reprimand Newt Gingrich for ethical misconduct and to assess him $300,000.
Republicans tried to be good sports, but sometimes there was an edge to their comments.
"Republicans join in congratulating President Clinton and in extending a hand of cooperation," said the new Republican National Committee chairman, Jim Nicholson.
"At the same time, Republicans look forward to four years from today, when we plan to celebrate the inauguration of a Republican president to work with a Republican Congress entering the next millennium."
"The talk of the revolution is over, but Republicans haven't given up hope in their efforts to change Washington."
Frank Luntz
GOPpollster
And at least one Republican, Sen. John Warner of Virginia, had the second-most prominent role on the inaugural podium, after Clinton, as chairman of the inaugural committee.
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., planned a morning news conference today to announce the GOP legislative agenda for the 105th
Congress, beginning with introduction of the session's first legislation a proposed constitutional
amendment to balance the budget.
Although Lott shared the platform with Clinton and accompanied him in the inaugural parade, he did not plan to attend any of the evening inaugural festivities, according to spokeswoman Susan Irby.
"I had four great tickets to watch the inauguration, but I gave them away to close friends," said GOP pollster Frank Luntz, who spent the day working instead. "The talk of revolution is over, but Republicans haven't given up hope in their efforts to change Washington. But clearly the dialogue has changed." Former Bush domestic adviser James Pinkerton suggested that the GOP angst about Gingrich would be short-lived. "What's to complain about here? Republics have the Congress and the Republicans have the ideological high ground, as the president's speech itself suggested.
"Republicans need a better plan, a better process, for selecting a candidate, having been clobbered in two presidential elections in a row," Pinkerton said.
Father once embroiled in custody case no longer sharing home with wife, child
Man made famous while fighting for son moves into a hotel
The Associated Press
"It's not the way I'd pictured it ending," said Otakar Kirchner's former lawyer, Loren Heinemann. "It hurts a lot."
CHICAGO — A man who battled fiercely for more than three years to win back his son from another couple has moved out of the house he shared with his wife and left behind the boy once known as Baby Richard.
"Whether it's permanent or not, I don't know," Heinemann said. "I hope that there is a happy ending."
Kirchner moved out several months ago, and the 5-year-old boy, now known as Danny Kirchner, is staying with his biological mother, the lawyer said yesterday.
Danny was adopted by Kimberly and Jay Warburton when he was 4 days old, before his biological parents had married. The boy's biological mother, Daniela Kirchner, said she believed at the time that Otakar Kirchner had abandoned her.At first, Otakar Kirchner was led to believe the boy had died.
Two months after the child's birth, Otakar Kirchner began fighting for custody. Following a fierce court battle, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that Kirchner's parental rights had been denied and invalidated the adoption.
Danny was taken sobbing from the Warburtons in April 1995 as supporters of the adoptive parents haunted the Kirchners with cries of "Monster!"
Despite his father's absence, the boy is a happy, healthy child, Heinemann said.
"He's doing great," Heinemann said. "I saw him yesterday as they were going to church."
The Warburtons, who have not been allowed to see or communicate with Danny since his return to the Kirchners, could not immediately be reached for comment. Their phone number is unlisted, and they did not return calls left with a child advocacy group they established after Danny was taken.
Richard Lifshitz, who represented the Warburtons, said it was disturbing that Kirchner, who claimed to be so interested in this child, walked away.
"What's perhaps more upsetting to me is that this child, who's already been severely traumatized, and undoubtedly being traumatized again by losing this caretaker," the lawyer said.
The Chicago Tribune reported that Kirchner was living in a suburban motel room registered to a woman with whom he worked.
"I don't think it's your business where I've moved," Kirchner told the
"It's not the way I'd pictured it ending. It hurts a
lot."
Loren Heinemann Kirchner's former lawyer
Tribune. "I temporarily live here."
Neither Kirchner nor his wife could be reached for comment yesterday. Neither had a listed number.
Lifshitz said Kirchner's absence from the house probably was not grounds to re-open the custody case.
"Danny's being cared for by his mother. What's wrong with that?" Heimemann asked. "It's not some sort of Dickensian scene."
KU grad who found Pluto is dead at 90
Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the planet Pluto in 1930 and later attended the University of Kansas, died Saturday at his home in Mesilla Park, N.M. He was 90.
Clyde Tombaugh's discovery won him respect, scholarship
By Mark McMaster
Kansan staff writer
Mr. Tombaugh began his search for "Planet X" at age 23, following the lead of Percival Lowell, the astronomer who had detected wobbles in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune and speculated that there might be an undiscovered planet.
Lowell was impressed with Mr. Tombaugh's amateur work and hired him to work in his observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., even though he had no formal education in astronomy.
It was at the Lowell Observatory, just 10 months later, that Mr. Tombaugh, then 24, found the planet by meticulously comparing photographs of the night skies, said Stephen Shawl, professor of physics and astronomy.
His achievement earned him a
full scholarship to study astronomy at the University, where he received a bachelor's degree in 1936. He also received a master's degree in 1938.
Mr. Tombaugh remained active in astronomy for the rest of his life, spending much of his time at New Mexico State University where he taught from 1955 until his retirement in 1973.
Shawl described Tombaugh as an extremely dedicated man willing to invest both time and effort into his work.
"He loved what he did, and he was intense about it," he said. "At the time when he discovered Pluto, he'd probably seen more of the universe than anyone else."
Astronomers remember Mr. Tombaugh for his interest in the amateur aspect of the science.
Barbara Twarog, professor of physics and astronomy, said Mr. Tombaugh regularly used the handmade telescope he built with his father at age 21.
Shawl said that Mr. Tombaugh was enthusiastic about KU sports.
"He was a very,very strong supporter of football in general,and KU in particular," he said.
Indian families send sick children to beg
The University dedicated its observatory to Mr. Tombaugh in 1980.
The Associated Press
MURSHIDABAD, India — In this desperately poor corner of India, villagers with handicapped children were among the few making any money. For years, they sent their children — deformed by burns or birth defects — to Saudi Arabia to beg.
The practice was little known, until Saudi Arabia deported 76 Indian girls last week. Now, Indian officials are investigating the export of beggar children to wealthy Arab nations, and the girls are coming home to families less than happy to see them.
"We will have to starve now as we do not have any other source of income," said Altaf Hossain, who described how he had sold his 16-year-old daughter to a trafficking ring for beggars.
They shopped at Home Depot for an ax that could go through a man's head and a hackshaw for cutting up the body, prosecutors said.
WHITE, PLAINS, N.Y. — Yakov Gluzman's killers went to market for murder.
Hossain, who lives in Murshidabad, a farming district 120 miles north of Calcutta, said his daughter, Begum Khatun, was among the girls flown from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to Bombay. India, on Jan 12.
At first, police and social workers in Bombay were baffled by the arrival of the girls, some as young as 6 years old and many with physical handicaps or deformities. They were being cared for at four children's homes in Bombay while authorities traced their parents and tried to arrange to send them home.
The Associated Press
Gruesome plot uncovered in case of marriage gone awry
Hossain said his daughter's feet were damaged during her birth. She could not walk properly, and she could not work. Hossain sold his daughter to traffickers for $800.
At a Grand Union supermarket, they bought the garbage bags that would hold the cancer researcher's 60-some body parts.
Disabled children are prized as beggars because they elicit sympathy.
And after the deed was done, they made a quick stop for $30 worth of bandages, because one of the killers had accidentally swiped the other
This grisly story of jealousy, greet and mayhem among a group of Soviet émigrés is unfolding in federal court, where Rita Gluzman, the victim's estranged wife, is on trial for a crime that could send her to prison for life.
with a hatchet.
The Gluzmans married in Ukraine in 1969, and there was a time when they would do anything for each other. He gave up science for carpentry in hopes of getting out of the Soviet Union by making himself less valuable to his homeland. And when she got out before him, she lobbied Congress and the United Nations until he joined her.
Gluzman worked for Nobel Prizewinning biologist James Watson, codiscoverer of DNA's molecular structure. He soon made his own breakthrough, discovering a cancer research method now used in laboratories around the world.
Gluzman, though, had a girlfriend in Israel. Gluzman's wife, 48, of Upper Saddle River, N.J., allegedly feared her impending divorce so much that she first tried wrestling and extortion to get the 35-year-old girlfriend out of the picture.
A private investigator testified that Rita Gluzman suggested the other woman be served the AIDS virus in a
drink on an airplane.
When such ideas failed, Rita Gluza man allegedly recruited a cousin to help kill her husband, and they ambushed the scientist with axes as he entered his Pearl River, N.Y., apartment last spring.
The plot unraveled the next morning, when the cousin, Vladimir Zelenin, 40, of Fair Lawn, N.J., was caught literally red-handed, dumping body parts into the Passaic River.
Zelenin, afraid he would be executed, agreed to cooperate with investigators and pleaded guilty to murder, hoping to limit his prison time to 20 years and prevent his sons' deportation by testifying.
"I completed the killing of Yakov Gluzman together with Rita," he testified. "The idea of killing Yakov was the idea of Rita Gluzman."
Rita Gluzman is being tried under a 1994 federal law that prohibits crossing state lines to attack a spouse. The district attorney in Rockland County, where the crime occurred, agreed to let federal prosecutors handle the case, thereby getting around a state law that says the testimony of an accomplice like Zelenin must be corroborated.
Speaking through a Russian-language interpreter, he talked about
buying the weapons and supplies.
Then Zelenin testified about the night of April 6.
He looked unilinchingly at a photo when Hochheimer asked, "Is this a fair and accurate representation of a part of Yakov Gluzman's head with an ax mark in it?"
"I think so," Zelenin said.
Even grislier than his testimony about the killing was his testimony about cutting up the body in the bathtub. At one point, a knife got stuck in Yakov's body and broke, he said. At the defense table, Rita Gluzman seemed to faint and then sobbed loudly.
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