IN BRIEF
Iraq's constitution seems
assured of passage
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraq’s land
mark constitution seemed assured
of passage Sunday after initial re
sults showed minority Sunni Arabs
had fallen short in an effort to veto
it at the polls. The apparent accept
ance was a major step in the at
tempt to establish a democratic gov
ernment that could lead to the
withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Opponents failed to secure the
necessary two-thirds “no” vote in
any three of Iraqi’s 18 provinces, ac
cording to counts that local officials
provided to The Associated Press. In
the crucial central provinces with
mixed ethnic and religious popula
tions, enough Shiites and Kurds vot
ed to stymie the Sunni bid to reject
the constitution.
Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is
sued a decree setting Dec. 15 for
Iraqis to vote again, this time to
elect a new parliament. If the con
stitution indeed passed, the first
full-term parliament since Saddam
Hussein’s fall in 2003 will install a
new government by Dec. 31. If the
charter has failed, the parliament
will be temporary, tasked with
drawing up a new draft on which
to vote.
Wisconsin School bus
crash kills at least five
OSSEO, Wis. — A bus carrying
high school students home from a
band competition crashed into a
tractor-trailer that had jackknifed on
the interstate early Sunday, killing
four adults and an 11-year-old girl,
officials said.
Twenty-nine others were injured,
some seriously, troopers said.
The semi had gone off the shoul
der of Interstate 94 and jackknifed,
and was blocking the westbound
lane, Wisconsin State Patrol Capt.
Douglas Notbohm said.
It was the first of four buses car
rying about 140 students and 15 to
20 adult chaperones, Schoch said.
Tropical storm warning
for Cayman Islands
GEORGE TOWN, Cayman Islands
— A tropical storm warning was in
effect Sunday for the Cayman Is
lands as a tropical depression
moved through the Atlantic on a
path that could threaten the U.S.
Gulf Coast later this week as a hurri
cane, forecasters said.
The system was expected to be
come TVopical Storm Wilma by
Monday, which would make it the
21st named storm of the season, ty
ing the record for the most storms in
an Atlantic season, the National
Hurricane Center in Miami said.
The only other time so many
storms have formed since record
keeping began 154 years ago was
in 1933.
At 5 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time,
the depression was centered about
150 miles southeast of Grand Cay
man, forecasters said. It was mov
ing west-northwest near 2 mph and
had sustained winds near 35 mph.
Depressions become tropical storms
when their winds reach 39 mph.
Neo-Nazis march through
Ohio neighborhood
TOLEDO, Ohio — In the days
leading up to a white supremacist
march, ministers pleaded with resi
dents to stay calm and community
leaders organized peace rallies.
Authorities even delayed releas
ing the route so protesters wouldn’t
know where the group planned
to march.
It wasn’t enough to stop an angry
mob that included gang members
from looting and burning a neigh
borhood bar, smashing the windows
of a gas station and hurling rocks
and bottles at police on Saturday.
Twelve officers were injured, one
suffering a concussion when a brick
flew through her cruiser window.
In all, 114 people were arrested
on charges including assault, van
dalism, failure to disperse and
overnight curfew violations.
Chinese space capsule
lands after five days in orbit
BEUING — A space capsule carry
ing two Chinese astronauts landed
by parachute in the country’s north
ern grasslands before dawn Monday
following a five-day mission meant
to affirm China’s status as an emerg
ing technological power.
The astronauts Fei Junlong and
Nie Haisheng were “in good health”
after their Shenzhou 6 capsule
touched down at 4:32 a.m. local
time in the Inner Mongolia region,
the official Xinhua News Agency
said. It said retrieval crews had
reached the landing site and the two
men were undergoing a
medical checkup.
The two astronauts were shown
live on state television climbing out
of their kettle-shaped capsule with
the help of two technicians in red
jumpsuits and climbing down a lad
der to the ground. They smiled,
waved to cheering members of the
retrieval crew, accepted bouquets of
flowers and sat in a pair of metal
chairs beside the capsule.
Libby, lawyer's contacts
with Miller questioned
WASHINGTON — New details
about Judith Miller’s decision to co
operate in the CIA leak probe are
raising questions about whether
Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief
of staff and his defense lawyer tried
to steer the New York Times re
porter’s testimony.
The dispute arose as the newspa
per on Sunday detailed three con
versations that Miller had with the
Cheney aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Lib
by, in the summer of 2003 about
Bush administration critic Joseph
Wilson and Wilson’s wife, covert
CIA officer Valerie Plame.
The issue over the contacts be
tween Miller, Libby and their repre
sentatives has arisen even though
Libby’s lawyer insists his client
granted an unconditional waiver of
confidentiality more than a year ago
for the reporter to testify.
Pakistani officials estimate
higher quake death toll
BALAKOT, Pakistan — Pakistani
officials predicted Sunday that
many more thousands of dead
would be found in earthquake-rav
aged Kashmir as heavy rains in the
Himalayan region drenched home
less survivors in mud and misery.
The latest estimate would raise
the death toll from the magnitude
7.6 quake in the mountains of
northern Pakistan and India to at
least 54,000 — a jump of more than
13,000 from the official count of
known dead.
A spokesman for the prime min
ister of the region warned that the
cold and wet could cause further
deaths among the 2 million or so
people believed to be homeless.
About a fifth of the villages in the
quake zone remained cut off eight
days after the tremor turned villages
scattered across lush mountainsides
into death traps, and the bad weath
er over Kashmir halted aid flights
by helicopters.
New ways to get stem cells
may skirt ethical objections
NEW YORK — Two new mouse
experiments may show how to ob
tain human embryonic stem cells
without ethical hurdles, a step that
could allow federal funding for such
research, scientists reported Sunday.
Currently, scientists must sacri
fice human embryos to harvest such
cells, which can form any tissue
type and are seen as valuable for
studying and treating illnesses like
diabetes and Parkinson’s disease.
Objections to embryo destruction
have led to a ban on federal funding
for such work, which scientists say
hampers research.
The new methods, detailed Sun
day in the online edition of the jour
nal Nature, seek to obtain the cells
without destroying embryos.
The Coalition for the Advance
ment of Medical Research, which
advocates federal funding of stem
cell research, cautioned that despite
the goal of avoiding ethical quan
daries, the new approaches “will
not sit well with many who oppose
embryonic stem cell research.”
—The Associated Press
■M
University Health Center
presents
the 4th annual
Best Dressed Br;
A breast cancer awareness fashion show