IN BRIEF
Hurricane Wilma claims
three on Mexico's coast
CANCUN, Mexico — Hurricane
Wilma lashed Mexico’s Caribbean
coastline for a second day Saturday,
ripping away storefronts, peeling back
roofs and forcing tourists and residents
trapped in hotels and shelters to
scramble to higher floors. At least three
people were killed.
Waves slammed into seaside pools
and sent water surging over the nar
row strip of sand housing Cancun’s
luxury hotels and raucous bars, joining
the sea with the alligator-infested la
goon. Downtown, winds tore banks
open, leaving automatic teller ma
chines partially submerged in water.
Wilma weakened to a Category 2
hurricane by midaftemoon as it inched
northward, with sustained winds of
100 mph, but it was expected to pick
up speed Sunday after moving out
over the Gulf of Mexico. It was likely to
sideswipe Cuba before hitting Florida,
probably Monday.
A hurricane watch was issued Sat
urday for the entire southern Florida
peninsula,»with heavy rain from
Wilma’s outer bands already causing
hip-deep flooding in Fort Lauderdale.
Hurricane watch issued
for the majority of Florida
KEY WEST, Fla. — Heavy rain from
Hurricane Wilma’s outer bands bat
tered parts of Florida on Saturday as
residents streamed out of the Keys un
der a mandatory evacuation order and
forecasters announced a hurricane
watch for the state’s entire
southern peninsula.
At the same time, a record 22nd
tropical storm of the season formed
about 125 miles off the Dominican Re
public, TYopical Storm Alpha.
Just five months into die six-month
Atlantic hurricane season, the annual
list of storm names had already been
exhausted and forecasters had to turn
to the Greek alphabet for the first time
in six decades of naming storms.
In Key West, one resident who
had yet to heed the evacuation or
der summed up the feelings of
many Floridians when he heard
about Alpha.
“Oh, lovely, that’s nice,” said a sar
castic John Cline, a guest house work
er having a drink at Mangoe’s Restau
rant on Duval Street in Key West. “Will
it ever end?”
As residents boarded up windows
and some fled Wilma’s path, state and
federal officials prepared for Wilma,
expected to make landfall on Florida’s
gulf coast Monday morning. It would
be the eighth hurricane to hit or at least
brush Florida since August 2004.
U.S. forces loll insurgents
sheltering foreign militants
BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops and
warplanes killed 20 insurgents Satur
day while destroying safehouses for
foreign militants near the Syrian bor
der, and four more American military
deaths edged the war’s U.S. death toll
closer to 2,000.
Iraqi election officials, mean
while, said no significant fraud had
been detected in last weekend’s
constitutional referendum as they
released partial results. Officials in
dicated the final count would not
come for at least a few more days.
The day’s heaviest fighting came
when U.S.-led forces raided five hous
es suspected of sheltering foreign fight
ers in Husaybah, a town near Iraq’s
border with Syria, the military said.
The troops reportedly killed 20 insur
gents and captured one.
The raiders found two caches of
small arms, ammunition, rocket-pro
pelled grenades, mortar rounds and
bomb-making materials, the military
said. Ttoops set off a car bomb found
near one of the buildings, and the Air
Force then used precision-guided mu
nitions to destroy the houses.
Miller/Times argument
goes public in newspaper
WASHINGTON — In the latest fall
out from the CIA leak investigation, re
porter Judith Miller and The New York
Times are engaging in a very public
fight about her seeming lack of candor
in the case.
In a memo to the staff, Executive
Editor Bill Keller wrote Miller “seems
to have misled” the newspaper’s
Washington bureau chief, Phil Taub
man, who said Miller told him in the
fall of 2003 that she was not one of the
recipients of a leak about the identity
of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.
Miller said Keller’s criticism is
“seriously inaccurate. ”
“I certainly never meant to mis
lead Phil, nor did I mislead him,”
Miller was quoted as saying in a
Times story Saturday.
According to a Times story on Oct.
16, Miller told Taubman two years ago
that the subject of Bush administration
critic Joseph Wilson and Wilson’s
wife, Plame, had come up in casual
conversation with government offi
cials, but that Miller said “she had not
been at the receiving end of a concert
ed effort, a deliberate organized effort
to put out information. ”
Al-Zarqawi's connections
grow with Iraq successes
WASHINGTON — U.S. intelligence
officials say Abu Musab al-Zarqawi
has expanded his terrorism campaign
in Iraq to extremists in two dozen ter
ror groups scattered across almost 40
countries, creating a network that ri
vals Osama bin Laden’s.
In interviews, U.S. government offi
cials said the threat to U.S. interests
from al-Zarqawi compared with that
from bin Laden, to whom al-Zarqawi
pledged his loyalty one year ago.
The director of the National Coun
terterrorism Center considers bin
Laden a strategic plotter who is deep
in hiding and out of regular contact
with his followers, while al-Zarqawi is
involved broadly in planning scores of
brutal attacks in Iraq.
“He is very much a daily, opera
tional threat,” said Scott Redd, who is
in charge of the government’s coun
terterrorism strategy and analysis.
In figures not made public before,
counterterrorism officials say that al
Zarqawi’s network of contacts has
grown dramatically since the U.S.-led
invasion of Iraq in 2003 and now in
cludes associates in nearly 40 coun
tries in the Middle East, Africa, Asia
and Europe.
Croatian authorities kill
birds to prevent flu spread
ZDENCI, Croatia — Authorities in
Croatia began killing thousands of do
mestic birds Saturday and ordered dis
infection for a large area near a nation
al park where six swans were found
dead from bird flu.
Elsewhere, Russia reported a new
outbreak of a lethal strain of bird flu,
and Italy and Congo became the latest
countries to ban imports of poultry
from nations affected by the virus.
Croatian experts detected the
virus in the swans late Friday after
they were found dead at a fish farm
near Zdenci national park. Samples
were sent to a British lab to test for
the H5N1 strain that has devastated
poultry stocks and killed 61 people
in Asia the last two years.
The virus is spread by migrating
wild birds and has recently been found
in birds in Russia, T\irkey and Roma
nia, spurring efforts around the globe
to contain its spread.
While H5N1 is easily transmitted
between birds, it is hard for humans
to contract. But experts fear it could
mutate into a form of flu that is eas
ily transmitted between humans
and cause a pandemic that could
kill millions.
E-tutors help American
students with math, science
COCHIN, India — A few stars are
still twinkling in the inky pre-dawn sky
when Koyampurath Namitha arrives
for work in a quiet suburb of this south
Indian city. It’s barely 4:30 a.m. when
she grabs a cup of coffee and joins
more than two dozen colleagues, each
settling into a cubicle with a computer
and earphones.
More than 7,000 miles away, in
Glenview, 111., outside Chicago, it’s the
evening of the previous day and 14
year-old Princeton John sits at his
computer, barefoot and ready for his
hourlong geometry lesson. The high
school freshman puts on a headset
with a microphone and clicks on com
puter software that will link him
through the Internet to his tutor, Na
mitha, many time zones away.
It’s called e-tutoring — yet another
example of how modem communica
tions, and an abundance of educated
Asians, are broadening the boundaries
of outsourcing and entering the minu
tiae of American life, from replacing a
lost credit card and reading a CAT scan
to helping revive a crashed computer.
- The Associated Press
University Health Center
presents
the 4th annual
r:;: ossed _
A breast cancer awareness fashion show
Monday, October 24
EMU Ballroom
7 p.m., free
v/V
UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
call 346-2843for more information