Student sent home for
allegedly practicing witchcraft
By John Rivera
The Baltimore Sun
BALTIMORE - Baltimore’s South
western High School was thrown into
turmoil Tuesday when a ninth-grader
accused her classmate, an admitted
practicing witch who is the daughter
Of a witch, of putting a hex on her.
In an incident seemingly more ap
propriate for a Halloween tale than
for a public school, Jamie
Schoonover, a 15-year-old freshman,
was sent home Tuesday with an offi
cial city schools discipline form,
which cited the reason for the refer
ral as “casting a spell on a student.”
Earl L. Lee, principal of the Alpha
Academy that comprises the school’s
ninth grade, has summoned the par
ents of both girls to his office
Wednesday to sort everything out.
“This is the first case I’ve ever had
like this in 29 years,” Lee said. “This
is totally new to me.”
Schoonover said it’s all a misun
derstanding. She would never cast a
spell because the principles of Wicca,
a form of neo-paganism that she and
her mother practice, dictate that what
Espionage trial of ex-Navy
captain gets under way
By Richard C. Paddock
Los Angeles Times
ST. PETERSBURG, Russia - En
vironmentalist Alexander Nikitin had
been in jail more than six months on
espionage charges when one of the
key secrecy acts he is accused of vio
lating was finally adopted.
The act, a Defense Ministry decree,
is itself so secret that Nikitin and his
lawyers had never even seen it until
this week. Neither had the three
judges who will soon decide whether
Nikitin is guilty of treason.
But that did not keep the trial of the
former navy captain from starting
Tuesday in what has become Russia’s
foremost human rights case since the
breakup of the Soviet Union.
Nikitin, 46, a former nuclear sub
marine inspector for the Defense Min
istry, faces up to 20 years in prison
for helping a Norwegian environmen
tal group document extensive radio
active pollution by the Russian navy
north of the Arctic Circle around
Murmansk.
The espionage trial, more than three
years in the making, has become a test
of the military’s power to hide its deg
radation of the environment behind a
curtain of national security. While
Russia’s Fiscal crisis has sparked fears
of a return to Communist control of
the economy, Nikitin’s case has made
Saddam’s son making millions off smuggling, ex-aide says
By John Daniszewski
Los Angeles Times
CAIRO - Saddam Hussein’s son
and heir apparent, Uday, is pocket
ing hundreds of millions of dollars
from a smuggling empire that ille
gally exports Iraqi oil and brings ciga
rettes and other goods into Iraq, ac
cording to a remarkable interview by
his former personal secretary.
The statements by Abbas Janabi,
who defected last spring and is said
to be in hiding someplace in Europe,
give new details about Uday’s in
volvement in sanctions-busting oil
trade and insights into the personal
ity of the 34-year-old. Janabi said he
has seen Uday murder and torture his
enemies.
Uday Hussein, who publishes Ba
bel newspaper in Baghdad and con
trols a voluntary militia of fighters for
his father, is perhaps best known in
the West for surviving an assassina
tion attempt in December 1996 that
has left him unable to walk without
crutches.
But rather than the heroic victim
celebrated by Iraq’s state-controlled
media, the portrait of Saddam
Hussein’s oldest son that emerges in
ever you do, good or evil, returns to
you threefold.
“If she was to go ahead and cast
some evil spell, she would look at it
coming back to her three times over,”
said her mother, Colleen Harper. “I
don’t think that she’d want to do
that.”
Harper believes her daughter has
become a target
because of her
religious beliefs.
“I’m highly up
set because this
is a faith we prac
tice as devoutly
as a Christian
would practice
Christianity,”
she said.
But school of
ficials say the disciplinary action
taken against Schoonover is not about
religion.
“The student was suspended for al
legedly threatening other students,
which is a violation of the student dis
cipline code, which was established
by the Baltimore City school board,”
said Vanessa Pyatt, a city schools
activists worry about the revival of
Soviet-style political repression.
“The outcome of this trial will be
the single-most important indication
of whether Russia will become a so
ciety of law, or whether it reverts into
a society where security forces can
bring to bear secret evidence on a ret
roactive basis against scientists who
speak the truth,” said Stephen Kass,
a New York environmental attorney
and board member of Human Rights
Watch who is here to observe the trial.
On Tuesday, Judge Sergei Golets,
the head of the three-judge panel hear
ing the case, rejected Nikitin’s motion
for an open trial and closed the pro
ceedings to the public.
The prosecution already has pre
sented its case against Nikitin in 21
volumes of material prepared by the
Federal Security Service, the main
successor agency to the Soviet-era
KGB.
Nikitin is scheduled to testify for
two days behind closed doors and then
offer two witnesses on his behalf. The
trial could come to a close as early as
Friday.
Golets said in an interview before
the trial began that the essence of the
case is whether two Defense Minis
try decrees governing secrecy can be
applied retroactively, as a commission
of experts already has ruled. Nikitin’s
attorneys argue it is unconstitutional
the interview is of a determined man
bent on accumulating power and mo
tivated by greed, violence and ex
tremism. The interview with Janabi
is being published this week in in
stallments by the pan-Arab daily A 1
Hayat, based in London. The news
paper said that Janabi fears for his
life and has asked for asylum in an
unspecified European country.
Abdel Wahab Badrakhan, an edi
tor at the newspaper, described
Janabi as a “man who was very close
to Uday and knows everything about
him.” He said the interview would
“help people to understand some
background of many, many events.”
The revelations will likely provide
ammunition for the many in the
Middle East who argue that maintain
ing U.N. sanctions, far from hurting
the Iraqi leadership, has been a
source of profits for Saddam Hussein
and his immediate family.
Iraq in recent weeks has ceased
cooperating with inspectors from the
U.N. Special Commission, whose job
it is to certify that Iraq has destroyed
all weapons of mass destruction. In
response, the U.N. Security Council
has suspended its periodic reviews on
lifting sanctions - in effect keeping
spokeswoman. “The nature of the
threat - casting a spell or whatever -
that doesn’t enter into it right now.”
Harper openly practices witchcraft
with the girl. Harper, a transsexual
who was Schoonover’s father but
now calls herself her mother, has been
a practitioner of Wicca for a year, af
ter dabbling in it for five or so years.
We’re not Satanists,
simply because Satan is a
Christian concept and we
don’t have anything to do
with Christianity.
Colleen Harper, student's mother
many supersti
tions that have been encouraged by
Hollywood’s depiction of witch-
craft.”
Wicca is a benign religious prac
tice closely associated with nature
and nature’s cycles, Harper said.
That confusion is at the root of the
problem, Schoonover said. Accord
ing to her version of events, she and
to do so,
Amnesty International has declared
Nikitin to be Russia’s first “prisoner
of conscience” since Andrei
Sakharov, the Soviet Union’s best
known dissident.
The United States has urged Rus
sia to drop the case against Nikitin.
Canada has invited Nikitin and his
family to emigrate there. Officials of
half a dozen countries, including the
United States and Canada, were
among more than 150 international
observers and reporters who attended
the open portion of Tuesday’s hear
ing.
Nikitin, who spent 11 years as a
nuclear submarine engineer, began
working with Bellona, the Norwegian
environmental group, after he retired
from the Defense Ministry in 1992.
He had written a section of a report
for Bellona on pollution by the North
ern Fleet when he was arrested in Feb
ruary 1996, for allegedly passing se
cret information to the Norwegian
group.
Nikitin was denied a lawyer for
more than two months after his arrest
and he spent more than 10 months in
jail. Since his release on bail in De
cember 1996, he has been prohibited
from leaving St. Petersburg.
He says the information he pro
vided Bellona was based entirely on
public sources and that he did not di
them in place indefinitely.
Although it has long been alleged
that Iraq is selling oil illegally despite
U.N. sanctions - in May U.S.
Undersecretary of State Thomas
Pickering said such sales reached
200,000 barrels a day - Janabi’s state
ments provide fresh corroboration
from someone with direct access to
the inner circle of the regime. Ac
cording to Janabi, Uday has built a
“trade empire” that extends to Tur
key, Lebanon, Jordan and Iran, and
includes a flotilla of 50 ships for
smuggling Iraqi oil through the Per
sian Gulf, an operation carried out in
cooperation with parties in Iran.
Janabi accuses Uday of seizing
much of the food and medical aid
sent to Iraq from sympathetic Euro
pean and Gulf Arab countries. A
small amount is distributed for the
sake of the media, he said, but most
is stolen and sold.
All in all, “Uday is the biggest win
ner from the sanctions,” Janabi said,
because he has been able to assume
a monopoly on cigarettes, whiskey,
chemical fertilizer and fuel.
Janabi, 50, is a former journalist
who worked for the Iraqi national
news agency and later became edi-
World and Nation
“We’re
not Satanists,
simply because
Satan is a Chris
tian concept and
we don’t have
anything to do
with Christian
ity,” Harper said.
“Unfortunately,
there are too
friends were sitting around a tree
when they noticed other girls had
written their own names on rocks.
One of her friends wanted to cross
out the names, so Schoonover lent the
friend a white-out pen.
After crossing out the names, the
friend wrote, “Life is a virtue of
death.”
“The girls came over and they
thought I had put a spell on them/’
Schoonover said. “I said, ‘No, I didn’t
put a spell on anybody.' ”
One of the girls began to cry.
“That girl was scared stiff,”
Schoonover said. “She was crying
and crying. She would just get scared
of me looking over at her.”
Lee said he was troubled by
Schoonover’s admission that she
practices witchcraft and by the effect
that knowledge is having on some
students.
“Because of the information the
child was giving us, we felt it was
necessary to send a letter home and
to talk with her parents about how it
is affecting other children in the
school,” he said.
vulge any confidential information.
“The indictment says I have vio
lated a law on state secrets,” Nikitin
said in an interview. “But when we
ask them to cite the exact article of
the law, the paragraph, the point, the
prosecution has a problem answering
us.”
A 45-page indictment charges
Nikitin with violating the
government’s official secrets law and
two Defense Ministry decrees that
spell out what the law covers.
While the law is a matter of public
record, both decrees are closely
guarded secrets.
The law was adopted in December
1995, three months after Nikitin
turned in his part of the report to
Bellona. The first Defense Ministry
decree was issued in 1993, the year
after he retired from the military. The
second was issued in August 1996,
after he had already been arrested.
Alexander Kolb, a Federal Security
Service investigator who helped build
the case against Nikitin, said the se
cret information that Nikitin revealed
in the Bellona report included a record
of Russian naval nuclear accidents.
“Nikitin has single-handedly ex
posed a history of accidents which led
to the deaths of many, many people,”
Kolb said. “The loss caused by his
actions is immense. °
'tor of Babel, the daily newspaper
owned by Uday, before becoming his
personal secretary.
Hayat did not provide details of his
defection, but said that Janabi had es
caped a kidnap attempt in an Arab
capital before succeeding in reach
ing a European country. Janabi said
he decided to leave after he was ac
cused by Uday of mishandling a busi
ness deal involving imported West
ern cigarettes, an accusation that
Janabi considered tantamount to a
“death threat.”
According to the interview, Uday
personally profited from Iraq’s
seven-month occupation of Kuwait
in 1990-91, stealing 160 cars, sev
eral boats, gold, jewelry and carpets.
Janabi said that Uday disagreed
with his father’s handling of the Ku
wait occupation, believing that
Saddam should not have stopped in
Kuwait.
According to him, Uday wanted
Iraq to mount a lightning strike on
Saudi Arabia’s oil fields. That way it
could have blackmailed Western
powers by threatening to set the
world’s largest oil deposits on fire if
they intervened.
The Behrend College Beacon - Thursday, October 22 , 1998 - page 7
B aby enters world
at toll booth
By Tom Jackman
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON - Jose Ortiz hur
riedly tossed 50 cents in the toll bas
ket on Northern Virginia’s Dulles Toll
Road Tuesday morning so he could
speed his pregnant girlfriend, Ana
Medrano, to the hospital. But before
Ortiz could pull away from the toll
booth, Medrano blurted out from the
back seat, “Oh, my God, the baby’s
coining.”
Ortiz told James Jones, who was
stationed at the booth in the main toll
plaza, to call the police and an ambu
lance.
Jones asked, “She’s having a
baby right now?” Pat Gandee, the
tollkeeper on the other side of Ortiz’s
car, heard Jones’ astonished tone,
looked down at Medrano, and “I saw
the (baby’s) head. I thought, ‘They’re
not going to make it to the hospital.’
This lady was having a baby right in
the middle of the lane.”
And before paramedics could ar
rive, Stephany Emperatriz Ortiz en
tered the world in the back seat of a
Nissan Sentra at 3:08 a.m., one month
prematurely, after two hours of labor.
Stephany held her first news confer
ence less than 12 hours later at Inova
Fairfax Hospital, declining comment
but looking pink and healthy at 6
N.Y. court
keeps stadium
issue off ballot
By Blaine Harden
The Washmgton Post
NEW YORK - Mayor Rudolph
W. Giuliani threw a legal curve ball.
Its aim was to help New York Yan
kees owner George Steinbrenner
build an expensive new baseball sta
dium in Manhattan, while making
sure that New Yorkers could not
vote against it in a referendum.
The top court in New York state
Tuesday called that curve ball a
strike, ruling that the Republican
mayor has authority to keep the sta
dium referendum off the ballot Nov.
3. In denying an appeal by the New
York City Council, which tried to
force the anti-stadium referendum
onto the ballot, the New York Court
of Appeals said Giuliani’s effort to
keep it off raises “no substantial
constitutional question.”
If the referendum had been al
lowed on the ballot, Steinbrenner’s
plan for an $BOO- million, taxpayer
supported stadium on the West Side
of Manhattan almost certainly
would have been vetoed, according
to a number of polls. They show that
eight out of 10 New Yorkers oppose
spending tax dollars to move Yan
kee Stadium out of its 75-year-old
home in the Bronx.
The ruling, in the midst of a World
Series that the Yankees are well-po
sitioned to win, marked the final out
in a complex game over the stadium
that has mixed baseball with poli
tics and the profit motive. The
champion of the referendum was
New York City Council Speaker
Peter F. Vallone, the Democratic
candidate for governor who hoped
the measure would increase voter
turnout in the city and boost his
Letters to the Editor
behrcoll2 @ aol.com
pounds 13 ounces and already sport
ing a full head of black hair.
Doctors said Stephany and her
mother were in excellent health.
Medrano, 23, of Reston, Va., said
through an interpreter that she was
“very grateful that everything went
quickly and that she received the
medical attention she needed at the
tollbooth.” She said it wasn’t a diffi
cult delivery, “because it went so
fast.”
Doctors at the hospital said the
tollkeepers did all the right things in
handling the delivery, though Gandee
said they did little other than watch it
all unfold. “We told them to roll up
the windows and keep the engine run
ning, to keep the baby warm,” Gandee
said.
The time from when Ortiz, 23,
of Herndon, Va., and Medrano rolled
into the toll plaza to Stephany’s birth
was about three minutes, Gandee said.
“She didn’t even scream,” Gandee
said of Medrano. “She didn’t yell. She
didn’t say anything.”
After Stephany emerged, the
tollkeepers comforted the mother and
child while waiting for an ambulance,
but they didn’t cut the umbilical cord.
“We didn’t have a clipper,” Gandee
said. “They’ll probably issue us those
now.”
struggling campaign to unseat Re
publican incumbent George E.
Pataki.
The political impact of Tuesday’s
ruling, however, could extend well
beyond Vallone’s long-shot bid. It
also could affect the nation’s tight
est Senate race by depressing New
York City turnout in the Senate con
test between Sen. Alfonse M.
D’Amato, R-N.Y., and Rep. Charles
E. Schumer, D-N.Y. Analysts here
say low turnout is likely to help in
cumbent D’Amato.
“Certainly, higher turnout is al
ways better for Democrats,” said
Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for
Schumer. “Every New Yorker de
serves the opportunity to vote on the
future of Yankee Stadium, but we
will win with or without the refer
endum on the ballot.”
The court ruling is a triumph for
Steinbrenner, who has threatened to
move his team to New Jersey if he
doesn’t get a new stadium, and for
Giuliani, who has feared that he
would forever be branded as the
mayor who “lost” the Yankees.
Steinbrenner, whose Yankees are
the most lucrative franchise in base
ball, has pressed the city for years
to build a new stadium in Manhat
tan, one that would have lots of
high-profit skyboxes for wealthy
corporate patrons. The current
stadium’s location in the South
Bronx, Steinbrenner argues, is un
safe for baseball fans.
His argument, though, was sub
stantially weakened this year by at
tendance figures, as nearly 3 million
fans came to the Bronx to watch the
Yankees win an American League
record 114 games in the regular sea
son.