1 ! , ! 1;t • ,
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2000
Justices bar random traffic stops to check for drugs
by David G. Savage
Los Angeles Times
November 28, 2000
WASHINGTON - The Supreme
Court called a halt Tuesday to nar
cotics roadblocks, ruling that police
may not routinely stop all motorists
in hopes of finding a few drug crimi
nals.
In a 6-3 opinion, the court stressed
that the Fourth Amendment forbids
police from searching persons with
out some specific reason to believe
that they did something wrong.
While police have broad authority
to stop motorists for traffic violations,
they do not have a general authority
to stop cars "to detect evidence of
ordinary criminal wrongdoing,"
wrote Justice Sandra Day O'Connor
for the court.
Tuesday's ruling is the third this
year that breathes new life into the
Fourth Amendment. It comes as a
mild surprise because, until recently,
the justices had sided regularly with
law enforcement in the war on drugs.
Earlier this year, the court ruled
After 10 chaotic years, Somalia builds a
government from scratch
by Karl Vick
The Washington Post
November 28, 2000
MOGADISHU, Somalia - After 10
years of anarchy, Somalia is prepar
ing to govern itself once again. A pro
visional government has taken up
quarters in a pair of Mogadishu ho
tels, the corridors of power graced
with potted plants and chambermaids
bearing fresh sheets and towels.
The executive branch wakes up ev
ery morning in the Hotel Ramadan.
one of the few public structures to
survive the years of firefights in
Mogadishu's battered streets. Legis
lators greet the day up the road at the
Laf-Weyn Palace. Parliament con
venes on white plastic chairs out in
the annex.
"Everything has to be started from
scratch," said Abdiqassim Salad
Hassan, the president appointed by a
transitional national assembly that
gathered itself from the rubble of the
nation over four months this summer.
"The judiciary will be next."
Establishing a government any
where is no easy thing, as the United
States is now demonstrating. But in
Somalia, a country unique in mod
ern history for going a full decade
without a central government, the un
dertaking takes on aspects of the mi
raculous.
For 10 years, the capital of this
country wrapped around Africa's
Horn has defied every attempt at im
posing order - including the United
States' readiness to help create what
President George Bush briefly called
the New World Order. In 1993, un
ruly Mogadishu helped bury that am
bition when the street fighters of a
local faction killed 18 U.S. troops in
a firefight and dragged the body of
one through the streets.
By 1995, after U.S. troops and then
U.N. forces had withdrawn. Somalia
was left to its warlords. Drawing on
clan loyalties and abandoned arse
Study: Listening registers differently in men
by Robert Lee Hotz
Los Angeles Times
November 28, 2000
Confirming what many women
have long suspected, new brain re
search released Tuesday shows that
men give only half a mind to what
they hear, listening with just one side
of their brains while women use
both.
This latest insight into the oldest
of humanity's differences - gender -
doesn't say who is a better listener.
But, using a brain-scanning tech
nique called functional Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (fMRI), the
work does highlight the differences
in neural activity between men and
women listening to someone read
aloud.
Conducted by researchers at the
Indiana University School of Medi
cine, the new study is the latest ad
dition to a growing catalog of re
search suggesting that the mental
that police may not stop and search a
pedestrian based entirely on a vague
and anonymous tip phoned to police
headquarters. The justices said the
Fourth Amendment requires more
specific evidence of wrongdoing.
The justices also ruled that police
may not squeeze or feel a traveler's
bags in a random search for illegal
drugs. In that ruling in the case of
Bond vs. United States, the justices
threw out drug evidence against a bus
passenger who was arrested after an
officer felt a brick of methamphet
amine in his satchel. The court said
a traveler's hand bags are private and
off limits to searches, except when
an officer has a specific reason to
look for drugs.
Narcotics roadblocks are rare, but
the Indianapolis case tested whether
or not they could be used nationwide.
In August 1998, city police there
set up six checkpoints to stop cars.
Their intention was to cut the flow
of illegal drugs in and out of the city.
When a motorist was stopped, an
officer asked to see his or her driver's
license. At the same time, a second
nals, local militias continued what
has now been a decade of battles that
have destroyed civil order, contrib
uted to famines and
led to the deaths of
hundreds of thou
sands of people
"There are several
sick states on the
continent of Africa,"
said Babafemi
Badejo, of the U.N.
political office re
sponsible for moni
toring Somalia from
the safety of Nairobi.
"But perhaps this is
the first one that en
tered full coma."
Today this country
of perhaps 8 million
lacks almost every
trapping of state. Its
currency is printed
by whoever feels like
it. Passports can be
had for $3O at a local
market ("What
would you like your
place of birth to be?"
a hawker asks).
And there is still
Mogadishu, where
foreign visitors must
pay $2OO a day for
the constant com
pany of a half-dozen
young men with AK
-47s as a hedge against kidnapping or
worse.
What Somalia does have is a pro
found public appetite for a return to
governance. Long defined by civil
war, the country is preoccupied by
its consequences. Somalia ranks dead
last in the worldwide U.N. survey of
human development. When a hand
ful of athletes made their way to the
Sydney Olympic Games, the TV pool
broadcast of the opening ceremony
announced them by saying, "One in
divide between the sexes is more
complex and more rooted in the fun
damental biology of the brain than
many scientists had once suspected.
"As scientists, we're figuring out
what normal is, and more and more
often it seems that normal for men
may be different than normal for
women," said Indiana radiologist
Dr. Micheal Phillips, co-author of
the study.
The findings were presented
Tuesday at the annual meeting of the
Radiological Society of North
America in Chicago. The research
also has been submitted to the jour
nal Radiology.
Understanding whether or not dif
ferences in mental capacity or in
tellectual ability can be attributed to
gender has long confounded scien
tists, parents, equal-rights activists
and educators. To be sure, men's and
women's brains are more alike than
not, but they are definitely not the
same - in size, sense or sensibilities.
WORLD Sr NATION
officer with a drug-sniffing dog
circled the vehicle. If the first officer
or the dog detected anything suspi
cious, the vehicle was pulled aside
and searched.
Over four months, police said they
stopped 1,161 motorists and made
104 arrests. Fifty-five of the arrests
were for drug offenses and 49 were
for other reasons.
When several detained motorists
complained about the stops, the
American Civil Liberties Union sued
the city, contending that the stops
were unconstitutional.
The U.S. court of appeals in Chi
cago agreed on a 2-1 vote that the
roadblocks violated the Fourth
Amendment. But in the spring, the
Supreme Court said it would hear the
city's appeal.
Lawyers for the city admitted that
their purpose was to catch drug
criminals, not to enforce traffic
safety.
They also had two good precedents
on their side. In 1989, the Supreme
Court had upheld sobriety road
blocks, ruling that the need to catch
four Somali children fails to reach the
age of 5."
"We are welcoming the honorable
Government worker Abadir Hassan holds up the Somali
flag on a "battle wagon" at the Marina military base, where
a new Somali army is being trained.
government," said Asia Ali Yusuf,
44, who has camped almost 11 years
in an office of the party headquar
ters built by Mohamed Siad Bane,
the country's longtime dictator. That
government - overthrown in 1991 -
was the last Somalia knew.
Living amid smoke from cooking
fires in the corridor, and with the
memories of a son and grandson
killed in the years of fighting, Yusuf
hopes the new government "will
open schools.... We will get jobs. We
Only now, however, are reliable
studies of metabolic and structural
brain organization offering scientists
hard evidence of how men and
women may differ mentally, often in
ways that buck conventional preju
dices.
A growing library of medical
scans captures the signs of mental
activity in living brains. Men and
women show significant differences
in certain brain areas that are linked
to how people think and experience
emotions, mathematical reasoning,
spatial relations, perceptual speed
and even sense color and sound.
Whatever they are doing, women
seem to activate more neurons than
Some of those differences appear
to evolve throughout a lifetime. The
brains of aging men and women
have significant structural and func
tional differences, recent research
reveals. Men's brains are larger but
are more damaged by the aging pro
drunken drivers outweighed the pri
vacy of innocent motorists. And in
1976, the court had upheld the
government's power to stop motorists
at an immigration checkpoint near San
Diego. Near the borders, officials may
use extra authority to search for ille
gal immigrants and smugglers, the
court said.
On Tuesday, the justices refused to
extend those precedents.
"We cannot sanction stops justified
only by the generalized and ever
present possibility that interrogation
and inspection may reveal that any
given motorist has committed some
crime," O'Connor said in her opinion
in the case (City of Indianapolis vs.
Edmond, 99-1030).
Her opinion was joined by Justices
John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter,
Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader
Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.
In dissent, Chief Justice William H.
Rehnquist said the roadblocks "effec
tively serve a weighty interest with
only minimal intrusion on the privacy"
of motorists. Justices Antonin Scalia
and Clarence Thomas agreed.
will work as before."
Days after President Hassan was
welcomed to Mogadishu on Aug. 30
by a crowd estimated at
100,000, he took a seat in
the U.N. General Assembly
during the Millennium
Summit. His flight to New
York was paid by members
of the Arab League, which
has provided most of the
government's scant initial
funding.
Additional support
- including $2O million
promised by the United Na
tions - is much on the mind
of senior officials here.
Speaking to an American
journalist, Hassan made a
point of apologizing for the
deaths of the U.S. soldiers
killed in the U.S. interven
tion here. "It is not in the
heritage of the Somali
people to kill guests," he
said.
But foreign analysts
warned that foreign help for
the new government will
come only if the place is
safe. In the last year, seven
aid workers have been
killed in Somalia, according
to the office of U.N. Secre
tary General Kofi Annan. "I
think security's going to be
the major yardstick," said
David Stephen, Annan's
representative to Somalia.
In other words, what about the war
lords?
"Faction leaders," as the militia
commanders prefer to be called, have
occupied the hollow core of Somalia's
political life for a decade. Every pre
vious peace conference - there were
12 - centered on the warlords, and
failed. When Somali business leaders
organized a 13th conference in the
neighboring country of Djibouti last
spring, the warlords were invited, but
cess; women's brains seem to work
more efficiently and appear to age
more successfully.
In the new Indiana study, research
ers used the brain scanner to study
10 men and 10 women - all healthy -
as they listened to a John Grisham
thriller read aloud. The fMRI scan
ner highlights activity in the brain by
measuring high-speed changes in
neural blood flow.
The radiologists were hoping to de
velop a simple test to identify critical
language areas in those about to un
dergo brain surgery, to help surgeons
avoid damaging certain areas during
an operation. Instead, they found
what appears to be yet another tell
tale difference in neural activity be
tween women and men.
As they listened, a majority of the
men showed exclusive activity on the
left side of the brain, in the temporal
lobe, which is associated with listen
ing and speech. The majority of
women showed activity in the tem
Ford
recall
by Fnuik Swoboda
The Washington Post
November 28, 2000
It isn't always easy getting things
right the first time. People under
stand that, especially car buyers.
But Tuesday Ford Motor Co. an
nounced the fifth recall since the
summer on the new Escape. SUV
and its corporate twin, the Mazda
Tribute.
First there were leaky fuel lines,
then incorrect wheel hubs. It seems
the Pord people put four-wheel -
drive hubs on the rear of two-wheel
drive vehicles. The wrong hub could
potentially affect steering control.
That was folloWed by problems
With the cruise control. It could
make the throttle stick. And then
<=. there Van the problem with the
steering wheel. It had the potential
to come off in your bands.
In addition, Mazda had a problem
all its own. it had to recall the Trib
ute handbook to change the instruc
tions on anchoring child-restraint
systems.
Tuesday's recall involved the
windshield wipers, which Ford said
might be damaged or defective.
Ford owns 33 percent of Mazda,
and the Escape and the Tribute are
both manufactured at a Ford assem
bly plant in Kansas City, Mo. The
two vehicles represent both compa
nies' entry into the U.S. market for
compact sport-utility vehicles, a
market that includes the Toyota
Rav4 and the Honda CRV,
Since its introduction late this
summer, Ford has bragged about the
safety of the Escape, a vehicle that
offers just about every safety device
currently available. So it's no sur-
only as part of a convocation in
tended to reflect the full sweep of
Somali society: clan elders, educated
expatriates, religious leaders and
women
The warlords declined. And when
the nascent government emerged
promising elections after three years,
its bylaws indirectly disqualified fac
tion leaders from holding office - by
requiring, for instance, that govern
ment ministers hold a college degree.
"This is .. cosmetic politics, this
is not reality," said Mohamed
Qanyareh, who along with other fac
tion leaders has threatened to collapse
the fledgling effort. "Where, where
is that government? In two hotels? I
have my hotel here."
Qanyareh spread his arms to take
in his militia compound. Nearby were
two heavy trucks mounted with anti
aircraft guns, known as "battle wag
ons," plus a pair of "technicals," or
Toyota pickups carrying heavy ma
chine guns. Antennas bristled from a
bunker-like building that was a So
mali army headquarters before
Qanyareh made it his home, five
miles outside Mogadishu.
"This area is safer than living in
the city, because the city has not had
sanitation in 10 years," said
Qanyareh, who, like other militia
leaders, also keeps a home in Nairobi.
He made a sour face. "Very danger
ous, living in the city."
s and women's brains
poral lobe on both sides of the brain,
although predominantly on the left.
"Our research suggests language
processing is different between men
and women, but it doesn't necessar
ily mean performance is going to be
different," said Indiana radiologist
and co-author Dr. Joseph T. Lurito.
"We don't know if the difference is
because of the way we're raised, or
if it's hard-wired in the brain."
The Indiana finding follows an in
fluential 1995 study by Yale Univer
sity brain researchers Sally and
Bennett Shaywitz, who discovered
that females appear to draw on both
sides of their brains when they read,
rhyme or engage in other verbal
tasks. In contrast, males draw only
on brain regions in the left hemi
sphere.
Whatever the biological reason for
this difference, it may account for
the fact that girls usually speak
sooner than boys, learn to read more
easily and have fewer learning dis
issues sth
2 SUVs
prise that both Ford and Mazda were
a bit defensive Tuesday about the
latest recall on vehicles that have
only been in production since mid
summer.
"It's important to note that in the
initial four recalls very few units
were actually in customer hands,"
said Ford spokesman Michael
Vaughn. "The Escape is a totally
new vehicle, and sometimes when
you launch a totally new product
there are minor production glitches."
Mazda spokesman Steve Gehring
said, "Tribute demand is outpacing
supply, but safety is our top prior
ity, and that's why we're performing
this inspection."
The latest recall involves 51,022
Escapes and 24,000 Tributes. Of
those. 27,516 Escapes and 12,500
Tributes have been sold.
But coming off a summer that saw
Ford become enmeshed in the recall
of millions of Firestone tires used as
original equipment on its Explorer
models, the string of recalls on one
of the company's newest products is
clearly something Ford doesn't rel
ish.
Tires weren't Ford's only recall
problems this year. This spring. the
company announced that it would
pay for head gaskets that failed on
nearly 1 million 3.8 liter V-6 engines
built during the early half of the
19905. Then, this summer, the com
pany was forced to recall 350,000
of its new Focus compact cars for a
safety fix.
Vaughn noted that all the recalls
of the Escape and Tribute were vol
untary and initiated by Ford. "Safety
is paramount, and that's why we take
action early," he said.
Other Somalis agree, but kicking the
wherewithal to live like the warlords,
they have abandoned them in droves,
said Somali and foreign analysts and
other people interviewed here. The
public consent that is most fundamen
tal to government appears to he
present in Mogadishu, where citizens
watched satellite TV reports of the
Djibouti negotiations tor months.
"The only thing the clan (the
people) wants no V, is a go\ eminent. -
said Ali (man. a co-owner of Horn
Afrik, a private TV and radio station
that has come to embody a significant
component of the democratic trend
here.
What Stephen, the U.N. represen
tative, calls "a different mood, a more
subtle politics" has been evident in the
eight months since Horn Afrik started
Mogadishu's first daily talk show: In
that time, only one caller has tele
phoned in to denounce another clan.
More typical was the call from
Ayam Mohamed, from south
Mogadishu. At 17, she was too young
to remember "the good things my par
ents tell me about government," but
she could name what she expected:
peace, dispute settlement. education,
health, employment. "People have
moved past brand loyalty to ask what
(warlords) have for them." she said.
"The people are actually dictating
the game."
orders, several experts suggest.
Women often also recover their
speech abilities more quickly than
men after strokes that damage lan
guage areas in the left hemisphere of
the brain, suggesting the) can more
readily draw on other portions of their
brains to compensate.
Some of these gender differences
in adults may themselves be no more
than the end physical result of pow
erful social conditioning about sexual
roles that begins in infancy. Through
out development, the neurons that
make up the brain are remarkably
sensitive to such outside influences,
some researchers suggest.
At the same time, the biochemis
try of gender itself also influences
how many genes are activated or are
regulated, altering the course of neu
ral development. Indeed, the human
brain begins as an essentially female
structure until it is altered by the on
rush of the male hormone testoster
one during early development.