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(07/03/03 1:37am)
WASHINGTON -- President Bush said Wednesday that a constitutional ban on gay marriage that has been proposed in the House might not be needed, despite a Supreme Court decision that some conservatives think opens the door to legalizing same-sex marriages.\n"I don't know if it's necessary yet," Bush said. "Let's let the lawyers look at the full ramifications of the recent Supreme Court hearing. What I do support is a notion that marriage is between a man and a woman."\nBush's words were aimed at calming members of the GOP's right wing, who are upset about the Supreme Court decision, said Patrick Guerriero, director of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay advocacy group. "I think what you're seeing is a momentary time-out from the radical right's temper tantrum," he said.\nIn striking down a Texas law that made homosexual sex a crime, the Supreme Court, on June 26, overturned its earlier ruling that said states could punish homosexuals for having sex.\nConservative Justice Antonin Scalia fired off a blistering dissent of the ruling.\nThe "opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as formal recognition in marriage is concerned," Scalia wrote. The ruling specifically said that the court was not addressing that issue, but Scalia warned, "Do not believe it."\nThe Supreme Court's decision was a broad ruling addressing privacy, and gay rights groups are saying they will use it to push for more legal rights.\n"We have a powerful new weapon in our legal battles on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people, but the impact of this ruling also stretches well beyond the walls of our nation's courtrooms," Kevin Cathcart, director of New York-based Lambda Legal, a gay rights advocacy group, said Wednesday in announcing a new online resource that maps out how the group will use the ruling to win full recognition of same-sex relationships, among other things.\nLegal authorities also are combing the decision to see what its impact will really be on other gay rights issues.\n"I don't know that there is any clear assessment -- that anybody has at this point -- about the legal ramifications of a just-made decision," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said.\nThe president was asked about whether he supported a federal constitutional amendment that would define marriage as a union between a man and a woman during an impromptu news conference that followed his announcement of a new global AIDS ambassador.\nRep. Marilyn Musgrave, R-Colo., was the main sponsor of the proposal offered May 21 to amend the Constitution. It was referred on June 25 to the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution.\nTo be added to the Constitution, the proposal must be approved by two-thirds of the House and the Senate and ratified by three-fourths of the states.\nSenate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said Sunday the Supreme Court's decision on gay sex threatens to make the American home a place where criminality is condoned. He said he supported the proposed constitutional amendment to ban homosexual marriage in the United States.
(06/09/03 1:43am)
WASHINGTON -- The White House did not hype intelligence about the threat from Iraq's suspected banned weapons in order to justify the war to oust Saddam Hussein, Bush administration officials said Sunday.\nThey said Iraq possessed such weapons before the war and that more proof is forthcoming.\nIraqis "have had weapons throughout their history. They have used chemical weapons. They have acknowledged that they had biological weapons. And they never accounted for all that they had or what they might or might not have done with it," Secretary of State Colin Powell said on "Fox News Sunday."\nPowell told reporters that the paper trail and interviews with Iraqis involved in the weapons programs would lead to the discovery of evidence.\n"I think all the documents that are now coming forward and people who are being interviewed will tell us more about what they have hidden and where they have hidden it," Powell said.\nPowell said the media, not the American people, were calling the prewar intelligence bogus.\n"How can it be bogus when I can show you pictures of people that were gassed by Saddam Hussein? I can show you reports from U.N. inspectors all through the 1990s that demonstrated that the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction. I can show you reports where the Iraqis were caught lying about their weapons of mass destruction" Powell asked.\nPowell also dismissed allegations that Vice President Dick Cheney, during several visits to the Central Intelligence Agency, applied political pressure to get intelligence officials to exaggerate their reports of the Iraqi threat.\n"False," Powell told "Fox News Sunday."\n"Simply not true," added Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, on NBC's "Meet the Press.'\nPowell said Cheney was simply doing his job, delving into the issue to make sure he knew the truth.\nWhen asked where the weapons were, Rice said: "This is a program that was built for concealment. We've always known that. We've always known that it would take some time to put together a full picture of his weapons of mass destruction programs."\nShe said intelligence offered solid justification for the U.S.-led attack on Iraq.\n"If you connected the dots about everything that we knew about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs going back to 1991 and going all the way up until March 2003, when we launched the attack against Iraq, you could come to only one conclusion," she told ABC's "This Week."\n"And that was that this was an active program, that this was a dangerous program, this was a program that was being effectively concealed"
(05/20/03 1:57pm)
WASHINGTON -- Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo gets a grand reception Monday at the White House, a meeting with President Bush and a state dinner. It's payback for her loyal support of the fight against international terror, but she wants to take home more than memories.\nArroyo is asking the United States for economic aid, trade concessions and money to combat terrorists.\nFor Bush, the state visit offers an opportunity to join another ally in a "victory lap" over the U.S.-led military success in Iraq, said Catharin Dalpino, an expert on U.S.-Asian relations at the Brookings Institution.\n"With the bombings in Riyadh and Morocco, we're going to see some charges that the Bush administration was not paying proper attention to the war on terrorism when it was focused on Iraq," Dalpino said. "This is a way for the Bush administration to signal that yes, they are."\nArroyo was among the first world leaders to call Bush and express condolences after the Sept. 11 attacks. Arroyo and Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong of Singapore were the only two Southeast Asian leaders to support the U.S.-led war in Iraq, and she expelled two Iraqi diplomats after Bush asked U.S. allies to do it. The Philippines has sent a 175-member humanitarian mission to postwar Iraq.\nSingapore's Goh visited Washington last week and signed an agreement that would wipe out tariffs and other trade barriers on about $33 billion in annual trade and give U.S. banks and companies more access to one of Asia's main financial centers. Now it's Arroyo's turn.\nBesides Bush, during her visit she is scheduled to talk with Secretary of State Colin Powell and members of Congress, meet with representatives from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, give a speech at the U.S.-Asean Business Council and receive an honorary degree at Fordham University in New York.\nShe's seeking duty-free privileges for Philippine products, such as dried mangoes, pineapple juice and tuna. Arroyo also wants to see Philippine businesses get reconstruction contracts in Iraq and is trying to lure U.S. companies to invest in operations on the islands.
(05/01/03 4:37am)
WASHINGTON -- News of missing children will speed to the public over radio, TV and electronic highway signs in more states under the Amber Alert legislation, signed Wednesday by President Bush.\nAlready operating in 41 states, such networks quickly distribute information about kidnapped children and their abductors.\n"It is important to expand the Amber Alert systems so police and sheriff departments gain thousands or even millions of allies in the search for missing children," Bush said at a bill signing ceremony in the White House Rose Garden.\n"Every person who would think of abducting a child can know that a wide net will be cast," Bush said. "They may be found by a police cruiser or by the car right next to them on a highway. These criminals can know that any driver they pass could be the one that spots them and brings them to justice."\nWatching Bush sign the measure, which also includes stiffer federal penalties for crimes against children and gives prosecutors new tools to fight child pornography, was a tearful experience for the mother of the bill's namesake, 9-year-old Amber Hagerman who was kidnapped in 1996 and never came home.\nIt was a happier day for 15-year-old Elizabeth Smart, a girl from Salt Lake City who was making her first public appearance since being found in March, nine months after she was kidnapped at knife point from her bedroom. Smart smiled shyly and offered no words.\nHer parents, Ed and Lois Smart, fought hard for the legislation, which provides matching grants to states and communities for equipment and training to expand alert systems across America.\nTears rolled down the face of Amber's mother, Donna Norris, as Bush spoke of signing the legislation in memory of her daughter.\n"It's bittersweet," said Ms. Norris, who wore a button with the face of her daughter, who was abducted in Arlington, Texas, and later was found murdered. "It's a chance to save other children's lives and I'm proud of it."\nAfter the ceremony, Ms. Norris hugged Elizabeth Smart, who stood between her parents, her blond hair pulled back with a white bow. Two people have been charged in her kidnapping.\nAt the urging of Republicans in Congress, the new law strengthens federal criminal penalties for child pornographers, sexual abusers and kidnappers.\nDemocrats argued that restricting federal judges' ability to reduce sentences for such crimes against children should have been more thoroughly debated, but the bill passed with broad bipartisan support: 400-25 in the House and 98-0 in the Senate.\nSen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass, said the legislation included needed provisions to protect children. But he protested the inclusion of the new sentencing guidelines.\n"These provisions may do serious harm to the basic structure of the sentencing guideline system and ... seriously impair the ability of courts to impose just and responsible sentences," he said.
(04/17/03 4:42am)
WASHINGTON -- The United States will talk with North Korea as early as next week in a meeting hosted by China, thawing chilly relations between Washington and Pyongyang over the communist nation's nuclear weapons program.\nIt will be the first time in six months that U.S. representatives have met face to face with North Korean officials.\nPyongyang had insisted earlier that any talks about its nuclear program must be with the United States alone, but agreed in recent days to allow China at the table. The Bush administration had repeatedly called for multilateral talks involving several nations in the region.\n"We don't anticipate an immediate breakthrough, but we're looking for progress," Sean McCormack, a national security spokesman at the White House, said Wednesday.\nWhile it won't be a full table in Beijing -- Japan, South Korea and Russia are excluded from the talks -- North Korea has agreed to let China host the talks and participate fully in them, he said.\n"I think that at our urging, China, at a very senior level, pressed the North Koreans to agree to multilateral talks, as did South Korea and Japan," McCormack said.\nThe United States consulted closely with top officials in South Korea and Japan before agreeing to participate, he said.\n"We all agreed that we would continue to press for the Japanese and South Korea's early inclusion in talks as one of our top priorities -- and possibly Russia in the future," McCormack said.\nThe U.S. delegation to the talks will be led by Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, who held a meeting with officials in Pyongyang last October. It was then that the United States accused North Korea of having a secret program to make nuclear weapons, and tensions subsequently escalated on the Korean Peninsula.\nThere is a sense of urgency about the situation because North Korea, already believed to have one or two nuclear weapons, could have several more by summer if it begins reprocessing existing stocks of plutonium.\nBy restarting a nuclear reactor earlier this year, the North is in position to accumulate additional plutonium supplies which could lead to nuclear weapons in about a year.\nIn Seoul, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun on Wednesday welcomed news of the talks.\n"North Korea will take the road of reform and openness, if economic aid and its political system are guaranteed," he said in a statement. "I don't think it will take risks, especially if the safety of its system is guaranteed."\nSouth Korea's foreign minister, Yoon Young-kwan, said both the United States and China promised that Seoul will eventually join the talks. He said Japan and Russia will be involved as well, but did not say what role either would play.\n"We decided to support the talks because it is of paramount importance that talks begin to lay the foundation for a peaceful solution to this problem," Yoon said at a news conference.\nShortly after taking office in 2001, President Bush suspended discussions begun by former President Clinton and ordered a full review of U.S.-North Korean relations.\nIn his first State of the Union address, in January 2002, Bush proclaimed North Korea a member of an "axis of evil" with Iran and Iraq, saying it was seeking weapons of mass destruction.\nSince then, North Korea has pulled out of the International Atomic Energy Agency and has threatened to restart reactors stilled by a 1994 U.S.-North Korean agreement. Bush has said he wants to deal with North Korea diplomatically but has not ruled out military action.\nRoh is scheduled to meet with Bush at the White House on May 14.