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Washington in brief
Compiled from Times wires President pushes ban on all cloningWarning that "advances in biomedical technology must never come at the expense of human conscience," President Bush on Wednesday delivered his strongest condemnation yet of human cloning experiments, in a speech designed to persuade a sharply divided Senate to ban the research. "As we seek to improve human life, we must always preserve human dignity," the president told an audience of nearly 200 lawmakers, religious leaders, bioethicists, scientists and patients in the East Room of the White House. "And therefore, we must prevent human cloning by stopping it before it starts." Now that cloning is before the Senate, the president's advisers say, Bush feels compelled to speak out, not only to reassure conservatives but also because he is deeply troubled by the science. Unlike embryonic stem cell studies, which can be conducted on embryos left over from infertility treatments, cloning for research involves creating and destroying embryos for the express purpose of experiments. There is widespread agreement that reproductive cloning, in which the embryos are implanted into a woman's womb to grow into babies, should be banned. The question before the Senate is whether therapeutic cloning, or cloning for research, should also be illegal. A vote is expected before the Memorial Day recess. On Wednesday, 40 Nobel laureates released a letter warning that a far-reaching cloning ban "would have a chilling effect on all scientific research in the United States." But the president warned that the research would inevitably lead to "embryo farms" and "a society in which human beings are grown for spare body parts, and children are engineered to custom specifications." Memo supported reason to grant Elian asylumMIAMI -- An internal Immigration and Naturalization Service memo surfaced Wednesday indicating that the agency may have ignored evidence supporting the asylum request of Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old shipwreck survivor who was returned to Cuba after months of political and legal wrangling. A handwritten notation at the bottom of an INS memo dated Dec. 29, 1999, said Doris Meissner, then the INS commissioner, ordered the memo destroyed the next day. Meissner on Wednesday said she didn't recall ordering that a specific document be destroyed. A copy of the memo survived and was made public Wednesday by the conservative legal group, Judicial Watch. It discussed the possibility that Elian's father at one time sought a visa to move to the United States. It also discussed allegations that the Cuban government had been coercing the father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. If coercion could be shown, the roughly drafted e-mail memo said, INS could "potentially accept the child's asylum's application and advise that there is no prohibition on age to child filing application. As such PA should proceed." "PA" apparently refers to "political asylum." Also ...ALASKA DRILLING DEBATE: The Bush administration said Wednesday that Saddam Hussein's decision to cut off oil exports for at least a month, or until Israel pulls out of the West Bank, makes it urgent for the Senate to allow drilling for oil in the Alaska wildlife refuge. In spite of that warning there was no evidence that Iraq's move ended the Senate deadlock over the issue.
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From the Times wire desk
From the AP |
