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By Compiled from Times wires
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 17, 2000
Switzerland to vote on limiting immigrants
GENEVA, Switzerland -- Bannered across the photograph of angry young men, heads shaved and arms extended in Nazi salutes, is the appeal, "Xenophobia isn't Swiss." In smaller print, the newspaper advertisement urges voters to reject a quota on foreigners in Switzerland.
Nationwide, the Swiss will decide next weekend whether to restrict foreigners to 18 percent of their population, now 7.3-million. Like neighboring Austria and Germany, Switzerland has been caught up in anti-foreigner sentiment, inflamed by charges that the country is inundated with immigrants. Statistics show that Switzerland has the largest number of foreigners per capita of any European country.
Isolationist sentiments are firmly woven into the Swiss political fabric, particularly in the German-speaking eastern portion of the country. The Swiss have voted seven times since 1964 to limit the number of foreigners here.
The debate over Swiss willingness to accept outsiders has been rekindled in the preparation for the quotas-on-foreigners vote set for Sept. 24. With one out of every five inhabitants foreign-born, the Swiss will decide whether to adopt the right-wing ideal of closing their borders.
In contrast to earlier votes, the stakes are higher now because Switzerland has taken more steps into the outside world, with new links this spring to the European Union and with its banks increasingly global.
The government, worried that a "yes" vote will damage Switzerland's image while it is trying to recover from the storm over its treatment of Holocaust victims, is lobbying strongly against it. Approving a cap, transportation minister Moritz Leuenberger warned, would mean "reducing the question of foreigners to a number and blaming them for all evil."
HERNANI, Spain -- Police uncovered eight grenades in woods near a Basque town Saturday just hours before a visit by King Juan Carlos, Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
Authorities said the grenades were planted by the armed Basque separatist group ETA -- whose political allies warned last week that although Schroeder was welcome in Hernani, the king and prime minister were not. About 1,000 people marched through Hernani to protest the visit.
The grenades were found in rudimentary launching tubes in a pit about 600 yards from the open-air museum of sculptor Eduardo Chillida, which was inaugurated by the king and later visited by Aznar and Schroeder.
UNITED NATIONS -- In what was thought to be the highest-level encounter of its kind in two decades, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi attended an eight-nation meeting together to promote peace in Afghanistan.
Albright said she and Kharrazi were on opposite sides of the horseshoe-shaped table and didn't have a one-on-one conversation during the session Friday afternoon at the United Nations.
Nevertheless, she said she was pleased that Iran and the United States took the same stand deploring Afghanistan's drug trafficking and human rights record and its harboring of terrorists.
"I was very encouraged by the similarity of views that we all had," Albright said.
WASHINGTON -- Cuban lawmakers outlined an offer to send doctors to poor parts of the United States and to provide free medical training in Cuba annually to 500 Americans, mostly minorities.
Pedro Saez, who led the delegation of five black members from Cuba's National Assembly, said at a news conference Saturday that Cuba has a surplus of doctors and is offering to send an undetermined number to Mississippi and other states where trained medical personnel are in short supply.
"The figure depends on the needs," said Saez, a member of the communist country's policymaking Politburo.
Cuba also is offering medical training for 250 black Americans and for 250 Hispanics, American Indians and other Americans from poor families. A State Department official said the administration has taken no position on the offers.