The Courier-Journal du lieu suivant : Louisville, Kentucky • Page 5

THE COURIER-JOURNAL REGION FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1996 S3, Computers haggle over snow amounts While how much is uncertain, the fact it will snow is not we've filled our coolers a couple of times already with milk," she In Harlan County, Road Supervisor Jim Hughes had just finished stocking up on salt after the last round' of storms. The county has already used between 600 and 700 tons this season, about twice the usual amount. Hughes said he's worried whatiall the salt use will mean for later in the year. "It's taking a toll on our little County roads," he said. "I don't know what we're going to do this spring when it starts thawing out." The University of Kentucky College of Agriculture warned farmers to monitor weather conditions closely and take steps to protect livestock.

"Extreme cold temperatures, coupled with driving winds, can cause severe distress in farm animals," said Darrh Bullock, a UK extension animal scientist. "Farmers need to make sure they monitor the situation closely. Bullock said animals' nutritional needs are greater in cold temperatures, and farmers should provide extra feed. He said animals also need an ice-free water supply. Associated Press The National Weather Service said its forecasters were having difficulty yesterday predicting how much snow Kentucky would get from an approaching storm.

"It's always tricky in any event," weather service forecaster Mike Callahan said. "We have multiple computer models we use and with this one, the computer models are still not agreeing." Callahan said the snow predictions from two different models ranged from one to six inches in the Louisville area. "The first time, (computer models) generally don't agree but as you get closer to the storm, they kind of merge into a single solution. These two are just not agreeing at all." Callahan said, however, that earlier predictions of sleet and freezing rain across Southern and Southeastern Kentucky had been changed to all snow. "It's just too cold" for sleet and freezing rain in Kentucky, he said.

"The farther south you go, the by this evening. The Somerset and Jackson areas were told to expect 6 to 10 inches with 4 to 6 inches in the Bowling Green and Lexington areas. Around 4 inches are expected in far Western Kentucky near Paducah with 2 to 4 inches predicted for cities along the Ohio River. In addition to the snow, the coldest air of the season will reach Kentucky tonight and continue into the weekend. Lows will be near zero tomorrow and from zero to 10 below Sunday morning.

In Southeastern Kentucky, where the most snow was expected, residents were getting ready. Nancy Jessie, assistant manager of the Middlesboro Wal-Mart Super Center, said people were stocking up. "One thing that they're really buying a lot of is milk and bread. I mean worse it will be," he said, noting that Tennessee is forecasting 6 to 10 inches. "It's one of those southern storms," Callahan said.

"We get those, but they're kind of strange. People always think the farther north you get, the more it snows, but not always." Late yesterday, the weather service issued a winter storm warning for Southern and Eastern Kentucky, and a snow advisory for northwestern and northern sections of the state. Bowling Green, Somerset, Lexington, Middlesboro and Jackson were among the areas included in the winter storm warning. Owensboro, Louisville and Covington were included in the snow advisory. The weather service said snow accumulations should be heaviest in the southeast with totals of 8 to 12 inches 7 Five-day festival is planned for week before PGA tourney (' '--V 'j, I i REGIONAL BRIEFS COMPILED FROM AP AND STAFF DISPATCHES Madison courthouse move debated RICHMOND, Ky.

City and county officials agree that overcrowding in the Madison County Courthouse could be solved by moving, but they can't agree on where to relocate. On Mondays and Tuesdays, people crowd the sidewalk and halls waiting for juvenile and misdemeanor cases to be heard. The small courtrooms are packed and noisy; security is virtually impossible. County leaders want to tear down the old county jail and build an addition to the main courthouse. City officials are pushing for renovations to their city hall built in 1891 as a federal courthouse so it can be used for court hearings.

Yesterday they took their problem to Frankfort and the Facilities and Standards Committee of the Administrative Office of the Courts, which oversees court clerks statewide. It will be up to the committee to decide which project gets state support. Shelbyville man is new prosecutor Gov. Paul Patton appointed Markita Shelbume's former law partner yesterday to replace her as commonwealth's attorney for Shelby, Spencer and Anderson counties. The appointment runs through the general election in November.

Fielding Ballard III of Shelbyville said that his partnership with Shelburne ended two years ago and that his only knowledge of Shelbume's criminal cases was "what I've seen in court and what I've seen in the press." However, he said his current partner, Hart Megibben, has been the assistant commonwealth's attorney under Shelburne and will continue in that post. The appointment of Ballard, 48, came a day after Shelburne was arraigned in Anderson Circuit Court on a felony charge of tampering with public records. Shelburne, who resigned last week, pleaded innocent and remains free on a $10,000 unsecured bond. Father, son face marijuana charges LEXINGTON, Ky. A federal grand jury has charged a father and son from Harrodsburg with growing 737 marijuana plants.

Ronnie Lynn Sexton 40, and Ronnie Lynn Sexton 21, also were charged yesterday with conspiracy to cultivate marijuana and carrying firearms in relation to a drug crime. The pair were arrested in September by the Kentucky State Police Special Operations Unit. At that time, police seized nearly $3,500 in cash, firearms and two all-terrain vehicles, all of which are now subject to forfeiture. Assistant U.S. Attorney John Compton said each man faces five to 40 years in prison and up to $2 million in fines.

The firearms charges carry mandatory five-year sentences and $250,000 fines. Man pleads innocent in kidnapping WILLIAMSON, W.Va. The accused triggerman in the shooting death of a former high school homecoming queen has pleaded innocent to kidnapping. James C. Pennington, 21, of Goodman in Mingo County, faces trial in April in the shooting death of Michael "Miki" Koontz last Aug.

25. Pennington was arraigned Wednesday in Mingo County Circuit Court on the additional charge, which was handed up by a grand jury last month. FBI documents released last month show Pennington said he forced Koontz into woods near a sewage treatment plant and shot her on orders from a drug dealer to pay off a debt and to keep the 17-year-old girl from snitching. Jury selection is scheduled for April 2. Robert Warren, who has confessed to being the drug ringleader, faces sentencing April 23 for conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine.

Worker injured in 110-foot fall KINGS MILLS, Ohio A construction worker installing a roof for a new roller coaster at Kings Island amusement park was injured when he fell 110 feet to the ground yesterday. John Reeves, 20, of Cincinnati, broke both legs and his pelvis and was listed in serious condition at University of Cincinnati Hospital, spokeswoman Pat Samson said. Reeves was working for United Roofing Sheet Metal a Cincinnati subcontractor for Fru-Con Construction the project's general contractor. Fru-Con is constructing a building for the new Paramount's Kings Island ride called "The Outer Limits: Flight of Fear." The roller coaster is to open this spring at the park, 20 miles north of Cincinnati. Locks reopen after barge mishap HOGSETT, W.Va.

The Robert C. Byrd Locks and Dam reopened to Ohio River traffic yesterday, a day after two barges carrying steel plates sank, authorities said. The barges broke away from a 15-barge tow headed upriver, hit the dam and sank Wednesday, tying up river traffic. Lockmaster Pat Worley said it appeared the towboat Myra Eckstein pushed the barges too quickly into a fast current at the opening of the locks, causing the leading edge of the front three barges to go under and the barges to break away. The Myra Eckstein is owned by Bluegrass Towing, a subsidiary of Marquette Transportation Co.

of Paducah, Ky. Worley said he did not know who owned the barges, how much they weighed or where they were headed. Program offers history internships CAMPBELLSVILLE, Ky. Campbellsville College and the Perry-ville Enhancement Project have started an internship program. Mary Breeding, the project's director, said yesterday that students from the college's history department will participate in research and help develop walking tours of Hillcrest Cemetery, among other activities.

The Perryville Enhancement Project is an umbrella organization whose members include the Perryville Battlefield Commission, the Kentucky Heritage Council, the Perryville Battlefield Preservation Association, the Kentucky Department of Parks, the city of Perryville, Boyle County and the National Park Service. name atop the leader board kept throughout the festival. The spouse and kids couldn't care less, you say? Bring them anyway. While you're away for hours, there's an organized play area for the young ones. For non-golfers, there's a food court and beer garden, music and other entertainment.

Admission will be $5 at the gate or $4 if you buy a ticket at booths in local shopping malls. Proceeds will cover the PGA's expenses, but 50 cents from each ticket will go to both Kentucky Harvest and the WHAS Crusade for Children. Mayor Jerry Abramson and Stan Curtis, the Kentucky Harvest founder who is vice chairman of the marketing committee for the PGA tournament in Louisville, said at an Oxmoor Center press conference yesterday that the festival is patterned after the Kentucky Derby Festival. People will be able to feel that they are part of the tournament and share in the atmosphere, even if they're not attending. The 31,000 tickets to the event sold out last August.

The Kentucky Derby Festival staff and volunteers will staff the golf festival. PGA marketing chief Joe Ster-anko said the PGA plans to make the golf festival an annual event before each PGA Championship. The PGA tried a similar golf festival once before, in Rochester, N.Y., last fall at the Ryder Cup. Steranko said the PGA expects about 25,000 people to attend the Oxmoor festival, which it hired Regency Productions of Chicago to create and run. Regency has produced similar technological fairs in connection with the Super Bowl, the By SHELDON S.

SHAFER Staff Writer Even if you don't know a mashie from a birdie, you too can take part in the hoopla surrounding the Professional Golfers' Association Championship when -it comes to town this summer. A five-day festival called "The PGA Golf Experience" is planned for the week before the tournament. Sure, the festival is built around golf, but it will offer activities for non-duffers, too. It will be Aug. 3-7 at Oxmoor Farm behind Oxmoor Center in eastern Jefferson County.e.

The championship runs from Aug. 8-11. So what will this "interactive fan festival" entail? You can put on the headset in the broadcast booth, summon your best Pat Summerall voice and call replays of great moments in PGA history as they unfold on a screen. Then, seconds later, you'll walk away with a video tape of your "on-the-air" stint. Browse exhibits on the evolution of golf.

Schmooze with tour pros and get an autograph. Sample the latest in golf equipment and technology or amble through the merchandise tent and pick up an official PGA hat, shirt or other item. Take a club and drive the ball into canvas; a computer or a golf pro will analyze your swing. Move over to a bunker or sand trap and do the same. Or take your putter and try to sink one in a replica of one of the world's most famous golf holes.

Get your regular foursome and see who can chip or drive a ball closest to the pin. You may get your 1 v. STAFF PHOTO BY BILL LUSTER Andrew Willinger, 2, played yesterday In a putting area set up at Oxmoor Center to publicize the PGA Golf Championship in August: part interest in the swank Valhalla and has an option to buy the entire course, built a new Valhalla clubhouse, which opened yesterday. The PGA has indicated it plans to rotate its annual-championship among Valhalla and a. handful of other golf courses.

NCAA Final Four and the NBA All-Star Game. At the press conference, Jim Aw-trey, PGA chief executive officer, said Louisville had embraced the PGA "like no other community has." The PGA, which has purchased a Polygamy in France means despair, anger "Polygamy may be as old as Africa, but it doesn't work in The women are rivals. The husband is never fair." Khadi Keita Indiana Senate rejects bill on storing guns near children "In Africa there is space. Even if co-wives live around the same courtyard, at least each wife has her own room or her house. The man visits her there, in her own bed.

Here two, three families are packed into two It is a myth that African women like polygamy, she continued. "Our mothers and grandmothers and every woman before them would go to the witch doctor to get a potion or cast a spell if she knew her husband was go-, ing to take another wife. Many still do. And women do it even Fatima Traore, who came from Mali, said she sometimes feels she will lose her mind. Sometimes she! and her two co-wives do not talk to each other for days.

She and her hus- band had been in Paris for four years when he went "on holiday" and came back with another wife. "From one day to the next, another wife comes and does what you' Traore said. "She meddles in the; house. She gets pregnant. You still-' get your turn with your husband, your nights with him.

But he pays no attention to you. Just two, three minutes to satisfy himself. That's it. Whatever you do makes no difference. You can', cry all you want.

He doesn't care." Women in polygamous marriages describe the marital routine like The husband spends two nights with one wife, then two nights with the. next. The wife who has her turn in; the marital bed does the cooking." for! the family. "If a woman says, 'It's my; turn in the then you know, Traore said. Health workers say the feelings' boiling in close quarters can make the! women ill or violent.

Hawa Koulibali is one of the worn-! en who feel trapped. She came as young bride from Mali 20. years ago-and now lives with her two co-wives and their 14 children half an hour's-train ride east of Paris. But she and the co-wives have never seen Paris.1 They cannot read. They speak no'.

French. suburb with his two wives and nine children. Both wives are pregnant. He wants to bring his young, third wife. His modest income is more than doubled by the generous benefits the French state pays to children and pregnant women, regardless of their status.

Djaara asserts that polygamy is hardest for the husband because his wives fight a lot, he has his job and does all the shopping. He shops because he must control all the money, he said. Given his complaints, why does he want more than one wife? "My father did, my grandfather did, so why shouldn't Djaara said. "When my wife is sick and I don't have another, who will care for me?" Besides, he said, "one wife on her own is trouble. When there are several, they are forced to be polite and well behaved.

If they misbehave, you threaten that you'll take another wife." Ruling at home may be one thing, but living with the neighbors is another. Town officials and building owners have refused large tribal families on their premises. In St. Denis last year, a welfare office allocated a small apartment to a Mauritanian family of six. Two months later, 30 members of the same family had moved in.

The French neighbors, outraged at the noise, pressed the town hall until the group was moved. It was mainly the Socialist government in the 1980s that quietly admitted more than one wife per husband as part of its family-reunification policy. The argument was that immigrants had the right to a "normal" family life. As a result, many immigrants brought not just their wives but as their income improved, they went home to buy new, young brides, often still teen-agers. Once the women gave birth in France, mother and child were allowed to stay.

"We've been telling the French for 10 years that this was wrong, that po-lygamy couldn't work here because we saw the problems," said Madine Diallo, who was born in Mali and now heads an African women's health and family ptof ning group. By MARUSE SIMONS 0 New York Times News Service PARIS Khadi Keita shifted in her chair in a Paris cafe as she described the day she became a stranger in her own home. That was the day in 1985 when her husband suddenly arrived with a new wife. He hung a curtain in the middle of the cramped bedroom and announced that from now on, the two women would have to share him, the kitchen, the closets, everything. The next four years became a nightmare of pregnancies, babies, nasty fights and long, hostile silences, Keita said.

Then her husband, a Muslim, went home to his African village, married again and brought wife No. 3. Keita, who has since divorced a rarity in polygamous marriages and become a social worker, is an immigrant from Senegal. She is one of the African women in France who are now willing to speak openly about the secrets of polygamy and about the strains, the anger and the humiliations of their marriages. Long overshadowed by other immigrant problems of poverty and discrimination, the widespread practice of polygamy in France is coming to light because African women are fighting the tradition.

In the current anti-immigrant mood, the government has also decided to take a stand. After quietly tolerating the Muslim male right of having up to four wives, the government has said France will recognize only one spouse and consider other marriages annulled. The discussion of polygamy has raised anew the question of how a society should deal with immigrant customs that are unacceptable or against the law in a new land. There have already been heated debates about whether girls may wear Muslim headscarves, a religious symbol, in France's secular schools, and French prosecutors have gone to court to forbid the tradition of sexually mutilating Muslim girls. "Polygamy may be as old as Africa, but it doesn't work in France," said Keita, whose former husband could not be located.

"It's unbearable because there is no room for two or three wives and 15 children in one small place. The women are rivals. The husband is never fair. He has a favorite, so there are horrible fights." There is the wrenching lack of privacy. "You hear everything, your husband and the other wives," she said.

"You hear how he behaves with his favorite, usually the new one. The women end up hating the man. Everyone feels bad inside." The politics of polygamy is no less charged. Ivry, a Pans suburb, has some 1,500 African immigrants, and two out of three families are polygamous. "Consider the costs," a town official said.

"One husband with three wives and a team of children may need government health care, education and subsidies for up to 20 people. Is this fair?" He said this question weighs heavily at a time when France's social welfare system is in the midst of an enormous debt crisis. In December, government plans to cut benefits caused three weeks of strikes and protests. Polygamy has come to France with the tens or thousands of African immigrants from countries like Senegal, Mali and Mauritania. The Interior Ministry says there are no firm statistics because foreign wives are often in the country clandestinely and immigrants keep other wives in Africa.

In the United States, the law bars polygamous immigrants and the authorities say they believe that such cases are rare. Moustafa Djaara, a construction worker from Mali, lives in a Paris Haute, said a vote against the bill was like saying, "We should allow an adult to knowingly leave a handgun in a location where a child can get to it." But opponents said the bill was unnecessary and unenforceable, noting that police would not know adults had violated the law until a child had killed or injured someone. "After such a tragedy, are we going to then take them to court and charge them with a Class A infraction?" asked Sen. Lindel Hume, D-Prince-ton. In other business, the Senate passed a bill that would increase penalties in some drunken-driving cases.

The bill is now eligible for consideration in the House. The bill, which passed 47-3, would affect drunken drivers with prior DUI convictions who seriously injured someone in an accident or who caused death. "I think it sends a message to repeat offenders, and that is we want them off the street," said Sen. Beverly Gard, R-Greenfield, who sponsored the bill. The Senate also passed a bill that would create a statutory commission for women, to replace a similar panel set to expire at the end of the year.

The measure is eligible for consideration 'in the House. By ANTHONY JEWELL Associated Press INDIANAPOLIS The Indiana Senate rejected legislation yesterday that would have made it illegal for adults to leave a loaded handgun where children could get to it. Senators debated for more than 90 minutes before voting 33-17 against Sen. Sue Landske's bill. Opposition was led by Sen.

Johnny Nugent, who frequently speaks against gun control. "Mandatory storage laws are just another restriction on lawful ownership of firearms," said Nugent, R-Lawrenceburg. "Education and awareness of proper firearm safety are the best ways to prevent accidents." The bill would have made it a Class A infraction for an adult to intentionally store a loaded handgun where an unsupervised child could get to it. Class A infractions are punishable by fines of up to $10,000. Landske, R-Cedar Lake, repeatedly said her bill was not a gun-control measure but was designed to protect children who live in homes where guns are stored unsafely.

"This bill is an attempt to reach the very few individuals who refuse to take steps to protect the children around them," Landske said. Sen. Robert Hellmann, D-Terre Aitnougn tneir nusoana goes nome-every two years, he says a trip for all; of them would be too. expensive; Cutoff from France and cut off from Koulibali feels lost. She and therco-; wives try to get along.

But being! friends is to difficult, she.