The Daily Herald from Chicago, Illinois • Page 74

Elgin and South Elgin More gambling Ryan says room for another casino Saturday WEATHER Perfect holiday Mostly sunny and warm with a high in the middle 80s. Winds will be south to southwest at 10 to 15 mph. Tonight will be fair with the low in the lower Page. CHICAGO Final curtain call The International Ampithe- atre, once among the nation's premier exposition halls and site of the 1968 Democratic Convention, hosts its final This electric grid near Belgrade is in ruins after Friday's NATO raids. Belgrade in dark Most of Belgrade and large parts of Serbia were again without electricity and water Friday as NATO warplanes launched combat missions from 3.

Palestinians angry As a last gasp, the government of outgoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu connected a Jewish settlement to Jerusalem, enraging Palestinian officials Page 3. BUSINESS Big league sales Minor league baseball fans are stocking up on merchandise from the Schaumburg Flyers and the Kane County Cougars Section 3. 5 5 Joint effort A 4-year-old company is joining forces with another developer to build a new golf course community in Highland Park. The Legacy Club, consisting of single-family homes and condominiums, is offering buyers a variety of house plans Section 7. i 271ft Year, 227' Saturday, May 29; 1999 8 Sections 5.0: Cents Kane County gets short end of funding stick BY ERIC KROL Daily Herald Staff Writer Kane County transportation leaders woke up Friday to find they fared worse than their collar-county counterparts in securing state money to repair roads and build new ones in the coming years.

It didn't sit well with them, either. "I'll be very blunt," said Karen Steve-McConnaughay, chairman of the county board's transportation committee. "It was political, and it was unfortunate." Kane will get $13.6 million for transportation from Gov. George $13 million from Ryan plan far below other counties Ryan's $12 billion public works program, the largest in the state's history. By contrast, smaller McHenry County walked away with $45 million for roads while slightly larger Lake County will take in $130 million.

Those figures do not include other public works projects that make up Ryan's plan, which legislators gave the green light to last week and then endorsed again Thursday by approving the state budget. Kane legislators did not support Ryan's plan, which raises the license plate sticker fee from $48 to $78 and a penny-a-drink tax increase on beer and wine. State Sens. Chris Lauzen of Aurora and Steve Rauschenberger of Elgin joined state Reps. Doug Hoeft of Elgin, Tim Schmitz of Batayia and Tom Johnson, whose district includes St.

Charles, in voting against the Ryan plan. State Rep. Patricia Reid Lindner of Sugar Grove was the only Fox Valley legislator to vote yes. "The counties that did not back the philosophy were punished," said Steve-McConnaughay, a Republican from St. Charles.

But county officials also added that they don't blame local legislators for failing to secure more money. Still, county board member Gerald Jones, an Aurora Democrat, called the relative lack of funding for Kane an "abomination." The county had asked the state for $39 million plus $72 million for local bridges. The county's $13.6 million will pay to realign Route 25 and Dunham and Stearns roads, widen Route 64 from Dunham to 7th Avenue in St. Charles, pave Route 47 from Route 64 to Seavey Road and improve the intersections of routes 64 and 47 and routes 72 and 47. The county also will get an extra $1.6 million in gas tax money on top of the $4 million a year it already receives.

Transportation officials said that on balance, county residents will be sending more to Springfield than they wiU get back. Garfield still waiting Alex Villacana, a third grader at Garfield Elementary School in Elgin, crosses her fingers for luck in hopes her team partner will get the correct answer to a math problem. The school has worked hard in the last year to improve test scores after learning more than half of the students did not meet state goals. Daily Herald Tonge Although test scores aren't in yet, educators feel good about results BY KENDRA L. WILLIAMS Daily Herald Staff Writer Summer will nearly be over before Elgin's educators know for sure how then- students did on this year's state standardized tests, but for some teachers and parents at Garfield Elementary School, the results cannot come soon enough.

A "coach" from the Illinois State Board of Education, the decision to begin a year-round school calendar in July and $37,000 in grant money all should contribute to what Principal Oceana Wright hopes will be more learning for her 527 students. Earlier this month, students received their scores on this year's new Illinois Standards Assessment Test. But the results were given as the percentage of questions answered correctly, so no one is sure yet how Garfield compares to other schools, said Bonnie Wilkerson, the director of research, evaluation and assessment for Elgin Area School District U-46. But Wright has been busy praising the students who answered a high percentage of questions correctly, said Kol- lette Villacana, president of Garfield's parent-teacher association. "She's been like a mother hen with baby chicks," Villacana said.

Nearly a year has passed since Wright and her staff learned more than half of Garfield's students did not meet the state goals on the Illinois Goals Assessment Program, or IGAP, tests. The low test scores brought an offer from the state for help. Wright accepted, and the state assigned Sharon Ransom, an educator with the Chicago Teachers Union Interactive Teaching and Learning program, to Garfield for the next three years. Ransom's workshops have given teachers a chance to try new approaches in hopes of boosting learning, and have encouraged teachers to shuf- See HOPE on Page 4 Upset hackers force FBI to shut down its Web site Senate site also closes after hackers break in Reuters WASHINGTON Hackers apparently retaliating against FBI raids overwhelmed the agency's Internet site this week in an electronic attack that has forced it to shut down the site, the FBI said Friday. The FBI, which investigates computer hacking and helps safeguard the security of the U.S.

government's computers, said the Web site www.fbi.gov went down Wednesday evening. FBI officials did not know when it would be back online. They said the FBI was investigating the attack as an act of retaliation after search warrants out earlier this week in Seattle, Houston and parts of California in an investigation into computer hackers. They said the FBI has yet to identify any suspects responsible for the attack. The officials emphasized that the hackers did not actually penetrate the FBI's Web site or change any files there.

They said the hackers apparently ran a program on another computer that flooded the IBM computer hosting the FBI's Web site as if millions of Internet users had tried to read the Web site. It resulted in a denial of service, they said. FBI spokesman Paul Bresson described its Web site "as a public relations tool" containing press releases and speeches. "There's nothing on it that is in any way sensitive or classified," he said. Another government agency was forced to close its Web site this week The Senate's Sergeant at Arms closed down the Senate's Web site, as well as senators' and committee Web pages linked to it, after the site was hacked at Thursday night, spokeswoman Sherry Little said.

She said hackers filled the site with pictures of special education students and misspelled words. Congressional e-mail and other systems were not affected, Little said, adding that the Senate site and its links were shut down temporarily "to figure out how to resolve the problem." The attacks were the latest in a series of incidents by hackers involving U.S. government Web sites. In mid-May, the White House Web site was briefly shut down because of an attempt to tamper with it by unidentified hackers. After NATO mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade earlier this month, Chinese hackers targeted several U.S.

government Web sites. In past years, the Justice Department's site was shut down by hackers who put Nazi swastikas on its home page, and hackers forced the CIA to shut down its site after changing the name from "Central Intelligence Agency" to "Central Stupidity Agency." Tools Jewels owner faces charges of having stolen goods, selling drugs BY CASS CLIATT Daily Herald Staff Writer Elgin police arrested the owner of a local resale shop Friday in what officers are calling the result of an amazing undertaking. A four-month investigation and a cooperative effort between local law enforcement agencies led to the arrest of Leo A. Diana, 39, of 617 West Wind Drive, Carpentersville, on charges he dealt with stolen property and sold drugs out of his business, Tools Jewels at 213 Walnut Ave. Police arrested Diana Friday morning.

Fourteen officers were at Diana's store until late Friday afternoon, combing through the shop and confiscating large quantities of car stereos, auto parts, tools, home audio equipment and marijuana, said Sgt. Greg Welter of Elgin's Major Investigations Division. "We had infiltrated his operation there with the use of undercover officers and we made several buys directly with Leo Diana," Welter said. "He was knowingly taking in stolen property and narcotics and also auto parts." Police first suspected Diana after people they arrested told officers he was dealing in stolen merchandise, Lt. Paul McCurtain said.

Eventually the Kane County Auto Theft Task Force, Illinois State Police and Elgin's investigations and narcotics divisions became involved in the case. "It sends the message that businesses dealing in stolen property won't be tolerated," McCurtain said. Other Elgin businesses call police when they suspect that something is stolen, he asserted. "And that really keeps the crime down in the city, having people out there that don't want that type of thing going on in the community," McCurtain said. Diana will await Monday's bond call while being held on 18 felony charges: 10 counts of failure to maintain records of essential auto parts, seven counts of unlawful delivery of cannabis and one count of calculated criminal cannabis conspiracy.

Police found 256 grams of marijuana at Tools Jewels, which they said has a street value of about $1,300. Police said the amount of marijuana indicated that it was being sold for profit. Memorial Day Andrew Wendt of West Dundee helps his mother Nancy Wendt put flags on the gravesites of veterans at the River Valley Memorial Gardens cemetery Friday morning. Daily Herald Hankins SEE STORY IN NEIGHBOR.