Clarion-Ledger from Jackson, Mississippi • Page 8

OA The Clarion-Ledger Saturday, Auqtist31. 1991 NATION REPORT sanation icago in we CHICAGO Climb up the water spout? Scaling the Sears Tower is a more likely challenge for those hairy, creepy, black-and-brown spiders that lurk outside the windows of city high-rises each fall. And while they're harmless, try telling that to the window washers who fight them for space each day or the tony apartment dwellers whose high-rent views are marred by the critters. "They're enormous. They get all over you.

Some of them bite you But there's nothing you can do about them," Harold Engel, owner of A-l Window Cleaning said Friday. "You knock them down one week and they're back the next. They are a very, very large pain in the neck." But some small admiration may be in order for these high-rise trapeze artists araneus serricatus to the cognoscenti whose ventures sound more like a children's story than a spider's tale. Experts don't have a great base of knowledge about this particular spider and don't know, for example, just how common they are in other big cities. But they say that some of the spiders apparently travel by air across Lake Michigan before taking up residence in Chicago.

As youngsters, the spiders climb to the top of a tall plant, extend themselves on a strand of silk and wait patiently for a draft of wind to balloon them across the lake, said Daniel Summers, an entomologist at the Field Museum of Natural History. "The high-rise buildings are really just in the way of their flight plan," said arach-nologist Louis Sorkin of New York's American Museum of Natural History. "For them, it's like being on a big tree. They set up housekeeping there." The winds that blow the spiders to the upper reaches of downtown buildings also blow other small, delectable insects into the elab- orate webs woven by the spiders, providing plenty of sustenance, said Summers. Summers said the spiders, some of which measure an inch across, remain outside skyscrapers until fall, when many of the adults die.

Some of the younger, heartier spiders may survive the winter by squirreling into cracks or sneaking inside. While they'll disappear from view over the winter, next spring, new immigrants from Michigan likely will fly in to augment the spider population, Summers said. "That's there method of dispersal," he said. "You don't want all the babies to stay in one area fighting for the same food." The Associated Press A big-city spider sits in its 14th-floor web outside a Chicago high-rise. Spiders hold Ch bof fa run (..

Li S-jJSfl iilllll 11111111m I i 1 'Rapist' caller was prison inmate SAN JOSE, Calif. The mystery of Mike, the man who called San Jose's rape crisis center last month and said he needed help so he wouldn't rape the 11-year-old girl he was baby-sitting, has been solved. "Mike," authorities have discovered, is a 27-year-old prison inmate in Washington state, who was calling from the Whatcom County Jail in Bellingham, Wash. He also imitated the voice of a hysterical girl during the call. Widespread police abuse charged ROCHESTER, N.Y.

The city's fired police chief and five vice-squad officers were indicted for allowing a virtual reign of terror in which suspects were allegedly choked, kicked and, in one case, run over with a car. Information about the alleged brutality began emerging in October, after Chief Gordon F. Ur-lacher was arrested on charges of embezzling police department funds. 4 arrested in credit-card slayings LOS ANGELES Four people were arrested Friday and booked for investigation of murder in three San Gabriel Valley slayings, including two women apparently abducted at a shopping mall and shot to death along freeways. The killings were committed for credit cards and teller machine cards, police said.

Pictures from bank cameras helped identify suspects, police said. 2nd teen arrested in slaying BEVERLY, Mass. Police on Friday arrested a teenager accused of helping dispose of the body of 14-year-old Amy Carnevale, who was stabbed to death and dumped in a pond. Michael Maillet, 19, was to be arraigned in Salem District Court on a charge of being an accessory to murder after the fact, police said. Carnevale's 16-year-old boyfriend was arrested Wednesday on a juvenile delinquency charge and accused of killing the girl.

NBC wants probe of correspondent's burial NEW YORK NBC News has asked the Pentagon to digup a site in Cambodia where villagers say foreign correspondent Welles Han-gen and two of his crewmen were believed executed and buried 21 years ago. Michael Gartner, president of NBC News, sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney this week asking that a team from the Joint Casualty and Resolution Center in Honolulu go to Cambodia and organize an excavation. In all, 19 foreign journalists are missing from the wars in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Crooks hit the road to steal occupied cars DETROIT Growing numbers of car thieves in the Motor City are targeting occupied vehicles over empty ones. Robbers have commandeered scores of cars stopped at traffic lights, drive-through windows or gas stations by forcing drivers out at gunpoint.

Two people who resisted were shot to death in the past two weeks. Informally, the crime is being called "carjacking." Officially, police call it "Robbery Armed, Unlawful Driving Away an Auto" a new crime classification, created this summer as up to 10 cars a day are being taken at gunpoint. Records show that 267 vehicles were seized from their drivers between July 28 and Aug. 24 in BCCI had secret foothold, investigators say PENSACOLA On the north end of town, in a scruffy mall whose chief anchor is a factory outlet store, sits one of the oddest pieces in the puzzling case of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Tiny First American Bank of Pensacola, wedged between a Radio Shack and a photo store, is part of the biggest banking scandal in history.

It is part of BCCI, the shadowy bank whose best customers included arms dealers, drug smugglers and Third World dictators. Investigators say BCCI's strategy was to bypass the money capitals such as New York and Los Angeles and infiltrate the back roads of American banking. ft OLD LTD i The Clarion-Ledger Coloring Contest Winners i is i "wimHW" -hi. i Congratulations to our Sweepstakes Winner Francie Wall whose ir3 ifv VSJiffV 'iS' 'i name was randomly drawn from all entries to win a drawing table and art supplies. First Place vubu First Place 9-12 year age category 58 year age category fW All Coloring Contest entries will be on display at NORTHPARK Mall thru Sept.

8th fie gUtion-ptlser Spend A Day.In The Park NOKIHPARK Gayfm, Dillard's, JCPenney, McRae's, plus more than 125 dazzling stores. Exit '55 at East County Line Road, Ridgeland, MS. Mississippi's Newspaper, For The '90s 4 5 A.