Indiana Gazette from Indiana, Pennsylvania • 3

A-3 Veterans practice their invasion at Normandy The Indiana, PA Gazette QjATIONAp Sunday, February 20, 1994 Some wives aren't thrilled with the idea If By BRIGITTE GREENBERO Associated Press Writer SAN DIEGO Adjusting their 'hearing aids and tying their bifocals on securely, several veterans of the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied France are jump-fog out of airplanes again. These World War II paratroopers, now in their late 60s to mid -80s, want to go back to France and parachute into Normandy all over again to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the June 6, 1944, invasion. Some of their wives aren't thrilled at the idea, and neither the government. The Pentagon's World War II "Commemorative office is coordinating an anniversary ceremony that will involve current members of the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions. For liability reasons, it's to have the aging vets join them, and it made some demands: practice, practice, practice; So that's what they did Satur-'day.

After two days of retraining, the veterans suited up and, one -by one, vaulted out of a plane at feet and landed in a muddy field under a bright sunny sky. Aside from a few scrapes there no injuries. The D-Day 'invasion ended with some 2,500 'Allied soldiers dead and 8,500 wounded. "If 1 jumped when they were shooting at me, why can't I do it now?" said 74-year-old Oscar Mendoza, a corporal during toe 'war. "The war was a big thing in my life," he said.

"The jump means "an awful lot." His wife of 48 years, Aurora, said she can think of some reasons why he shouldn't jump again, but she has learned to keep them to herself. "I'm kind of scared, but he wants to do this. God help him," she said. "He's never afraid of anything." Richard Falvey, 73, whooped and hollered while descending. When he landed, he immediately stood up, raised his arms above his bead and cheered.

"Absolutely fantastic," he said. "How did my buddies make out?" Falvey spotted his wife, Leona, 72, and said: "No fool like an old fool." She hugged him. Saturday's plunge was a far cry from the D-Day jump, which was made in the middle of the night, Falvey said. "There is no comparison, none whatsoever. We didn't know how high we were.

You couldn't see the ground, you just hit it. This was something else," said Falvey, a former staff sergeant. The men acknowledge the government still may not let them do It, even though they proved they still can. After all, there's a certain liability involved in allowing a veteran to fling his now-brittle body out of a plane. Though the bones are arthritic and the hair gray, these men say they are still soldiers.

There are things they still don't want to talk about, even with their wives, but they also remember the ticker tape parades when they returned home victorious. They want to relive their moments of glory and show the world what valiant men thev were and are. Bill Sykt of long Beech, Worid War tl British 6th Airborne Division paratrooper, smiles after parachuting for the first time in 45 years Saturday near Brown Field in San Diego. He and 32 other veterans were practicing in hopes of parachuting in June at the 50th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, France. (Af photo) Bacterial catastrophe predicted Billings, refuses to accept crimes of hatred SAN FRANCISCO (AP) Common bacteria that cause pneumonia, children's ear infections and many other diseases are evolving into forms untrea table by all known medicines, threatening a chilling post-antibiotic era that would be "nothing short of a medical disaster." a researcher said Saturday.

In the post-antibiotic world, the simplest infections could quickly escalate into fatal illnesses, said Alexander Tomasz of Rockefeller University in New York City. Most people think it will happen," he said. "It's unpredictable when." And the consequences? "No one knows. The mortality is quite high." The first antibiotic, penicillin, became widely available in 1940. For 50 years, most bacterial infections have been treatable.

But certain uncommon bacteria already have developed un-trealable strains. And laboratory experiments have proven that the same thing can happen with common bacteria, Tomasz said. Tomasz sounded the alarm at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a leading authority on bacteria that are resistant to treatment by antibiotics. His concerns are shared by doctors at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

"It's potentially an extremely j-jj .4 Dawn Fast Horse and her three-year-old daughter, Ryan, stand in front of the racist graffiti left on their home Oct. 23, 1 993, in Billings, Mont. Similar crimes of hare have prompted area residents to rally together against prejudice. (AF Photo "Hate crimes and hate activity will nourish only in communities that allow it to Oourish." Wayne Inman Seraw's three skinhead attackers were fresh from a meeting of East Side White Pride at which two agents of White Aryan Resistance, a supremacist group, gave a spirited "recruitment" speech. The skinheads pleaded guilty, and, in a trial two years later, WAR founder Tom Metzger and his son, John, were convicted of inciting Seraw's murder by recruitment.

"I saw the emergence of the hate groups and a community's denial, and 1 saw a wakeup call that was the death of a black man by baseball bat because he was black," Inman said. "That's what it took to wake up Portland. We didn't have to go through that here to get the wakeup call." What was different in Billings, a metropolitan area of about 100,000 people, was the united public reaction to the early ugliness. "There was not silence," Inman said. "There was community outrage, saying, 'If you harass and intimidate one member of this community you are attacking all of Inman kept repealing a message to civic groups and community leaders: Hate groups must be resisted, not ignored.

And the resistance was more than bluster. Within five days of the spray-painted vandalism, 27 volunteers from Painters Local 1922 swarmed over the defaced house and obliterated the slurs in 45 minutes. Bigotry resurfaced the next month. On Nov. 27, a beer bottle was hurled through a glass door at the home of Uri Bamea, conductor of the Billings Symphony.

Five nights later, a cinder block thrown through a window sent shards of glass spraying over the bed of 5-year-old Isaac Schnitzer. Both houses were decorated with Hamikkah menorahs. Both houses had children at home with baby sitters. By TOM LACEKY Associated Press Writer BILLINGS, Mont. Police Chief Wayne Inman has seen what happens when racism and anti-Semitism are allowed to fester.

As a cop in Oregon, he watched skinhead hatred turn murderous. When the swastikas appeared in Billings, Montana's largest city, Inman was determined to halt the hatred early. He and others stirred the community to a roar of outrage that appears to have cowed the racist groups, at least for now. "Hate crimes are not a police problem, they're a community problem," he said in an interview. "Hate crimes and hate activity will flourish only in communities that allow it to flourish." The first signs came last year, when fliers started showing up in Billings mailboxes, on doorsteps, under windshield wipers.

The fliers and anonymous phone calls vilified Hispanics, Indians, blacks, gays, lesbians and welfare recipients but reserved special venom for the city's Jewish community of 48 families. Then, a series of seemingly random, isolated incidents: In January, a few skinheads slipped into a Martin Luther King Day observance; afterwards, participants found their cars papered with Ku Klux Klan material In the spring, skinheads began showing up in twos and threes at Wayman Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, glowering in the back pews. As the Rev. Bob Freeman recalls it, "They were trying to intimidate us with 'the you know." In August, a black swastika painted on white posterboard was nailed to the door of Beth Aaron Synagogue, and tombstones were toppled in its cemetery. In October, swastikas and racial slurs were spray-painted on the home of a mixed race couple, white and Indian.

From his previous job, Inman recognized an emerging pattern hate literature to intimidation to vandalism to personal attacks which in Portland had culminated in the November 1988 beating death of Mulugeta Seraw, a young Ethiopian. serious problem," said Dr. Mitchell Cohen of the CDC. SSL -rtw Any new drugs that might be developed to cope with the deadly bacteria are at least five to seven years away, and drug companies are not pursuing them eagerly, Cohen said. "A number of pharmaceutical companies had focused their research in the non-infectious area, because their marketing people were telling them there were enough antibiotics out there," Cohen said in a telephone Certain strains of pneumococ- cus are resistant to only one antibiotic, called vancomycin.

the researchers said. If those bacteria become resistant to vancomycin, too, there will be no treatment tor them at all. Pneumococcus bacteria cause hundreds of thousands of cases of pneumonia in the United States Billings Chief of Police Wayne Inman stands in front of the Beth Aaron Temple in Billings, Friday. Inman has joined with human-rights groups in taking an outspoken stance against hate groups. (AP photo) each year.

Committee Chairman David Wilhelm will attend the session. "I would have expected it with or without the strain that NAFTA put on the relationship," Donahue said. "This is a Democratic administration we fully supported. It seems perfectly appropriate." Donahue said there are still projects on which the unions and the White House will be allied. "All that we ask of the administration is on the things on which we agree, they fight just as hard as on the thing on which we disagree," he said.

"I don't think there's over any money. Tom Donahue, AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer, said he believes those unions in the federation that have had strong ties with the Democrats will continue to do so. There will be some discomfort caused by the fact that some (members of Congress) supported the administration on NAFTA and turned their backs on workers on that issue," he said. The White House is concerned enough about alienating a core constituency that donates millions of dollars and thousands of volunteer hours each year that Vice President Al Gore is being dispatched to meet with the union leaders. In addition, senior White House adviser George Stephanopoulos, Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Democratic National Labor looks again at ties to Clinton But they still are smarting after their losing the fight last year over the North American Free Trade Agreement, in which President Clinton accused the union leaders of using strong-arm tactics to dissuade members of Congress from voting for the pact.

Since then, unions have declined to make donations to the official Democratic Senate and House campaign committees, saying they would wait until the AFL-CIO's 35-member executive board gathered in Bal Harbour this week before deciding. The three-day session begins Monday. An AFL-CIO committee, meeting in Washington a week-and-a-half ago, agreed to continue talking with Democratic Party leaders before deciding whether to hand By ROBERT NAYLOR JR. AP Labor Writer BAL HARBOUR, Fla. A year of not-so-cordial relations with the Clinton administration has leaders of organized labor reassessing their ties to the White House and the Democratic Party.

Union leaders meeting in Bal Harbour this week will discuss ways they can work with the administration to pass health care reform, strengthen worker-safety laws and cooperate on other legislation. Labor leaders go into the meeting with their spirits buoyed by a government report showing their membership rolls swelled by 200,000 last year. It was the first time in 14 years their numbers grew. anytning special iney nave 10 oo us Foremost among the issues is health care..