The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 4

METRO EDIT1QN53 GFp' it if iu The Atlanta Journal The Atlanta Constitution NATION A4 Tuesday, April 8, 1997 NATION IN BRIEF Winter they won't forget Despite injury, Clinton lighter i he knee-jerk reaction to President Clinton's knee injury was that his weight would balloon, but the White House says his torn tendon has helped shed presidential pounds. Press secretary Mike McCurry said Monday in Washington that Clinton is recovering well from March 14 surgery to repair a torn tendon in his right knee. The White House doctor reports that Clinton has 75 percent flexibility in the joint, McCurry says. Fearing that reduced mobility would make for a weightier president, White House physicians restricted Clinton's already low-fat diet. So far, it has worked, and he has lost a little weight.

One reason may be that Clinton is moving around on crutches, a physically demanding task. He said the president also is lifting weights to improve his upper-body strength. v. 7 I fir "VVlif I- SI--I r-Zl" ht' 4, j. i averted suspension by adopting an ethics code and agreeing to give employees ethics training, install surveillance cameras and require individual paperwork for each medal.

The company pleaded guilty in federal court in Newark, N.J., last year to selling unauthorized medals for $75 apiece from 1991 to 1994. Search for bomb jury The search for a Denver jury in Timothy McVeigh's trial as a result of the Oklahoma City bombing resumed at the same slow pace that marked the first week. The second week began with the questioning of a giggly cosmetics clerk who reads Cosmopolitan and the dictionary. "I'm not actually reading it front to back," said the woman, three years out of high school. "But I do spend a lot of time flipping through and learning new definitions." CHARLIE NEIBERGALL Attodated Presi A long hose to row: Tim Greenfield pumps floodwater Monday out of the home he has owned only one week in Watertown, S.D., where thawing blizzard snow is causing floods.

Sandbags, snow, ice piling up in Minnesota, Dakotas Astronauts racing clock on research Borrowed time: With the mission cut from 16 to four days, the shuttle crew is scurrying. By William Harwood WASHINGTON POST Cape Canaveral, Fla. Turning out lights to conserve power, astronauts aboard the space shuttle Columbia worked by flashlight Monday to complete as many scientific experiments as possible before their aborted mission ended. Columbia's planned 16-day flight, scheduled to end at 2:33 p.m. Monday at the Kennedy Space Center, was cut short Sunday by problems with one of the shuttle's three electricity-producing fuel cells.

Working with the two remain-" ing fuel cells, Columbia's crew was forced to conserve electricity. So astronauts turned out lights and worked by flashlight at times in the dim confines of their Spacelab research module. "It's for sure you can't cram 16 days of work into four days, but we're doing our best at it," said astronaut Donald Thomas. "Most of the experiments have been able to get at least one or two runs in, so we're bringing some science." Only 10 percent to IS percent of the objectives of the Microgra-vity. Science Laboratory were completed during the shortened mission.

But officials said the quality of the data scientists did receive was excellent and mission managers have requested a re-flight. "The disposition of that request by NASA headquarters will take some time," said Joel Kearns, a senior manager at the Marshall Space Flight Center. "But I have no doubt that in the future we will bring these investigations to a successful conclusion." NASA officials decided to end the mission early after engineers noted a slight discrepancy in the voltage from one section of a fuel cell, raising concern that the cell could catch fire or explode. NASA flight rules require a shuttle crew to head for home as soon as reasonably possible in the event of a fuel-cell failure. the evacuation of about 1,000 rocMante nf AHa a tnurn nf GOVERNMENT Probe of senator ends The Federal Election Commission in Washington has closed its investigation of Sen.

Carol Moseley-Braun's 1992 Senate campaign without levying a fine or other punishment. The Illinois Democrat had been dogged by questions relating to her $6.7 million campaign, including allegations of extravagant personal spending. The FEC audit focused on travel and hotel expenses that were run up on a debit card used by Moseley-Braun and her former campaign manager and ex-fiance, Kgosie Matthews. Making it work Vice President Al Gore is claiming early success in the government's push to answer phones faster, cut red tape and be polite. The effort to treat people like customers "will amaze the bench-warmers," he said.

Gore, chief of bureaucratic housecleaning, declared "the era of better government has begun" in a pep talk in Bethesda, to hundreds of federal workers and private-sector managers drawn together to make government more efficient. THE SOUTH Law could help Ray An attorney for James Earl Ray, imprisoned for the shooting of the Rev. Martin Luther King says he believes the death of a Tennessee judge could lead to a trial for his client. Andrew Hall argues that a long-forgotten Tennessee law granting a pending motion to a defendant if the ruling judge dies could give Ray a new trial because Memphis trial Judge W. Preston Battle died before he could rule on Ray's motion for a trial.

Ray filed the motion soon after recanting his confession in the 1968 shooting. Shelby County Assistant District "We're absolutely overwhelmed," Mayor Russ Onstad said from one of the town's few working phones. "We're getting water from north, south and east." President Clinton signed a statewide disaster declaration Monday because of South Dakota's blizzard and the flooding. There was no immediate word on declarations for other states in the region. gauge how bad the flooding might become once the snow melts, but 4 to 5 inches of heavy, late-season snow could be equal to 1 inch of rain, Seeley said.

In Granite Falls, windblown snow stung the faces of people stacking sandbags along levees in an effort to protect about 40 homes along the Minnesota River. Flood victims and weary out-of-town volunteers trapped by the snowstorm stuck it out in a shelter at the high school gym. "We've had so much fun here floods, blizzard. We're expecting the asteroid next," said Red Cross volunteer Karen Barck of Marshall, 30 miles away. She had been at the shelter since Thursday.

Residents were told to drink bottled water after sewage backed into the Granite Falls water supply. A big snow blower was used as a pump, sucking water off streets and spraying it in a 100-. foot-high arc over the levee and back into the river. In northwestern Minnesota, rising water from the Wild Rice and Marsh rivers forced By Chris Tomlinson ASSOCIATED PRESS Granite Falls, Minn. Volunteers raced to stack more sandbags Monday, afraid that the meltdown from a spring blizzard could worsen what already is some of the most severe flooding in the northern Plains in years.

Across the Plains, fields of white stretched to the horizon after a weekend storm left more than 2 feet of snow in places. In Minnesota, sunshine melted a little snow along the Red River, which forms the state line with North Dakota. A big thaw is eagerly expected Thursday or Friday, said Mark Seeley, climatologist with the University of Minnesota Extension Service. "Everything predicted for the Red is a flood of historic proportions," he said. For other parts of Minnesota, a National Weather Service flood warning was issued for the next two weeks along parts of three rivers: the Minnesota, the Mississippi and the St.

Croix. There was no quick way to Temperatures dropped to zero Monday in Dickinson, N.D., and in Bemidji, the wind chill reached 37 below zero. Outside Wahpeton, N.D., along the Red River, Tom Ku-bela's wheat and bean fields were entombed in ice that was IS feet deep in spots. Kubela's farm is just 100 yards away from the Bois de Sioux River, a tributary to the Red River. His family has lived there for 110 years, and he said, "You expect it, but when MILITARY Army sex guilty plea A former drill instructor pleaded guilty to having sex with 11 trainees at Aberdeen Proving Ground, in violation of Army rules, but denied charges he raped eight women under his command.

Staff Sgt. Delmar Simpson, 32, said he had sex with subordinates in his office, his home and at a hotel on another military base. In most cases, he said, the sex was initiated either by the woman or by both partners. "She would come to my office and we would engage in conversation and one thing would just lead to another, sir," he told a military judge, PEOPLE Service for Ginsberg Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg was remembered by several hundred shoeless mourners in New York who sat on pillows surrounding his coffin in a ceremony Monday that combined elements of Buddhism and Judaism. "There is no birth and no cessation," they chanted as gongs were struck, bells chimed and incense burned during a four-hour service led by a high priest at a Buddhist meditation center.

Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, was read in Hebrew. Ginsberg had liver cancer and died of a heart attack Saturday at 70. Although born to Jewish parents, he was a Buddhist. you get a major flood and throw in a blizzard, and a deep freeze afterward, nothing like this has ever happened here." Devotion to dad leads to arrest in 72 cop killing Attorney jonn tampoeu said a new trial would be "tantamount" to releasing Ray because it would be virtually impossible to try him. Vote corruption alleged The day after Election Day in November, Alice Allison called the nursing home in Baton Rouge, where her elderly parents were living and found out they had gone to vote.

Although both suffer from dementia, they had been picked up ajid taken to vote. Allison said in an affidavit that she learned a river-boat casino had sent two buses to pick up most of the 117 nursing home residents, most of whom suffer from dementia, or impaired mental capacity. Her statement is a)nong the thousands of pages amassed by Republican Woody Jenkins to bolster his challenge to the election of Sen. Mary Landrieu COURTS pootleg medals A company fined $80,000 for selling 300 bootleg Medals of Honor will remain the nation's primary maker of military decorations under a deal announced Monday with the Pentagon. HX.I.

Lordship Industries Inc. of Hauppauge, N.Y., Robert Caffey says his father's advice kept him going. "I stuck with what I thought was right" ELECTIONS Mayoral vote in LA. Appealing for divine assistance and a few more votes, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and challenger Tom Hayden were bracing for today's election, each hoping to lead the nation's second-largest city. The Republican incumbent, a successful business executive, was well ahead in polls against the graying Hayden, Jane Fonda's ex-husband and a 1960s rabble-rouser who has served as a fairly mainstream Democratic state legislator for the past IS years.

From news services Mi LOU KRASKY Associated Prtu Suspect Betsy Kemmerlin of Santee, S.C., allegedly told people in a bar she was with her brother( and another man, who since have died, when she saw a state trooper killed. By Lyn Riddle FOR THE JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION Orangeburg, S.C. For 25 years, Robert Caffey pressured authorities to solve the slaying of his father, Roy Caffey, a South Carolina trooper gunned down beside his patrol car in 1972. Caffey's death had been the state's only unsolved slaying of a law enforcement officer, and his son, now a 40-year-old bank vice president in Orangeburg, had made solving the case a crusade. He regularly wrote the governor, the state's lawmakers and the head of the state Law En-forcement Division about the case.

Not long ago, he enticed the producers of the television show "Unsolved Mysteries" to air a segment on the crime. "My father told me to stick with one thing, keep going at it and do your very best," he said. "That's what kept me going. I stuck with what I thought was right." On Monday, a judge ordered Betsy Kemmerlin, 40, jailed in the case. She was named a suspect last month but was allowed to await trial at home under house arrest.

The judge revoked those terms after Kemmerlin was arrested last week on a charge of public drunkenness. Solicitor Walter Bailey has said Kemmerlin identified her brother Ben Kemmerlin and another man, Lee Mizzell, as alleged accomplices in the killing. Ben Kemmerlin died in a 1981 traffic accident and Mizzell was shot to death three years later in a domestic dispute. Robert Caffey was IS when he last saw his father. His father, he remembers, ar small brick ranch home for supper.

It was about 7 p.m. Oct. 8, and Robert Caffey, a high school football player, lay on the couch watching television when his father went back to work. "Bye," the father said, lifting his wide-brimmed trooper's hat to his head, cocking it slightly to the left, as was his way. "I love you.

I'll see you tonight." At about 11:30 that night, a patrolman came to tell the family that Roy Caffey had been hurt. They rushed to the hospital and learned Caffey had been shot, not involved in an accident as they had been led to believe, and that he had died on the way to the hospital. "They didn't tell us anything except that he was shot six times," Caffey said. Everyone thought an arrest was imminent. Orangeburg was a small town then, and it seemed no one could keep that big a secret.

Someone would talk. But they didn't. Three years later, just after Caffey graduated from high school, his mother suffered a heart attack and died. Caffey believes she died of a broken heart, deprived of a husband and any closure on his killing. Caffey heard from a source that two people were seen in the patrol car that night.

He heard from another source that the el A A' r-' jf 1 thorities wouldn't let him have them. He asked for the badge from his father's uniform hat. That, too, was denied. Finally, last year, Boykin Rose, who was then head of the state Law Enforcement Division, assigned agents to the case. Betsy Kemmerlin was charged in the slaying on Valentine's Day.

The Santee, S.C., woman allegedly told people in a bar that she was with her brother and Mizzell and saw Roy Caffey killed. Robert Caffey says he gave that information and Kemmer-lin's name to law enforcement officers in 1992. He says he doesn't understand why it took so long to make an arrest and doesn't care much about the outcome of Kem-merlin's trial. "I just wanted to know what was on his way to make a huge drug bust and warned them that everyone would be surprised over who it would be. Robert Caffey also heard that a red car, a Ford Mustang, had been seen in the area about the time of the slaying.

Robert Caffey went on to The Citadel, graduated, married, went to work at First National Bank and fathered two children. Time moved on, but Caffey's devotion to his father's memory did not. "I felt I owed it to my kids to find out what happened to their granddaddy," Caffey said. Officially, the case was still open, but no real work was done on it after the initial investigationIn 1976, rumors circulated that an arrest was imminent. Nothing happened.

Eventually, he asked for the emergency dispatcher tapes. Au KRIS TRAHNSTROM Associated Prtu Students side with principal Doth sides sound off as Darlington, S.C., School Superintendent Jimmy Newsom (left) responds to the Rev. Franklin Briggs (center) while facing students who walked out of Darlington High School on Monday. The students were rived as usualat the family's der Caffey had to someone he ingaie, wiy is namea in a graue-iampenng lawsuu. happened," he said.

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