Salt of the Earth: newsbriefs

Social justice newsbriefs
May 2000

CIA reports as many as 50,000 come to U.S. as "slaves"
U.N. revisits sanctions policy
Berrigan earns long sentence for depleted uranium protest
U.S. may surpass Russia as world incarceration leader
Newsbriefs

Gun manufacturers and states in legal shootout
Seven of the nation's largest gun manufacturers filed suit on April 26 to keep New York State, Connecticut and 16 local governments from adopting purchasing policies favoring gun companies that agree to stringent rules governing the ways they make, sell and distribute weapons.

The suit seeks to prohibit purchasing policies intended to pressure gun companies into adopting a sweeping "code of conduct" promoted by Housing Secretary Andrew M. Cuomo and the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut. Among other things, the code requires companies to install locks on handguns, develop "smart-gun" technology allowing only authorized users to fire a weapon and place hidden serial numbers inside guns. It also requires dealers to accept a host of restrictions, including selling weapons only to people who have passed gun safety courses.

To date, only one company, Smith & Wesson, the nation's oldest and largest handgun maker, has accepted the code. In exchange, 29 cities agreed to drop lawsuits against Smith & Wesson seeking monetary damages for gun violence. But since agreeing to the code on March 17, Smith & Wesson, a unit of Tomkins PLC of London, has tried to back away from major elements of it.

Most approve of partial-birth abortion ban
Almost 70 percent of Americans support a ban on partial-birth abortion,a ccording to a recent poll conducted for the U.S. bishop's Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities and the Knights of Columbus. Less than 20 percent of 1,000 people surveyed opposed a ban and 13.4 percent didn't know or declined to answer.

End of the ABM treaty near?
After a second round of intensive meetings with the Russian foreign minister about the missile defense system that the United States wants to develop over Russian objections, senior administration officials said on April 27 that they had detected a readiness by Moscow to explore all avenues of a possible resolution to the looming standoff.

The Clinton administration wants to developd a missile defense against "rogue" states like North Korea and Iran. National missile defense systems are prohibited in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missle treaty, which is based on the principle that the only way to encourage reductions in strategic arms is to restrict ways to counter them.

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