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The beginning of the end
News of a peace deal in Kosovo raises hopes and skepticism among Balkans watchers.
By Daryl Lindsey
[06/04/99]

Is it peace yet?
Cautious optimism prevails in the Balkans as Milosevic settles for a worse deal than the one he rejected at Rambouillet.
By Laura Rozen
[06/03/99]

Milosevic plays the U.N. card
The Serbian president appears to wave the white flag, and the blue United Nations banner is set to fly again in former Yugoslavia.
By Ian Williams
[06/03/99]

A refugee's escape from hell
With rumors of peace, Serbs are making a last-ditch attempt to change the ethnic mix inside Kosovo forever.
By Laura Rozen
[06/02/99]

Under the volcano
The Japanese, never known for their frivolity, have grown downright depressed as their decade-long economic troubles proliferate.
By David Lazarus
[06/02/99]

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Since Thursday, May 20, 1999.

That's when the Violent and Repeat Juvenile Accountability and Rehabilitation Act passed the Senate, 73-25, with nearly unanimous Democratic support. And while debate over the gun-control provisions in the act, known as the juvenile justice bill, received much fanfare and media ballyhoo, what is less well-known are the conservative Republican measures that constitute the larger share of it.

These were provisions that Democrats in the Senate had adamantly opposed last year, creating an impasse on legislative action and sticking the bill in senatorial purgatory. Then known as S10, the bill was reported out of the Judiciary Committee but it never hit the Senate floor because so many Democrats found much of the bill irreparably odious.

But it lives! Even though Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., took a lot of right-wing heat for his role in the passage of the juvenile justice bill's gun-control measures, in a just and fair world his conservative critics would also be giving him major props. Because when Lott went looking for a bill that would allow the Senate to look like it was addressing the massacre at Columbine High School, it was a modified S10 that he picked -- a fine right-wing horse to which he allowed the Democrats to hitch their gun-control wagon.

With some tweaking, the bill that the Senate passed a few weeks ago, with added gun-control amendments, is the same one the Los Angeles Times described as taking a "rigid, counterproductive approach" to juvenile crime prevention, the same one the St. Petersburg Times called "an amalgam of bad and dangerous ideas."

How could Lott have so easily given S10 a pretty new dress and shoved it out on the Senate dance floor, where so many Democrats lined up to give it a big fat smooch?

"I don't think people had any serious awareness of what was in the juvenile justice bill," says Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis. Thus, pro-gun conservatives should take solace in the fact that left-wing civil liberties and civil rights groups are now as miserable about the bill as they are -- and specifically about the way the bill was handled. The world's most deliberative body opted not to deliberate all that much on juvenile justice in this heated go-round.

How could liberals like Kennedy, Boxer, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, Michigan Sen. Carl Levin -- in fact, every Democrat present except for Feingold and Minnesota's Paul Wellstone -- not have known what was in the bill?

Good question, Republicans say. "This bill has been around for two years, we didn't 'sneak' anything through," says Jeanne Lopatto, press secretary for the Senate Judiciary Committee. "We had hearings, a [Judiciary] Committee mark-up and quite a lengthy debate on the bill. All these issues have been aired in the last two years."

"The bill was hijacked by two different agendas," Feingold explains, "by those who were supporting, after Columbine, certain aspects of gun control, and by those who wanted to use it as an excuse to blame Hollywood and TV. But the bill is supposed to be about intervening, and addressing problems with juveniles -- how to get an 11- or 12-year-old kid on the right track. The Senate ended up approving a bill that is very harmful in terms of creating wise public policy. And also very regressive."

Calling the Senate bill "mean-spirited and wasteful," Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., a member of the House Judiciary Committee, says that he "was disappointed at the Senate action. In the House, we have two juvenile justice bills that are constructive, that we have had hearings on and that are a result of a bipartisan consensus -- not only of politicians, but of experts."

Scott fears what might happen to the House's bills in the current climate, given that the Senate set the debate on what he feels is the wrong path. "Once you allow explosive politics to set in, there's no telling what might happen."

Explosive politics carried the day in the Senate, advocates say. Senate Democrats "sold their souls for gun control," is how Rachel King, legal counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, puts it.

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