World briefs
About the article
This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from April 1994.
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The court said it will hear the Clinton administration's argument that a federal appeals court erred when it essentially threw out the law as contrary to the US Constitution.
Government lawyers want the court to reinstate a former Texas high school pupil's conviction for taking a gun to school. He said he intended to give the gun to someone else for use in a gang war.
Alfonso Lopez Jr., then a senior at Edison High School, was arrested on 10 March, 1992, after school authorities received an anonymous tip.
He admitted carrying a .38-caliber handgun and five bullets. He said he had been paid US$40 to deliver the gun to another person after school.
High levels of lead in water
Washington - Americans with new brass pumps to provide water from wells face hazardous levels of lead from those pumps. The US Environmental Protection Agency is warning people who get their water from wells, and who installed a new brass pump within the last year, to have their water tested for lead.
In the meantime, drinking bottled water was recommended, particularly for youngsters. Excessive lead levels can cause brain damage in children.
Peter L. Cook, deputy director of EPA's Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water, said that regardless of the manufacturer of the pump, "if they know they have a brass pump they should follow our advice."
Water from the new brass pumps has lead levels "well in excess of our lead action level of 15 parts per billion during the very early days of the pump," Cook said.
Stainless steel and plastic pumps do not produce high lead levels, he said.
The problem is that lead is part of the brass alloy, and it seems to be leaching out of the new pumps very rapidly, Cook explained.
Baby dumping
New York - The Quebec couple didn't want their 4-year-old daughter to know her infant sister was dead. So, police said, when they went for a car ride they put a doll in a child seat.
The 10-week-old infant also was in the car, police said - wrapped in three plastic bags and stuffed into a knapsack. The parents had found her dead in her crib. Fearing trouble because of previous abuse allegations against them, they drove 70 miles to dump the body in Quebec woods, police said.
Over the next week, the parents Joseph Bales, 33, and his wife, Helene Lemay, 31 - decided to drive with 4-year-old Priscille to New York City and concoct a story that the infant, Muguet Bales, had disappeared here. They told the story Saturday. It unraveled on Sunday.
