Internal ETS! stuff: One of these weeks we'll have a new phone number. We have it set up, and are simply waiting; our old voice mail company is going out of business, and the disconnect date was originally set for late April, but as of this writing (May 5) they're still up and running, so ... many thanks to Ellen Jablow (phones) and Mike Berry (distribution) for picking up the slack and doing a great job in areas where we've had a hard time with volunteer coordination for the last several months. Our legendary ETS! customer service is much improved as a result ... at our May business meeting, we decided to go to an every-other-week publishing schedule over the summer this year. (We'll adjust subscriptions and ad schedules accordingly.) The reasons are less monetary--though it will help us ease a couple of debts--than the simple need for a rest. Several of us that do writing, editing, and layout have been doing this every week for two or three years now, and we're concerned that burnout might affect the quality of the weekly product. So this is a preventative measure to keep us fresh. Of course, new volunteers can help, too--feel free to join in! We wanted to announce the summer schedule now, especially for flyer inserts, ads, and calendar announcements, so that people with such items will (we hope) remember to allow enough time to get it to us ahead of time for the proper week(s). We also plan to slightly increase our print runs to cover for the issues lying around for the extra week. And we'll be back to our regular weekly schedule come September.--Geov Parrish

Regular ETS! contributor Troy Skeels is one of the minds behind a cool new free quarterly newsprint publication, Instant Planet. It's around town; check it out! --G.P.

A satirical group called Billionaires for Forbes ("Because the Rich Still Aren't Rich Enough"), an outgrowth of United for a Fair Economy, ruined Steve Forbes' GOP announcement of his presidential bid recently. The Forbes press conference, with the usual array of balloons and rent-an-idiots, was invaded by banner-wavers and picketers in Tuxedos and formal wear, wielding slogans like "We Want More Status than the Status Quo," "Keep the Wage Gap Growing," "Because Inequality Isn't Growing Fast Enough," "Tax Cuts for Me, Not My Maid," and the like. Forbes, like almost every other GOP candidate for 2000, has never held elected office but is hoping to buy his way in through a newfound zeal for Christian evangelicals combined with his 1996 flat tax proposal (which would disproportionately benefit the very wealthy). The approach, however, can be transferred to just about any Republicratic presidential candidate. How 'bout a similar demonstration the next time Al Gore comes to town to soak up more Microsoft money? --G.P.

Last week the Boston Globe ran a three-part series on the following theme: the United States is a haven for war criminals from other countries. The first article detailed how the U.S. Immigration Service has accepted a wide range of criminals--from members of the Haitian junta that overthrew Jean Bertrand Aristide's government in 1991 to a general from El Salvador accused of covering up the murder of four American churchwomen in 1980. One such immigrant is Carl Dorelien, the former head of personnel for the Haitian army. From 1991-94 he headed a force of 7,000 men who engaged in acts of murder, rape, torture, kidnapping, and summary executions, which led to the deaths of over 5,000 Haitian civilians. He left Haiti in 1994, when the U.S. government dispatched 20,000 troops to the island to re-install Aristide's government. Currently Dorelien lives in luxury with his family in the resort community of Port St. Lucie, Florida. Referring to other member of the junta, Dorelien bragged, "We are all here. Plus, other members of the staff at different periods of time during those three years. Remember, all members didn't stay in the same position between 1991-94. Sometimes Cedras would change his staff. Those former members, they are here, too." The list of war criminals living happily in the U.S. is numbered in the thousands, according to Gerald Gray of the Center for Justice and Accountability (funded by Amnesty International). The list includes several former henchmen of the Somali general Mohammed Siad Barre, as well as Bosnian war criminals like Zijad Music, a Bosnian Muslim who joined a Serbian paramilitary squad known as El Manijakos (The Maniacs), the most hated and feared death squad in the city of Prijedor. The members of El Manijakos were known for getting drunk and going door-to-door torturing, murdering, and terrorizing non-Serbian civilians in Prijedor, where over 60,000 non-Serbian civilians were "purged." Notably, Music has been denounced by a number of his victims living in the U.S. (including his own Muslim relatives), yet he hasn't been arrested, deported, or charged with any crimes. Clearly, the U.S. government can spend billions of dollars trying to bomb war criminals in Yugoslavia (and killing a lot of innocents in the process), but it can't spend a few thousand bucks to detain and file charges against Zijad Music and others like him. Of course, once a war criminal reaches U.S. soil, his usefulness for U.S. foreign policy is gone.--Maria Tomchick. >From a three-part series: "U.S. is a haven for suspected war criminals," "Suspect in 'cleansing' by Serbs living in VT," and "Rights violators exploit U.S. immigration system," all by Steve Fainaru, Boston Globe, 5/2/99 to 5/4/99.

Some of the folks who scraped oil off of Oregon's beaches during the New Carissa disaster earlier this year are still working at it. Last week, a beach patrol found that another new wave of tar balls have drifted ashore near Ona Beach State Park, located about halfway between Newport and Waldport. Evidently, New Carissa tar balls, which are now a more or less regular occurrence at Oregon beaches, come in two different flavors: old and crusty or fresh and gooey. The Ona Park batch contains crusty ones left over from the spill trailed by the leaky aft section when it washed ashore nearby before it was towed out sea and sunk. Near Coos Bay, however, clean-up crews found more tar balls of the fresh and gooey kind, prompting officials to worry that the source of the new oil pollution is the stern section of the ship, still beached near Coos Bay. This could kill any idea of leaving the stern section as a permanent fixture of the landscape, instead of forcing the ship's insurer, Gallagher Marine Systems, to dismantle or tow the hulk away. In the meantime, commercial fishermen and shellfish farmers are taking stock of the damage: tests on four upper Coos Bay oyster farms have found that as much as 70% of the oyster beds may have been lost by the disaster, after tar balls washed into the beds. So much for the argument that the ocean can just "flush away" waste.--M.T. From: "New Tar Balls Litter Oregon Coast," Channel 6000 (KOIN TV), 5/5/99.