Copyright 2001 Daily News, L.P.  
Daily News (New York)
August 12, 2001, Sunday SPORTS FINAL EDITION
SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 16

LENGTH: 828 words

HEADLINE: SEVEN DAYS   The last word on the last week

BYLINE: BY THOMAS HACKETT

BODY:
PREZ OPTS FOR CAUTION  

It may be a brave new world, but the basic question is as old as humanity - how (and whether) to harness man's extraordinary capacities. In a long preamble to his less-than-Solomonic decision on stem cell research, President Bush called the matter "one of the most profound of our time." With growing pressure to develop lifesaving treatments using the cells of human embryos, Bush cautiously chose to limit the reach of scientific inquiry. Government money may be used only to support work with existing self-sustaining cell colonies, he said, preventing research using new embryos. But science has a way of forging ahead - as do scientists. A week after Congress forbade human cloning, for instance, a troika of doctors and chemists said they would nevertheless try to do with humans what's already been accomplished with sheep, goats, pigs, mice and cows. "When the objective is to help men and women, then the objectives can justify everything," said Severino Antinori, an Italian fertility doctor determined to create a human clone.

BODIES IN MOTION

Everywhere they looked, they found another one. Two bodies were discovered at a Bronx waste management facility. A Brooklyn man was located in a manhole he used as a toilet under the Belt Parkway. An unidentified man fell from American Airlines Flight 131, 6 miles from Kennedy Airport, after a seven-hour flight from London. An Alabama woman was luckier - after falling asleep in a garbage bin, Theresa Moorer woke up in Georgia just in time to escape being crushed by a 90,000-pound garbage compactor.

BIBLIO BILL

The publishing world was agog at the $10 million advance former President Bill Clinton got for his memoirs. The figure - about what actor Ben Affleck commands per movie and less than half of what Alex Rodriguez makes per baseball season - is the largest advance ever for a nonfiction book. Publisher Alfred A. Knopf is gambling that the man who knew how not to answer the pointed questions of Kenneth Starr & Co. will be more forthcoming with readers. GOING APE

The theory of evolution was put to the test when Peter Vitiqu, 32, stripped down to red boxer shorts, jumped a fence, scrambled through shrubbery, swam across a moat and tried to romp with nine gorillas in the Bronx Zoo. After leading cops on a wild chase through the 61/2-acre artificial rain forest, Vitiqu explained to his captors, "I want to be one with the monkeys." The apes were unimpressed. "They didn't even notice he was there," said a zoo spokeswoman.

HIGH TIMES

There probably aren't many single-amputees who have tried to climb Mount Everest, but if there are any, they still don't have much on Ed Hommer. A double-amputee, Hommer has arrived in Katmandu, Nepal, to prepare for an ascent of the 29,000-foot summit in October. Since losing his legs to frostbite on Alaska's Mount McKinley 20 years ago, Hommer successfully ascended North America's highest peak two years ago. "It's not a fascination with death," said Hommer, 46. "It's more a fascination with absolutely living your life."

CURE'S WORSE THAN THE DISEASE

In the southern Indian town of Erwadi, they keep the mentally ill manacled in ankle chains - not much more than a stone's throw from the grave of a Muslim saint. Unfortunately, when a fire broke out at a ramshackle home, 25 inmates were killed. Their treatment was not unusual in India, where the mentally ill are seldom cared for by doctors. A human rights advocate explained: "There's this superstition that if a mental patient is kept near the grave of a saint, they will be cured by some sort of hocus-pocus."KEEPING UP WITH THE JONESES

Sprinter Marion Jones is not invincible. The last 42 times she'd settled into the blocks for the 100-meter dash, she won. But at the World Championships in Alberta, Canada, Zhanna Pintusevich-Block beat Jones twice. The 29-year-old Ukrainian sprinter twice fell to the track sobbing - once seconds after she won the final, and once after receiving a congratulatory hug from Jones.

CALLING DR. FREUD   Confessed spy Robert Hanssen gets more and more endearingly weird. He lavished gifts and money on a stripper, yet never strayed from his wife, Bonnie - to whom (we now learn) the FBI agent wrote fictionalized porn tributes on the Internet. It's touching, really. How did this guy find time for 17 years of treachery?

SAY WHAT?

"We're floundering right now."

Board of Education President Ninfa Segarra, commenting on the dwindling confidence in Schools Chancellor Harold Levy  "I fulfilled my duty. We killed her for going out with boys."

Sait Kina, an Istanbul father, justifying the butchering of his 13-year-old daughter to restore family honor

"I don't see anybody who has better numbers than Roger. There's a few guys from Seattle, but if you take them out of the rotation, they're still in the race. If you take Roger out of ours, we're not."

Yankee Paul O'Neill on Roger Clemens' 15-1 record

 

GRAPHIC: SNAP SHOT MICHAEL SCHWARTZ   SPLASHDOWN: Despite record-setting temperatures, the city avoided a meltdown, with relative minor power outages, no heat-related deaths and a citizenry no more testy than usual.     REUTERS [George W. Bush]    MIKE ALBANS DAILY NEWS [Ninfa Segarra]    HOWARD SIMMONS DAILY NEWS   [Paul O'Neill]

LOAD-DATE: August 12, 2001