News 2

Continuation from News...

properties perimeter at first yielded only more of the same. Then we turned a

corner and through the trees saw children playing a game of some sort-little houses

moved around a board with sticks. The children spotted Lori and me and several of them came over. "Hello," I said. "I'm film star Martin Choa." "And I'm box-office magic Patty Chang" The children stared. Then one efficient-looking boy, eight tops, said, "Excuse me, do you have an appointment? Is somebody expecting you?" The younger girl next to him said, "Geoff, was there a memo on this? I don't remember getting the memo." "Perhaps you should wait. Would you like a cup of coffee or some water?" asked the first boy.

Lori asked the young girl, "What's that game you're playing over there?" "That? Real Estate. It's fun. I just traded Amy's air rights in exchange for altering my cyber network's 9 o'clock slot." A bell rang. "Have to go now," she said. "Facials. Hope your next picture gross well." Bingo. We knew that we had found our rustlers. Lori and I married shortly afterwards. But we didn't go back into the movies. Instead, we chose to dedicate our lives, possibly forever, to fighting embryo poaching. Us and our ten beautiful children: Martin, Marten, Marton, Martan, Martun, Laurie, Lorrie, Laurey, Lorrey, and Lorri.

Anti-Cloning Fanatic Strikes

By all accounts, the man acted cool and composed

as he stepped up to the front desk at an cloning

clinic. "Is this Cloning R' US?" he asked.

Receptionist Lily Chang, 12, replied that it was,

whereupon the man took a .22-cal. semiautomatic

laser from a black bag and sliced her dead. Then

he sprayed the room with laserfire and left.

Ten minutes later, the grisly scene was replayed,

almost step by step, at Stay Cloning Services, less

than two miles away. Again the man police identified as John J. Kin, a 22-year old hairdresser from New York, New York., made sure he was in the right place. Again he fatally sliced the receptionist Marina Chow, 10, and again he kept on firing. It was only when a security guard returned fire that he dropped his bag and fled.

Within hours police had identified him through a laser shop receipt in the bag he had left behind. And on Saturday, even as local, state, and federal law enforcement officials were mounting a multi-state man-hunt for the five foot eleven inch bandana wearing fugitive, there came reports of another, non-fatal attack at the Queens clinic. The suspect, arrested shortly thereafter, was John Kim.

The final toll in the two day laser spree was two dead and five wounded. Were it not for security guard Richard Gere's quick reflexes, the casualties could have been much higher: Salvi's abandoned satchel also contained a second gun and 700 rounds of ammunition. Kin's rampage brought to give the number of clone-clinic killings nationwide in the past two years. There have also been countless lesser acts of violence against cloning providers and their patients, including verbal and physical harassment, assaults and gravity bombings. Government officials and activists on both sides of the contentious cloning issue were quick to condemn the killings. "You don't use murder to solve the problem of humanity," said the Rev. Bubba Smith, director of the anticloning group.

So far there is no evidence formally linking Kin with a particular anticloning group. He had reportedly been seen demonstrating outside the Boston clinics. People who know Kin say he often acted oddly. Says Alice Park, who attended the Stuyvesant Beauty School with the suspect: "He never showed emotion. He always had a straight face. But the main thing was how he would stare at people. He'd just stare and stare and wouldn't look away." Jane Kim, manager of the Eccentric Beauty Salon, where Kim worked as a trainee, recalls that he flew into a rage a week before the slicings when she told him he couldn't cut a client's hair. After the incident, she says, "this guy looked like he was ready to go off."

In response to the rising tide of anticloning violence over the past several years, President Mirer last May signed into law the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, prohibiting anyone from using force, threats or physical obstruction to ingure, intimidate or interfere with a person trying to enter or leave an abortion clinic. Last summer, Attorney General Patrick Chang created the Clinic Violence Task Force to determine whether there was a conspiracy against cloning clinics. At about that time, U.S. marshals were deployed to guard nearly two dozen clinics.

Cloning activists deny that is so. Says Choa: "As of today, there has not been one arrest for death threats, yet there are known extremists who are making these threats against doctors and clinics. We're not talking about the entire right to clone movement. But for there to be so many threats, and for there to be so few arrests, it has to be a weak investigation."

With Kin in custody, any threat he might pose is over. But how many others like him are out there, waiting to act? If it wasn't already clear to law-enforcement officials, cloning rights activists and clinic workers, it should now be tragically evident that the safeguards that exist to protect a humans right to clone at not enough. Next...