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Listen To This3lesson 27

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The Soviet news agency TASS reports that an American cancer researcher has defected to the Soviet Union. According to TASS, Arnold Loskin, his wife and three children arrived in Moscow today after being granted political asylum. TASS said Loskin has defected after being fired from his job, because he opposed US foreign policy.

The upcoming summit is having an impact on the budget debate on Capitol Hill. President Reagan accused Congress of helping Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev by attaching arms control demands to the spending bill. The House wants the President to continue to abide by the terms of the ungratified SALT II Treaty, among other things. House leaders say the President is threatening to shut down the government unless he gets his way on arms issues. The House today approved a compromise anti-drug bill that would institute the death penalty for drug related murders. A provision threatened a filibuster to keep it from passing. Representatives dropped the provision from the original bill that would require the use of the military to patrol the border against drug smuggling.

It hasn't rained until ... since Saturday in Eastern Missouri, but flooding problems continue to intensify along the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers north of St. Louis. Thousands have been forced to leave their homes as flood waters continue to rise. Jim Dryden of member station KWMU in St. Louis reports. "In St. Charles Counry just to the north of St. Louis, flooding is worse now than at any time in recent history. All of the levees along the Missouri River have broken, and the towns of Portage Des Sioux and Westalton, which sit at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, have been completely isolated by water. Ray Camp of the St. Charles County Office of Emergency Management says levees and dikes north of the confluence of the two rivers are causing those rivers to seek out new channels. Westalton is now under the water of one such new channel. That town is being evacuated this evening after desperate attempts to sandbag it failed. Almost the entire peninsula which sits at the confluence of the two rivers is under as much as fifteen feet of water, and is now accessible only by boat. And even though the Missouri River reached its crest this morning and the Mississippi is expected to crest tomorrow, emergency management officials say it will be quite some time before residents of the flooded area will be able to return home. For National Public Radio, I'm Jim Dryden in St. Louis."

As President Reagan gets ready for this weekend's meeting with Soviet leader Gorbachev, commentator Cal Thomas thinks that House Democrats are depriving the President of the most important thing he could take to Iceland—a clear control over US foreign policy.
House majority leader Jim Wright isn't even Speaker of the House yet, and already he is acting as if he were President. Wright has offered President Reagan a deal. He says he and House Democrats will delay a showdown with the White House over arms control until next year if the President will agree to terms for future consideration of constraints on strategic weapons and other House arms control strategies. These would include abiding by weapons limits in the unratified SALT II Treaty, which the Soviets have repeatedly violated. This type of behavior on the eve of a meeting in Iceland between the President and Mikhail Gorbachev would be unseemly enough for any member of Congress. But for major Democratic leader it is unconscionable. Why should Gorbachev feel any need to negotiate with the President if House Democrats led by Jim Wright are doing his job for him? Gorbachev, of course, is under no such pressure since members of the Politburo in one-party Russia compete only for the privilege of being the loudest ratifier of Gorbachev policies. Wright, who was a co-signer of a 1984 "Dear Commandant" letter to Nicaragua's Marxist dictator Daniel Ortega, in which, among other things, he deplored his own country's policies against the Central American nation, apparently believes that cutting a deal with the Soviets in which we all will live in a safer world is like a mating game. One must make the right moves before the other party shows any interest. The Soviets are pressing ahead on all fronts, offensive and defensive weapons and laser technology, even while they denounce the United States for conducting research on its own strategic defense initiative. Will they be impressed by the good will Congressman Wright thinks he is displaying by trying to tie the President's hands before Iceland? Hardly. Gorbachev will try to tie the President's feet as well. The history of this country before the Vietnam War was that the President of the United States set American foreign policy. The Congress advised and debated, but in the end it was the President who prevailed if differences arose. Now it is the Congress that is making foreign policy: on South Africa, on Central America, and, on the most dangerous level of all, with our chief adversary, the Soviet Union. There is no room for mistakes in dealing with the Soviets, but Jim Wright and the House Democrats are making them. Gorbachev will arrive in Reykjavik well rested, knowing that much of his work will have already been done for him by Jim Wright. No wonder he's bringing his wife. There will be plenty of spare time for socializing.
Cal Thomas is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.

The Superpower leaders left Iceland this weekend without moving their nations noticeably closer to peace. But at the same time another interaction between Americans and Soviet citizens was just getting started in the USSR. It is a meeting of Northern people, an Arctic attempt at understanding. From Anchorage, reporter Joanna Urick has more on the Alaska Performing Arts for Peace.
Before Leaving for the Soviet Union, sixty Alaskans from throughout the state gathered in a log cabin on a lake outside of Anchorage to rehearse.
"I see people from Moscow. I see people from Leningrad."
As John Pingyer, a Upic Eskimo reads his lines, he's thinking about an ancient Upic ceremony called "the Bladder Festival," in which people from different villages gather together. At the end of the week-long rituals they take the bladders from seals their hunters have taken during the past year and inflate them so they'll float. Then they return the seal bladders to the ocean.
"There's a lot of symbolism behind the ceremony. And one of the strongest symbolism that we're using in this Bladder Festival is ... togetherness of people, as one part of one big village or a community, and then we use it to portray the closeness of people, which is the peace."
The Bladder Festival forms the dramatic framework for a show involving more than sixty people from Alaska. The Alaska Performing Arts for Peace will take their show through a succession of cities, towns and villages in the Soviet Union, culminating in the reunification of Siberian Upic Eskimos, people who have lived along the coast of the Bering Sea, until the Cold War moving freely back and forth between the continents. At times, they can see one another hunting on the ice, but actual contact has been forbidden since the coming of military installations following World War II. The Alaska villages of Wonga on St. Lawrence Island is actually closer to Siberia than to the US mainland. Seventy-year-old Aura Gologrogin, who accompanies the Wonga comedy players on the tour, remembers the last time she visited friends and relatives on the Siberian coast. She's looking forward to meeting them again.
"Yeh, it is like a big family reunion. I was thinking if I could meet some of the people that I know long time ago, since I have been there when I was younger. In 1940 I go over and stay there for nine days and they were so nice people. And I want to meet them again."
This tour is not just an Eskimo reunion. Along with some thirty Eskimos are chorus, cloggers, fiddlers and black gospel singers.
"Each culture has something unique to offer, and that's what we have here. Each culture has something unique to offer, and that uniqueness will be pulled together as one. And that one body is what we are sharing with the Soviet Union."
Shirley Staten is one of five gospel singers from Anchorage looking forward to another reunion with the small group of Russians, descendants of Black Americans who emigrated to Moscow during the Depression.
"And we're going to sit around and sing gospel music, and I am just ... I mean that's the highlight of the trip."
"We are going to sing in chorus. Then we can start together in Russian. It seems like that's the way it's going to work."
Organizer Digby Belger says it's taken two difficult years to make the tour of the Alaska Performing Artists for Peace a reality. And in that time, there have been dramatic ups and downs in US-Soviet relations.
"In some way, this might be a nice time to go. And you know, if ... I really feel that the more tension between us, the more that we really need to communicate. And people to people exchange is a very good way to do that."
The Alaska Performing Artists for Peace's month-long tour will take them from Moscow in the west to the Chukchi Peninsula in the east coast of Siberia. They'll return to the United States November 2nd. In Anchorage, this is Joanna Urich.

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