Datelines
al., Thomas J. Long et.
Arafat's Last Stand? OCCUPIED WEST BANK The Arab taxi driver spins the cab around just before reaching an orange van parked along the road that borders the De-heishe refugee camp near Bethlehem....
...His followers harass camp residents, and he passes out leaflets to Palestinian schoolchildren asking them to "please leave" the disputed Biblical land...
...Days before the November meeting of the Palestine National Council, Israel reiterated its control of the West Bank...
...he had come to the city to buy a suit for his wedding the next day...
...And in Ramallah, a twenty-one-year-old laborer was killed when soldiers fired on a march protesting the meeting...
...We knew the hospital inside and out...
...Bruce E. Johansen (Bruce E. Johansen is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Nebraska at Omaha...
...The issues remain as pressing as always, according to Chambers: "There are still hungry that are still hungry...
...Brooks Egerton (Brooks Egerton is a free-lance writer in Madison, Wisconsin...
...Since 1970, Chambers has represented Nebraska's eleventh district in the state's one-house legislature...
...As one doctor who treated Klein said, "If he had taken aspirin, he might have thrown it up...
...The Tylenol, aggravated by alcohol, destroyed his liver before he knew what hit him...
...Even with the devil himself...
...With the skill of a ward boss, he lined up enough supporters to pull together a quorum despite strong opposition from his critics, many of whom boycotted the gathering...
...The Nebraska press has had a hard time coming to terms with Chambers, whose home-district office is his north-side barbershop...
...So what can they criticize me for...
...He led the fight for legislation that prohibited the state from cutting off financial aid to injured college athletes, many of whom were black...
...Okay, I am already burning...
...Opening fire on a Bir Zeit University demonstration supporting the Council meeting, Israeli soldiers killed one student and wounded eight others...
...We had the groundwork laid," says Brown...
...The list reads like a Who's Who of corporate investment—from Abbott Laboratories and Amax to Union Carbide and Warner Lambert...
...And Arafat has no military option left...
...If the people in America and Europe need a meeting in Amman to begin thinking about our human rights, we don't need them," says Bassam Sha'ka, former mayor of Nablus who lost his legs in a Jewish terrorist bombing in 1980 and was later dismissed from his elected office by Israeli authorities...
...Unfortunately," he adds, "it's probably going to take more deaths" before measures are taken to protect consumers...
...Last year, he almost singlehandedly pushed through the legislature a law substantially curbing state investment in South Africa...
...The week-long Palestine National Council meeting in Amman has just ended, with Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat and his followers reveling in a political victory but offering little in the way of hope to the refugees here...
...After the 1984 Democratic National Convention, for instance, he accused Jesse Jackson of pandering to "the applause and approval of racists, Jews, Uncle Toms, and Aunt Jemimas...
...Still, the amount of Tylenol Klein took is significantly short of the amount generally thought to be toxic...
...So he started popping Extra-Strength Tylenol as if it were aspirin—two or three tablets at a time for a total of fifteen in twenty-four hours...
...Arafat scored a coup in convening the conference at all...
...Since Tylenol is marketed as an aspirin alternative, many consumers use it in comparable doses...
...In the early days, he was called "a civil-rights activist" and "a militant Negro barber...
...People are really psyched up...
...Chronic alcoholics are notoriously unreliable informants," Kniffin says...
...Hospital Workers Find a Cure SEATTLE When Swedish Hospital Medical Center here erected a huge symbolic crane over the hospital's maternity ward to celebrate its seventy-fifth anniversary last year, the workers at the hospital were not amused...
...Klein, an alcoholic in his mid-thirties, died in less than a week...
...Employees were asking how much the stork cost and why the hospital could not pay more in wages," says Laurie Brown, chief union organizer for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) at the medical center...
...The fifteen tablets Klein said he ingested are almost double the recommended maximum dose posted on Tylenol packages...
...Two years later, the voters of the state's only substantial black district elected Chambers to represent them...
...He wears his hair in braids...
...But many in the occupied territories denounce Arafat and the Amman meeting...
...his painful pancreatic condition had flared up...
...I feel that having labored as hard as I have and as long as I have in the state of Nebraska has been all but a waste of time...
...On this cold, wet afternoon, Hassan, an eighteen-year-old Arab who operates an egg stand in one of the stone buildings on the outskirts of the camp, invites a visitor to sit for tea...
...The land is for the Israelis, the goods are for the Israelis, Jerusalem is for the Israelis," says Hassan...
...Chambers resents such treatment...
...Begrudgingly, he acknowledges Levinger's presence a hundred yards away-one more nuisance to which he has grown accustomed during an entire life spent under occupation...
...The only black senator in this predominantly rural, white state, Chambers is not a typical politician...
...But others have given up on armed struggle...
...Visible signs of overdose don't appear until three or four days after ingestion, when liver damage is already irreversible...
...The company says it is unaware that any alcoholics have died after taking Tylenol, except in cases of "acute overdoses...
...But this time, the union had more success...
...He was instrumental in changing election laws in Omaha so that the city council was elected by districts rather than at-large, a reform that made it possible to elect a black city council member for the first time...
...There are unemployed still without jobs...
...Amidst the armed soldiers guarding the van is Rabbi Moshe Levinger, who has stationed himself here for several weeks...
...The Amman meeting of the Palestine National Council had been billed as Arafat's last stand...
...What we got...
...Chambers opposed this loophole, and says he may try to close it in an upcoming session...
...These days, he's known as "the legislator in a muscle shirt...
...The perils of mixing the two drugs are unknown to the general public, though researchers have been documenting deaths similar to Klein's for years...
...Sha'ka and fellow ousted mayor Ibrahim Tawil of Al Bi-reh argue for continuing to struggle until Israel is forced-through military, economic, or political pressure—to withdraw...
...He might have had stomach pain" that could have alerted him to the seriousness of the overdose...
...The growing rift within the PLO ranks had threatened to accomplish the one job that Israel could not: to send him forever into political obscurity...
...Chambers has also fought to outlaw the death penalty in Nebraska, and lately he has spoken of the need for collaboration between the urban and rural poor...
...Patients should probably be warned that the co-administration of alcohol and acetaminophen, at least in high therapeutic doses, may be harmful...
...That was 1968...
...Thomas J. Long (Thomas J. Long is a free-lance writer in Bloomington, Illinois...
...It marks the first major health-care unit organized in Seattle in more than five years...
...Even some of his opponents at Amman acknowledged that he remains important as the most visible symbol of Palestinian nationalism...
...As passed, the law allows the state to retain investments in a few companies that adhere to the so-called Sullivan Principles, which call for raising the living standards of South African blacks employed by U.S...
...Despite his accomplishments, Chambers looks back on his record with a jaundiced eye...
...Roger A. Yockey (Roger A. Yockey is a free-lance writer in Woodinville, Washington...
...Nebraska is one of five states that have restricted investment in companies that do business in South Africa...
...Following the win at Swedish Hospital, other area hospital employees have approached the union in hopes of making inroads at their own workplaces...
...The workers at Swedish Hospital were being paid at rates 50 cents to $2.00 an hour lower than at other area hospitals...
...The poor wages, coupled with a careful organizing drive, have brought a union to Swedish Hospital, the largest hospital in the Pacific Northwest, with 1,000 workers in the bargaining unit out of a workforce of3,000...
...Workers "got fed up and said 'go for it,'" comments Alex Hinible, fifty-four, a custodial employee with four years' experience at the hospital...
...Extra Strength, Extra Hazard MADISON, WISCONSIN After a weekend drinking binge in November, Robert Klein (a pseudonym) had more than a hangover...
...Tylenol is more likely to cause death than just about any drug in your medicine cabinet," says Dr...
...Mark Katz, associate director of emergency services at Madison General Hospital...
...I don't lie or cheat or flash," he told Steven Stin-gley of the Omaha World Herald last year...
...Witnesses who knew the second victim said he was not even involved in the demonstration...
...ten years later, he led black community protests against police brutality on Omaha's near north side...
...Rain pours through the corrugated metal roof onto the chicken coops...
...The South African investment legislation Chambers championed has induced the state to sell $14.6 million of stock in companies that invested in South Africa...
...Nothing is substantially better for my having passed this way...
...And when Jackson tried to distance himself from Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan's anti-Semitic remarks, Chambers wrote Farrakhan that Jackson had "run back to the cotton patch and started picking cotton with a happy song on his grinning lips...
...Those delegates his organizers could not persuade to attend were merely replaced...
...The divestiture legislation was the latest in a series of battles Chambers has waged for Nebraska's blacks, who account for 2 per cent of the state's population...
...He is known as the Palestinian leader who has failed to liberate a single inch of Palestine and has been twice routed from Lebanon—first by the 1982 Israeli invasion, then by PLO mutineers supported by Syrian President Hafez el-Hassad...
...He wears sweat shirts...
...Like his mentor Malcolm X, Chambers can stir up animosity with his words...
...The Maverick in Lincoln OMAHA Ernest Chambers's father, a minister, was run out of Omaha by the Ku Klux Klan for preaching racial equality...
...They forgot that the people here should be the end—and that should never be forgotten...
...After eighteen years, we are used to this...
...McNeil Pharmaceutical, a subsidiary of Johnson and Johnson, manufactures Tylenol...
...It was an easy, and apparently fatal, mistake...
...Most overdoses with drugs like Tylenol, which are generally thought not to be lethal, come in people who are looking for attention," Katz says...
...Deheishe camp...
...How can you fight Israel from Tunis...
...corporations...
...He doesn't smile enough...
...Ironically, Tylenol's invisibility makes it popular with drinkers, who know how aspirin can cause an upset stomach or bleeding but are ignorant of Tylenol's effect on the liver...
...There aren't warning labels on liquor bottles," says Bob Kniffin, a spokesman for Johnson and Johnson...
...The SEIU had previously tried to organize Swedish Hospital, most recently in 1981...
...The New York City Employees' Retirement System also has voted to sell its stock in companies with operations in South Africa, a move that could involve the sale of up to $665 million worth of securities...
...By the end of the meeting, Arafat had bought himself some more time...
...When young blacks passed out circulars calling police officers racists, the police charged them with criminal libel and illegal leafleting...
...It's just the occupation," said a man drinking coffee at the Ramallah Club...
...to ensure his own survival and continue his fifteen-year tenure, he had no other choice...
...The Nebraska Investment Council also has compiled a list of ninety-five multinational firms in which the state may not invest...
...The problem with Tylenol, says Katz, is "already well-known in the medical community...
...Arrest me," Chambers said, handing copies of the leaflet to city officials, including the mayor...
...Katz, who reports seeing about one Tylenol overdose a week, thinks it is time to make the drug available only by prescription...
...He doesn't go to church...
...Johnson and Johnson disputes Klein's account...
...Born in the same neighborhood as Malcolm X, Chambers began to read about the Muslims in the late 1950s...
...They offered nothing to us living under occupation," says Sa'ed Erakat, a West Bank political scientist...
...Should we set ourselves on fire like the Indians to show them we are suffering...
...They've taken the overdose and had time to regret it, only to suffer liver failure...
...What makes it so deadly is its "silent toxicity," Katz explains...
...the others are Massachusetts, Michigan, Maryland, and Connecticut...
...It also rejects suggestions that it print warnings about alcohol use on Tylenol containers...
...The problem is that the PLO itself and the leaders became the end rather than the means...
...The Journal of the American Medical Association noted in 1980 that there is "convincing evidence that acetaminophen [Tylenol's generic name] may not always be as safe as it seems...
...My impact has not been that great," he says...
...I feel good about the union," says Linda Kleinschmidt, twenty-six, a nursing unit secretary for three-and-a-half years...
...asked an Arafat critic on the West Bank...
...We did our homework...
...What we need is to make peace, any peace," says one Arab shopkeeper in the Old City of Jerusalem...
...They can't see this...
Vol. 49 • February 1985 • No. 2
