OVERHEARD

"If this would make our nation, America, more safe, it would be OK. But it doesn’t look like it. It sounds like the Pakistani community is being targeted unfairly."

Shaukat Sindhu, president of the Chicago-based Pakistani American Association of North America, at a news conference denouncing the requirement that young Pakistanis who are not permanent residents register with the INS by Feb. 21 or be deported.

NEW AMERICAN

Released Chinese Activist Enjoying Freedom

A pro-democracy activist who spent four years in a Chinese jail is enjoying his new freedom in the United States and plans to live “one day at a time,” his daughter said.

Xu Wenli, 59, spent Christmas day catching up with his family and sleeping off jet lag after arriving in New York, said his daughter, Xu Jin, who lives in Pawtucket, R.I., and teaches at an area private school.

American human rights activists say he is the first person convicted of endangering state security to be released early from prison. The charge has been used against leading Chinese dissidents.

“It’s overwhelmingly joyful,” the daughter said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “There are just a lot of emotions, and it’s going to be hard. To start your life all over — that’s tough, but we’ll get through.”

Xu was jailed after trying to set up the opposition China Democracy Party with other activists. The communist government quickly crushed the party and sent dozens of members to prison, sentencing Xu to 13 years.

He was freed Tuesday after intense lobbying by Clark Randt, the American ambassador to Beijing, and repeated requests for his freedom by U.S. legislators visiting China.

The release came a week after U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Lorne Craner said he had appealed to Chinese officials in human rights talks in Beijing to free Xu.

Xu and his wife, He Xintong, flew from Beijing to Chicago, where they met with 30-year-old daughter Xu Jin. The family then flew to New York City.

“It’s nice to be a free man, to be with my wife and daughter,” Xu said after touching down at New York’s LaGuardia International Airport. “Because of them I am free.”

Xu, who suffers from hepatitis B, was granted medical parole by the Chinese government.

China has rid itself of other prominent political prisoners by paroling them on health grounds — usually on the condition that they go into exile, most often in the United States, where they lose their political influence in China.

He was also arrested in 1979 for advocating greater political freedom during the Democracy Wall movement. He was imprisoned from 1982 to 1993 on charges of being counterrevolutionary.

Xu Jin said her father had not yet determined what he would do in the United States.

“I think we’ll just go around to see friends, and enjoy vacation, and then go on to a new life,” she said.

— The Associated Press

WAR ON TERROR

International Students Stay at School During Breaks

Many international students are spending their holiday breaks on campus because they fear they won’t be able to return to the United States if they go home.

Tim Huff, manager of Oklahoma State University’s international students and scholars, told students from primarily Arab and Middle Eastern countries to avoid leaving the country during the holiday break except for family emergencies.

“Our recommendation is not to travel home over the Christmas break,” he said. “It’s a different world than what we’ve seen in the past.”

Huff said he has been advised that visa processing in some embassies could take three weeks or longer. Any delay of international students in coming back to school could affect their grades and threaten their student visa status in the United States.

OSU has a high percentage of international students — about 10 percent, compared to the national average of 3 to 4 percent.

The university’s international student population includes 2,135 international students from 122 countries.

While many of his friends and colleagues went home for the holidays, graduate student Kashif Khan, a Pakistani national, worked at the OSU library on the Stillwater campus.

He worried that if he left, U.S. immigration officials might not let him return to Stillwater, where he has been a computer science student for 2-1/2 years. The same fear kept him here over the summer and caused him to miss his sister’s wedding.

Next month, Khan will be photographed and fingerprinted as part of the government’s new anti-terrorism program. Non-immigrant men from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are the latest to be called up.

The registration, ordered by the U.S. Justice Department, requires males 16 and older, primarily from Arab and Middle Eastern countries, who arrived in the United States before Oct. 1 to be photographed, interviewed and fingerprinted.

Khan must register with the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Oklahoma City in the third “call-in,” the most recent, along with other Pakistanis and citizens from Saudi Arabia, between Jan. 13 and Feb. 21.

Officials will not say how many have registered in the Oklahoma City INS office since the first phase of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System was implemented Sept. 11.

Nor will officials say whether anyone in Oklahoma has been detained or arrested.

The process is not expected to last more than an hour.

Khan, a 26-year-old student from Lahore, Pakistan, said he understands that the United States must be cautious “since most of the problems are coming from Muslim countries,” but it still leaves him uneasy.

“I am so embarrassed,” Khan said. “It is very upsetting. It makes me feel not very good.”

His parents have cautioned him not to come home until he receives his degree.

“My future is more important,” he said. “I have to finish my studies over here.”

— A.P.

CHINATOWN NYC

WTC Dust Less Toxic Than Thought

Scientists say the thick layer of irritating dust that blanketed lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks probably will not cause alarming increases in cancer, emphysema and other serious long-term health problems.

An analysis found that most of the potentially toxic dust particles collected in the week after the attacks were too large to lodge deep in people’s lungs. Only 1 percent of the dust samples were composed of finer particles, researchers said.

In addition, the chemical composition of the dust appears less toxic than originally feared.

Many lower Manhattan residents and rescue workers at ground zero have reported continuing respiratory problems. The dust from the collapsed World Trade Center towers was largely a combination of pulverized glass and concrete, among other materials, that can be extremely alkaline and irritating.

Scientists said the dust particles were large enough that people probably coughed them out of their upper airways. But the study did not directly test whether people had deeply inhaled any of the dust.

“In terms of potential lifetime exposures, we’re probably going to be very lucky, in that these may not be exposures of significant health risk,” said Paul Lioy, one of the authors of the report. Lioy is associate director of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, jointly run by Rutgers University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.

The team estimated that the dust contained 100 to 1,000 tons of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a group of compounds including some that are classified by the Environmental Protection Agency as probable human carcinogens.

The report will be published in the February issue of Environmental Science & Technology. A summary of the article appears on the website of the American Chemical Society, which publishes the journal.

The director of the Environmental Research Foundation, a New Jersey-based public interest group, said there were still enough toxic particles to cause concern.

“One percent of a million tons is 10,000 tons,” Peter Montague told The New York Times. “So you’ve got 10,000 tons of fine particles. That’s a lot.”

— By Joseph B. Verrengia, A.P.