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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 7, 1985)
Gramm will continue to fight FEC subpoena for records — Page 3 r School board members seek end to busing in Fort Worth — Page 4 ■■H Last minute negotiations fail; Baseball players' union strikes — Page 6 mmmm^ Texas asm — — •mm m The Battalion Serving the University community Vol. 80 No. 186 CISPS 045360 6 pages College Station, Texas utu stops potentially violent Associated Press ■ DAVEYTON, South Africa — Standing alone between white police and hundreds of angry young blacks Tuesday, Bishop Desmond T utu de mised an explosive confrontation Huring a funeral for a young girl in ithis black township. But violence continued elsewhere. I In the township of Brandfort, po lice fired rubber bullets and tear gas into the home of Winnie Mandela, pvite of the imprisoned leader of iSouth Africa’s outlawed African Na tional Congress. Seven gasoline bombs were found in the home, po lice said. Mandela was visiting Johannes burg at the time. Her lawyer, Ish- mail Ayob, reported that her 20- month-old grandchild had been in the house and could not immedi ately be found after the raid. Police said later that they had established that the child had not been in the house, but the lawyer couldn’t be reached for comment on that. A statement from police head quarters in Pretoria, the capital, said officers pursuing a crowd that had stoned police and hurled a fire bomb, attacked the Mandela home. Police said they arrested 19 men and 11 women who were in Mandela’s home. Police reported widespread un rest in townships near the Indian Ocean port of Durban, where a lead ing black woman civil rights lawyer was slain by unknown attackers on Thursday. In one incident, a black policeman fired on a crowd attack ing his home in Kwamashu township and shot to death one man, police said. In Daveyton, Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, persuaded a crowd of about 1,000 not to embark on a banned march to the graveside of a teen-age girl who had been killed by police. And he negotiated with police chiefs to provide buses for mourners to attend the burial. The diminutive black Anglican Runway at Rudder Cindy Hood, a mechanical engineering major, sits in the cockpit of a miniature F-16 fighter plane. The Air Force designed the plane for parades and recruiting drives like the one held at Rudder Tower Tuesday. Hood is participating in the Air Force College Senior En- Photo by SCOTT SUTHERLAND ginenng Program. As an incentive, the program helps seniors pay tu ition in exchange for a promise to serve after graduation. The minia ture plane won’t quite reach the speeds of the real thing, it’s powered by a lawn mower engine. Funeral directors argue over bodies Storm didn’t appear to faze pi lot Associated Press GRAPEVINE — The pilot of | Delta Air Lines Flight 191 appeared lunconcerned about a thunderstorm he passed through just before the ijumbo jet crashed short of a landing ;at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, a federal investigator said Tuesday. , “We’re in the rain; it feels good,” the pilot was heard to say on tapes from the cockpit voice recorder re covered from the demolished air craft, said Patrick Bursley, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board. Investigators have said they be lieved that wind shear, a violent blast of air from a thunderstorm, may have contributed to the crash. Bursley said the NTSB’s opera tions group would reconvene in At lanta next week to review Delta’s pi lot training program, which he said was routine. Investigators Tuesday continued examining recordings and wreckage as Dallas-area funeral home owners squabbled over division of the corpses from the crash. The investigator said the pilot was told to cut speed to 150 knots on his approach. Bursley said the order to cut speed was “not a crisis maneu ver” and was merely precautionary. A group of about 20 business owners charged racism and favor itism in the distribution of bodies to area funeral homes. “We’re not demanding anything,” said Nat Clark, a Dallas funeral home owner. “ We just Want our share. It’s greed on the part of a few owners, flat greed.” The group says the president of a mostly white funeral home associa tion deliberately left them off a list of homes authorized to prepare and transport the bodies of crash victims. Wednesday August 7, 1985 confrontation bishop argued with police. Dozens of army and police ar mored personnel carriers rolled into Daveyton, 40 miles from Johannes burg, early Tuesday. Troops ringed the township and blocked off nearly every main street leading to the dead girl’s home. Last week the white-minority gov ernment banned mass funerals, marches, and political speeches and banners. The new restrictions tight ened the state of emergency pro claimed July 21. An initial crowd of 150 gathered in a tattered tent near the home of 16-year-old Elizabeth Kumalo, shot to death by police along with two other girls and a young man after another victim’s funeral July 24. As mourners pressed round the wooden coffin. Tutu lived up to his pledge to ignore the ban on political preaching, and declared, “Know that God will lead us all out of this bondage and this land will be free!” Shuttle returns with treasure for researchers Associated Press Towards air force base, Calif. — Challenger sailed smoothly back to Earth on Tuesday, its seven astronauts bearing a scientific trea sure trove gathered during a voyage that began precariously but ended in triumph. The 100-ton shuttle streaked across the California coastline, passed over Los Angeles with win dow-rattling sonic booms, spiraled down to Edwards Air Force Base and landed in a cloud of dust on the Mojave Desert lake bed runway. Technicians stood by to remove the heat sensors from Challenger’s main rocket engines as soon as possi ble after landing. Jess Moore, NASA’s associate ad ministrator for spaceflight, said the sensors will be analyzed to deter mine if they were responsible, as be lieved, for the premature shutdown of a rocket engine during last Mon day’s launch, an event that created the shuttle’s first launch crisis. “We’ll be looking very hard at the sensors,” Moore said. “As we learn, we’ll phase it back into the program and try to avoid this sort of thing from happening.” Despite the problems, said Moore, Challenger’s mission “returned a wealth of information. “In fact,” he said, “this may be the most important scienific mission that the shuttle has flown.” Challenger’s $75 million array of 13 science instruments focused on the sun, the stars and on the Earth’s ionosphere to collect 1.25 trillion bits of data. The astronauts collected thou sands of photographs and 45 hours of video tape and filled 230 miles of data tape as they worked around the clock in two 12-hour shifts. The crew included five scientists — geophysicist Tony England, astro nomer Karl Henize, solar physicist Loran Acton, physician Story Mus- grave and astrophysicist John-David Bartoe. Helping Mission Com mander Gordon Fullerton fly the craft was pilot Roy Bridges. Engineers pinned the launch problem on the sensors rather than the engines themselves and National Aeronautics and Space Adminstra- tion officials were eager to verify that analysis, so. the shuttle Discovery can be launched Aug. 24 as planned. NASA is so confident that Chal lenger’s launch problem was caused by the sensors that Discovery was rolled out to the launch pad Monday night. Its engines are equipped with new, redesigned sensors. The mission’s collection of science data will give scientists unique views of the universe and may shape fun damental theories on its formation. A solar instrument measured he lium and hydrogen ratios on the sun. Scientists said the data could help prove some elements of the “big bang” theory, which proposes that the universe began with a mas sive explosion. Other solar instruments studied sunspots, the surface eruptions that can disrupt communications and electric power transmission on Earth. A free-flying satellite gathered data on the ionosphere, the radio wave-reflecting layer of the atmo sphere formed of charged particles, or plasma. Two telescopes studied distant star fields, gathering information in the infrared and x-ray spectrum. The infrared instrument also discov ered a cloud of heat radiation that seemed to follow Challenger around in orbit. IRS asked to help collect defaulted student loans Associated Press WASHINGTON — Faced with billions of dollars in defaults on student loans, the government said Tuesday it is resorting to “the ultimate trump card” to col lect— the Internal Revenue Serv ice. Education Secretary William J. Bennett said his department is asking the IRS to withhold tax re funds for 1 million defaulters on federal student loans unless they start paying their debts. Another 1 million borrowers will get notices from state agen cies warning that they will be den ied federal tax refunds next year unless they make good on their debts. “I think it’s going to be without a doubt the most successful thing we’ve ever done to recover de faulted loans,” said Richard Has tings, director of debt collection for the department. Department officials say for mer undergraduate and graduate students have defaulted on $3 bil lion in low-interest loans subsi dized by the federal government under the Guaranteed Student Loan program. Another $1.1 bil lion has been defaulted in the Na tional Direct Student Loan pro gram of low-interest loans to students through their schools. All those in default are now out of school, and while some may not be working, most are earning money and “basically are making economic decisions” not to repay the low-interest loans, Hastings said. Bennett said in a statement that notices will be mailed to those in default beginning this Saturday. Defaulters will have 60 days to begin repayment or to work out a plan for payment. Federal GSL default rate could go up By JERRY OSLIN Staff Writer The default rate for federally sponsored guaranteed student loans is a relatively low 4.4 percent but will probably get higher in the next five years, says Texas A&M’s assistant di rector of student financial aid. A1 Bormann, who has been with A&M’s financial aid office for 19 years, says the expected passing of a more restrictive loan policy by the federal government will force the default rate to go up. “There has been talk that the poli cies of the program will be changed by 1986-87 and if they are, it will be a more restrictive type of program,’ he says. “If the new loan qualifica tions are based on a strong, need- based system, then the lower-to-mid- dle income families are the main re cipients. If the student from these families can’t meet his obligation, then he will probably default be cause chances are his parents don’t have the resources either.” Bormann says the current na tional default rate is mainly the re sult of the generous loan policy dur ing the Carter administration. “The loans that are in payout right now are those people who re ceived their loans during the Carter administration,” he says. “At that time it was open ended and it didn’t make any difference as to what the family income was. A student would receive a government-subsidized student loan. “The low default figures you are seeing now is probably because the majority of the borrowers that are paying off their loans now are prob ably out of the middle to upper in come families. If the student can’t pay off the obligation, then mother and dad will because they have the liquidity.” Bormann says students from mid dle and upper income families ap plied for GSL’s so their families could keep their money in high-in- terest investments. “Some middle and upper income families would use GSL’s to pay for their kid’s school so they would not have to liquidate their CD’s or other investments,” he says. “They would let the commercial lender loan them the money at a low interest rate and then pay off the obligation when the student graduated. I think a lot of these obligations were paid off by middle and upper income families and not the student.” Bormann says the federal crack down on defaulted borrowers has contributed to the current low de fault rate, but the rate would go up despite that. “Regardless of the collection ef fort, you will probably see a rising default rate because the makeup of the clientele is different,” he says. He says the national default rate of 18 to 20 percent several years ago was a result of a loan policy that helped the very needy and excluded higher income families. Bormann says the government might decide to change GSL policy by basing its interest rate on the in terest the federal government offers on treasury bills. “Either the loan policy will be based completely on a needs test or they may decide to use a program similar to that in the health profes- ssions area,” he says, “where the in terest would be based on T-bill rates plus 3.5 percent added on.” The interest rate on T-bills was 21 percent several years ago, Bormann says. The current interest rate on GSL’s is 8 percent, he says. If the interst rate on GSL’s was tied to the T-bill rate, Bormann says, the total educational debt owed by graduating students would be enor mous. “With a 15 year payout on a loan of $13,000 at 12.5 percent, the pay back at the end of that 15 years would be $144,000,” he says. “So if you borrowed $50,000 to $60,000, you would end up paying almost half a million dollars in educational loans.” Bormann says he is especially con cerned with the cost of medical care in the future. “There are a lot of medical schools in the country, though Texas A&M isn’t one, where the students are graduating with $60,000 to $80,000 debts,” he says. “What if the average doctor owed $80,000 right out of medical school? The con sumer would end up paying for it. Your doctor bills and insurance bills and health care bills would be enor mous.