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The Battalion
II
/oh 82 No. 23 CISPS 045360 16 pages
College Station, Texas
Friday, October>lf 1985
Vietnamese
nay agree
o MIA hunt
Associated Press
URITED NATIONS — In what
ould be a major breakthrough in
ie search for Americans missing in
ction, a top-ranking Vietnamese
Cabinet minister says his govern-
aent is agreeable in principle to al-
iwit)g U.S. excavation teams into
he Hanoi area for the first time.
Otlicr official American and Viet-
lamese sources said Vietnam has
igreed to a U.S. proposal that the
:oumries carry out a joint survey
mdexcavation of a crash site near
Hanoi as an experiment.
The sources said the date and
)thei details of the excavation have
^et to be worked out.
Vo Dong Giang, a Cabinet min-
steif without portfolio and the sec-
indlranking official in the Foreign
Ministry, told The Associated Press
Wednesday that with regard to joint
excavations: “In principle we are
Hkable except in the crash sites
where our security cannot permit
foreigners to have access.”
A U.S. State Department official
in iWashington confirmed that
AHnican officials have discussed
Hjoint excavation of sites with a
Vietnamese delegation led by Giang.
The State Department official
said i he Vietnamese had expressed
their agreement in principle to the
pitoosal at meetings in Hanoi Aug.
28-29 and in New York Sept. 27 with
Richard Childress, the National Se
curity Councils’s political and mili
tary affairs director.
Hie said that since both sides had
agreed to speed up the search, the
U.S. passecl on to the Vietnamese
“many more cases” at the Hanoi
meeting.
jTjhe first official U.S. excavation
iit Communist territory was carried
out last February in southern Laos at
the site where a C-130 transport was
shutdown in December 1972.
American excavation teams have
never ventured into North Vietnam.
In his interview with the AP,
Giang disclosed for the first time de
tails of Vietnam’s three-part plan de
signed to settle the MIA issue within
two years:
Photo by ANTHONY S. CASPER
Chemists In Action
As part of the research being done for the Office of.the State
Chemist, Larry Whitlock (left) and Bob Rumberg create a mini
dust storm while grinding corn feed. 1 he resulting cortfmeal will
be tested for minerals, proteins, antibiotics and fungus.
PLO hijacker’s plane
forced down by U.S.
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — American
F14 warplanes intercepted an Egyp
tian aircraft carrying four Palestin
ian hijackers, forcing the plane to
land Thursday night at a NATO
base in Sicily where the gunman
were taken into Italian custody,
according to White House spokes
man.
“. . . it should send a message and
a strong one, that we will do what is
necessary to apprehend those who
are involved in terrorism,” Larry
Speakes said. “We will do it again, if
the opportunity presents itself?’
He said that “in a matter of hours”
the United States would “pursue
prompt extradition” so prosecution
could be undertaken for the murder
of 69-year-old American tourist
Leon Klinghoffer. Italian authorities
have expressed their own plans for
prosecuting the men.
“This operation was conducted
without firing a shot,” Speakes told
reporters. He said the four Palestin
ians, who hijacked the Italian luxury
cruise ship Achille Lauro on Mon
day, were in Italian custody “for ap
propriate legal proceedings.”
Asked what the Palestinians said
as they were taken from the plane,
Speakes said, “I judge they probably
had an expletive or two.”
In a midnight briefing. Secretary
of Defense Caspar Weinberger told
reporters: “On the plane were the
four terrorists, two other Palestin
ians and four Egyptians and the
crew of the plane.
He said that if an Italian investiga
tion shows the two other Palestinians
were implicated in the hijacking,
“than our extradition request will be
extended to them.”
The F-14 jets blasted off from the
Saratoga, and intercepted the Egyp
tian Boeing 737 aircraft on its way
from Cairo to Tunisia, Speakes said.
During the flight, the Tunisian
government — apparently heeding a
U.S. request to deny the hijackers
sanctuary — refused the Egyptian
plane permission to land in that
North African country, U.S. admin
istration sources in Washington said.
An Italian government statement
said President Reagan had asked
Craxi to let the plane land in Sicily,
and Craxi agreed, the Italian news
agency ANSA reported. Craxi’s
spokesman confirmed to the AP that
the premier received a call from the
White House, but did not know what
was said.
“The aircraft landed with Italian
consent and was surrounded by
American and Italian troops,”
Speakes said. Sources in Washington
said the U.S. troops included Navy
SEALS, a specially-trained combat
unit.
The airliner touched down at Sici
ly’s Sigonella airport, a NATO base
near Catania, at 12:30 a.m. (7:30
p.m. Thursday EDT), said Craxi’s
spokesman.
"The (Egyptian) plane will leave
for Egypt, but the terrorists will stay
here to be tried here,” said the offi- -
cial, speaking on condition of ano
nymity.
Speakes said the U.S. government
would “pursue prompt extradition,”^
so that the four Palestinians could be
tried in the United States.
Senate agrees to raise
government debt limit
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — After end
ing eight days of wrangling over a
balanced budget plan, the Senate
agreed to raise the national debt
limit to more than $2 trillion
Thursday night.
By 51-37, the Senate voted to
increase the government’s line of
credit from its current $ 1.824 tril
lion to $2,078 trillion, enough to
meet the government’s borrow
ing needs for the next y'eari
The action came after the Sen
ate completed several revisions to
the balanced budget plan that was
attached to the debt limit legis
lation on Wednesday.
The House, in effect, agreed to
the debt limit increase when it
passed a budget blueprint on
Aug. 1, but the addition of the
budget plan in the Senate will re
quire further action.
The Senate has been tied up
since last week on the debt and
budget issues, which forced an
extraordinary weekend session,
prompted hard feelings between
Republicans and Democrats and
between the Republican lead
ership and the Treasury Depart
ment.
Earlier Thursday, Senate Ma
jority Leader Robert Dole angrily
accused the Treasury Depart
ment of undermining efforts to
pass the balanced-budget plan
and displaying “no guts” with an
emergency $5 billion auction that
eased the government’s credit cri
sis.
“What they’ve done is give the
House plenty of time to try and
kill the package,” the Kansas Re
publican said before the Senate
went back to work on fine-tuning
the measure.
Air Force declassifies 2 main shuttle payloads
• The Vietnamese will do the ma
jor part of the searches.
• In cases where it is extremely
difficult to reach crash sites such as
those in deep water or in an abyss
where cranes and other heavy equip
ment would be needed, Hanoi
would ask the U.S. for help.
; • Giang said his government was
agreeable tojoint excavations.
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The Air
Force on Thursday declassified the
two primary payloads that the space
shuttle will carry on its first mission
from the West Coast next year. One
is designed to track cruise missiles;
the other is to be, eventually, a detec
tor for ballistic missiles.
It has been a badly kept secret that
A&M bids for brightest
of America’s students
I
By CYNTHIA GAY
Staff Writer
■ The stakes are high and the com-
( petition is keen when Texas A&M
I bids for America’s brightest from
: the nation’s pool of high school stu-
f dents,
H “We recruit national merit schol
ars and other outstanding students,”
I said Dr. Lawrence Cress, assistant
provost of the University Honors
Program.
p: In the spring of their junior year,
students who score over 1250 on the
SAT and are in the top 10 percent of
f their class are mailed letters con
taining A&M scholarship informa-
t don, Cress said. Four thousand
l|rexas students and 2,000 out-of-
| State students received letters this
year, Cress said, in the largest mail-
out in the program’s history,
il “We reach out to every student in
ffexas with an outstanding academic
record,” Cress said.
I When looking beyond the Texas
Borders, A&M’s honors program
liakes a random sample of students
with high PSAT and SAT scores,
gtiainly from Louisiana, New Mex
ico, New York and California, Cress
Said. Maryland and Virginia stu
dents are also considered, he said,
“because many of their parents are in
the military, and the transition to a
Texas school would be made more
Basily.
A&M has received national pub
licity from its national merit schol
ars, which now stands at approxi
mately 625 students. For Dr. Cress,
all the hullabaloo has resulted in in
terviews with such major newspa
pers as the New' York T imes, USA
Today and many metropolitan
newspapers in Texas.
“We have doubled the number of
national merit scholars from out of
state in the last two years,” he said.
“It’s important to get the good
students (national merit), but there
are other good students who are not
national merit scholars,” Cress said.
The honors program offers three
academic scholarships: the Presi
dential Endowed Scholarship, the
Lechner Fellowship and the McFad-
den Scholarship. While the Presi
dential Endowed Scholarship comes
from a $25,000 endowment usually
given by former students, and pays
the student $2,500 per year, the
Lechner and McFadden award stu
dents between $1,000 and $2,000
each year. Cress said all three four-
year scholarships guarantee a dorm
room.
After students mail A&M their
scholarship applications. Cress said
honors program officials cut down
the potential scholar number to
about 600. Out of the 600 students
awarded a scholarship, 300 accept,
he said See Honor, Page 16
the inaugural flight from Vanden-
berg Air Force Base in California
next March 20 will carry an infra
red space surveillance experiment
called “Teal Ruby,” and another in
fra-red sensor called “Cirris.”
Major Ron Rand, an Air Force
spokesman, said that “since Teal
Ruby and Cirris are experimental
rather than operational, we deter
mined that disclosure of their identi
ties and mission would have a negli
gible effect on national security.”
An earlier version of the Cirris,
which is a sensor to collect data on
the Earth atmosphere, was flown on
the fourth mission of the space shut
tle in June 1982. It failed, appar
ently because a telescope cover
didn’t open.
Teal Ruby and three other experi
ments will be aboard a satellite that is
to be released from the shuttle cargo
bay. Cirris is one of six experiments
mounted on a shuttle pallet that will
be exposed to space during flight,
then brought bacK. to Earth.
Teal Ruby is described as a “star
ing mosaic array” — detector that
concentrates on a specific area of the
Earth. The detectors sense infra-red
energy, which is then transformed to
an image.
The device is able to swivel, en
abling the sensor to focus on a point
while the satellite orbits. After a de
tection attempt, Teal Ruby’s tele
scope can be stowed in the satellite.
Policy at Beutel 'discriminator/
Students discuss health policy
By LAURIE MATUSEK
Reporter
“This is not an issue of birth
control or sex on campus, but an
issue of discrimination,” says Ann
Robbins, a senior psychology ma
jor at Texas A&M.
Robbins and other A&M stu
dents gathered at Rudder Foun
tain Thursday to discuss the dis
continuation of physical exams
and birth control prescriptions at
the A.P. Beutel Health Center.
Full gynecological care was elimi
nated at the health center Sept. 1.
Although Robbins says this is
an issue of discrimination, Dr.
Claude Goswick, director of the
health center, said previously that
the health center does not want to
discriminate against women, but
it is understaffed and over
worked.
Robbins began discussion of
this move at the open forum
sponsored by Memorial Student
Center’s Great Issues committee.
“There are two traditions (at
A&M) that need to be put to an
end: student apathy and discrimi
nation against women,” Robbins
says.
Patrick Zinn, a senior modern
languages major, says that men
Ann Robbins
should be concerned about this is
sue also.
“This is a people’s issue, one of
discrimination and one of aware
ness,” Zinn says.
Katie Cokinos, z. senior history
and philosophy major, says, “I
want people to be aware — not to
sleepwalk.”
Cokinos is a member of a con
cerned group of students protest
ing the discontinuation. She says
the forum was an excellent way to
get the student body’s attention.
Awareness of the subject may
lead to some changes, she says.
See Policy, page 16
By TRENT LEOPOLD
Senior Staff Writer
The A.P. Beutel Health Center
will resume conducting gyneco
logical examinations and pre
scribing birth control Monday,
said Dr. John Koldus, vice presi
dent for student services Thurs
day.
Koldus announced this shortly
after the Memorial Student Cen
ter’s Great Issues open forum in
front of Rudder Tower.
Dr. Claude Goswick Jr., direc
tor of the health center, has hired
a female physician who will be in
charge of administering gyneco
logical exams and prescribing
birth control pills, he said.
She will start her practice here
Monday, Koldus said. He said the
forum had nothing to do with the
decision to hire the new physi
cian.
Goswick could not be reached
for comment Thursday, and
according to. an article in The
Houston Post Thursday, he could .
not be reached for comment
Wednesday either.
According to the same article, a
spokeman for Goswick said the
services were discontinued in part
because of budget constraints.
But Koldus said this was not the
case.
“There was some kind of mis
understanding about the budget
constraints,” Koldus said. “What
it amounts to is that he (Goswick)
just needed someone to fill two
positions at the center. There was
never a lack of money involved.”
“Hiring a female helps with
this particular problem,” Koldus
said.
Goswick told The Battalion
that another reason examinations
for birth control were not given
was because some doctors person
ally prefer not to give prescrip
tions for birth control.
The National Organization for
Women will distribute free litera
ture about birth control and free
condoms in the MSC today and
Monday.
Health Center will resume
prescribing birth control