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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 16, 1987)
i Texas mm M # The Battalion r ol. 82 No. 78 (JSPS 045360 10 pages College Station, Texas Wednesday, January 1987 College Station fireflgnters hose down a duplex that was damaged by afire luesday night. Lt. Terry Thigpin of the College Station Fire Flame-quenching Photo by Doug La Rue Department said no injuries resulted from the fire, which heavily damaged the duplex at 203 Fairview in College Station. 13th reporter is kidnapped in west Beirut BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) — Gun men on Tuesday kidnapped a French reporter covering Terry Waite’s mission to free American and other foreign hostages held in Lebanon. They pistol-whipped and shot at another French newsman who escaped. Police said eight men in two cars grabbed Roger Auque, 31, soon af ter he photographed Anglican Church envoy Waite taking a morn ing stroll along the seafront in Mos lem west Beirut. Auque is a free lance reporter-photographer for French, Canadian and Belgian radio stations and photo feature agencies. Paul Marchand, a French re porter accompanying Auque, fought off the men in west Beirut’s Raouche residential district at 9:40 a.m. and escaped, police said. Marchand told France’s Radio Monte Carlo, his employer, that the assailants shot at him as he fled. He said he will stay in west Beirut. “I can’t leave now,” a shaken Mar chand told the CBS television net work in an interview. “Roger is my friend.” No group claimed responsibility for Auque’s abduction. Auque was the 13th foreign jour nalist kidnapped in west Beirut since Moslem militias wrested control of the Moslem side of the capital from the army in bloody fighting Feb. 6, 1984. Seven have escaped or been released. Several different groups have claimed responsibility for the abductions. ran/on missile hits Baghdad; Iraq strikes back BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — A missile hit aghdad on Tuesday, and Iraqi warplanes aided Iranian cities and missile batteries in eply. Iran claimed to have broken out of a eachhead on the fifth day of its offensive, utlraq denied it. Iranian reports monitored in Cyprus said ae missile hit a trade center, but an Iraqi mili ary spokesman said it exploded in a heavily •opulated district, killing or wounding many raqis. Journalists were kept away, but wit- icsses said the missile narrowly missed the esidential district . Iraq said its air force raided Isfahan, Dezful nd the holy city of Qom in retaliation. All hree Iranian cities have been bombed three pays in a row. Reports from Iran’s official Islamic Repub lic News Agency quoted Tehran commu niques as saying Iranian forces broke through heavily fortified defenses on a six-mile front and advanced toward Iraq’s southern port city of Basra over 38 square miles they were able to “liberate.” The Iraqi high command said its troops, tanks and helicopter gunships “annihilated” Iranians who tried to push out of the beach head on Iraqi territory east of Basra. The an cient city is Iraq’s second largest. Communiques reported heavy fighting in the southern marshlands, which have been a frequent battlefield since the war began in September 1980. Both sides reported using warplanes, missiles and artillery Tuesday. Conflicting claims cannot be reconciled be cause neither side allows Western journalists into battle areas except on rare guided tours. At the United Nations in New York, Secre tary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar pro posed a meeting of foreign ministers of the 15 Security Council members. “Something dramatic has to be done,” he told a news conference. “Otherwise we can continue being the witness to a real massacre in the Middle East again with a chance of an expansion of the conflict.” Battles resulting from the Iranian offen sive, which began Friday with a thrust across the Shatt al-Arab border waterway and flooded marshlands west of it, appear to be the fiercest since Iran captured part of the Faw Peninsula in southern Iraq 11 months ago. Iraq’s reports indicated it had reinforced its 3rd and 7th Army Corps, which normally man the southern sector, with units from the 2nd Army Corps and the elite Presidential Guards. The Iranians said the breakout east of Basra began before dawn and overran what they called Iraq’s “Iron Fort” line, an elab orate network of earthworks, bunkers and minefields. A communique from the Ixaqi command said its men repulsed the “hopeless attempt to recover footholds” it said the Iranians had lost south of Fish Lake, an area flooded by the Iraqis in 1982 to stop Iranian advances. Iran also said it had seized the islands of Belganiya and Umm al-Tavila in the Shatt al- Arab. In Paris, France’s Foreign Min istry deplored the kidnapping and said in a statement it “intends to pur sue its efforts to reach a settlement of the entire hostage problem.” Waite met for 45 minutes behind closed doors Tuesday with Walid Jumblatt at Jumblatt’s west Beirut home. Jumblatt, head of the Druse militia and the Progressive Socialist Party, is Lebanon’s tourism and transport minister. Jumblatt pledged to do his best to help Waite to free hostages held by Shiite Moslem extremists. After meeting Jumblatt, Waite left for the Chouf mountains southeast of Beirut to meet Sheikh Moham med Abu Shakra, spiritual head of Lebanon’s 300,000-member Druse sect, a secretive offshoot of Islam. But Waite’s convoy was turned back before he got there. Jumblatt militia officials gave no explanation. Waite, in Beirut for the fifth time since November 1985, began his day with a 30-minute stroll along the Ein Mreisseh seaside boulevard where he drank a cup of Arabic coffee of fered by a vendor. After covering Waite’s stroll, Au que and Marchand drove to Auque’s apartment in nearby Raouche. Marchand told Radio Monte Carlo he was waiting for Auque to come down from the apartment when three gunmen drove up in a white car. One assailant toting an AK-47 as sault rifle tried to grab Marchand by the jacket, telling him in English: “Come with us.” Marchand said: “I was able to get loose. I saw Roger was still in the foyer . . . behind a locked gate ... I told him, ‘Stay, stay!’ ” He said the gunman “fired a shot at me and I saw then that Roger had come out of the building. I told him, ‘Run, run!’ Me, I took off. I heard gunshots.” Police said eight men in two cars were waiting for the Frenchmen. Officers said the assailants beat and pistol-whipped Marchand and the driver. They said Auque appar ently did not resist as he was bun dled him into a car and driven off. Seventeen foreigners are now missing in Lebanon after being kid napped: six Americans, six French men, two Britons, one Irishman, one Italian and one South Korean. University leaders pledging to work Legislature Worker charged with murder in hotel blaze .US'l'IN (AP) — The state has the wrong message about Texas ter education and needs to show nation it’s a top priority, college university leaders said Tuesday, leedngjust two hours before the islature convened, the university pis said they hoped to work I lawmakers during upcoming Iget negotiations. We are here today not to de ad more funding, but to pledge ivork with the Legislature,” said 'Temple, chairman of the state ge and University System Coor- ing Board and head of the Se- Committee on Higher Educa- emple told about 250 people ered for a higher education mit that the state undermined :ational institutions when the Legislature proposed cutting ling by 26 percent. We cannot afford to send out the tig kind of message to the coun- about the kind of priority we e on higher education,” Temple Temple said the threatened 26 :ent cut scared away prospective ulty, We care so much about creating ew economic base and reducing mployment that we cut the edu- on that would train the workers omorrow,” Temple said, wales Maden Jr., a member of the Ject committee, said at least 220 prospective educators declined of fers from Texas institutions last year. “The current practice of turning to employment of part-time faculty in order to meet shrinking budgets may produce short-term solutions, but it will create long-term prob lems,” Maden said. SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — A Dupont Plaza Hotel maintenance worker was arrested Tuesday and charged with 96 counts of murder for the New Year’s Eve fire at the posh hotel. Federal officials said early today that a second person had been ar rested in the case, but would not identify him or provide any further information. The maintenance worker, 35- year-old Hector Escudero Aponte, was an employee of the hotel for 10 years. According to charges filed in the U.S. District Court in this U.S. commonwealth, Escudero Aponte set the fire “‘in concert with and in agreement with others.” Justice Secretary Hector Rivera Cruz and Jerry Rudden, chief spokesman for the U.S. Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that joined the investigation, also said they did not believe Escudero Aponte had acted alone. One federal investigator, speak ing later on condition he not be identified, said, “I don’t have any of the particulars, but there has been a second arrest.” The New York Times said the sec ond suspect was taken into custody and was under detention Tuesday night. It quoted an unidentified fed eral official as saying the second de tainee provided material to set the fire and had blocked Escudero Aponte from public view while the blaze was set. The Timessaid the second suspect was a busboy at the hotel Court upholds state maternity leave rule States can mandate worker job protection WASHINGTON (AP) —States may require employers to give pregnant workers job protections not available to other employees, the Supreme Court ruled Tues day. T he court upheld a California law requiring employers to grant unpaid leaves of absence of up to four months to women whose pregancies leave them unable to work even if leaves are not granted for any other disability. Although the 6-3 decision was a major victory for working women, some feminist lawyers said the decision did not go far enough in promoting on-the-job equality. California’s pregnancy law had been challenged by the California Federal Savings and Loan Asso ciation and other employers whose leave policies did not meet the law’s requirement. The justices discounted argu ments by the employers that the law forces them to discriminate il legally against men and non-pre gnant women. The court concluded that the state law does not conflict with a 1978 federal law, the Pregnancy Disability Act, that bans discrimi nation based on pregnancy. “By taking pregnancy into ac count, California’s pregnancy dis ability leave statute allows women, as well as men, to have families without losing their jobs,” Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote for the court. Eight other states have similar laws. They are Connecticut, Ha waii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Montana, New Hampshire, Ohio and Washington. “Congress intended the (1978 law) to be a fioor beneath which pregnancy disability benefits may not drop — not a ceiling above which they may not rise,” Mar shall said. He was joined by Justices Wil liam J. Brennan, Harry A. Black- mun, John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O’Connor. Justice Antonin Scalia, in a separate opinion, agreed that the state and federal laws are not in conflict. Chief Justice William H. Rehn- quist and Justices Byron R. White and Lewis F. Powell dissented. In an opinion for the three. White said the 1978 law’s language “leaves no room for preferential treatment of pregnant workers.” “Congress intended employers to be free to provide any level of disability benefits they wished — or none at all — as long as preg nancy was not a factor in allocat ing such benefits,” White said. But Marshall said the Califor nia law does not mandate prefer ential treatment. He said tfcie law “does not com pel employers to treat pregnant workers better than ' other dis abled employees; it merely estab lishes benefits that employers must, at a minimum, provide to pregnant workers.” Marshall added, “Employers are free to give comparable bene fits to other disabled employees.” The dispute over California’s law arose when Lilian Garland, a receptionist at a California Fed eral Savings and Loan office in Los Angeles, began a pregnancy leave in early 1982. When she said she was ready to return to work three months later, she was told her job had been filled and no comparable job was available. Garland returned to work as a receptionist at the savings and loan association seven months later. The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing alleged that the savings and loan association had violated the state pregnancy disability law in deal ing with Garland, and that action led to the association’s challenge of the law. Cal Fed spokesman James Hurley said his organization was “surprised and disappointed” by Tuesday’s ruling. Eleanor Smeal, president of the National Organization for Women, said, “We’re very pleased . . . Women everywhere, I think, will benefit in the long run by the decision.” Other feminist leaders, how ever, voiced some.concern. “We are pleased to see that the pregnancy disability leave benefit has been preserved,” said Judith Lichtman, executive director of the Women’s Legal Defense Fund. “We are disappointed, however, that (the decision) didn’t go far enough, providing more universal benefits for all workers.” Isabelle Katz Pinzler, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s women’s rights project, portrayed the decision generally as a positive one for women. But when asked if any ill effect could come of it, Pinzler said, “I don’t know. I hope not. Time will tell whether employers try to defer hiring women (because of a perceived special benefit). We and many other groups would go after any employer that did that.” In other decisions, the court: • Ruled that its decision last year barring prosecutors from disqualifying potential jurors based on their race applies retro actively to perhaps hundreds of other convicted defendants.