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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (April 24, 1987)
The Battalion .82 No. 143 GSRS 045360 14 pages College Station, Texas Friday, April 24, 1987 toreponia telemark: action on i 'HI not lx it ommittee confirms unding of Contras bvestigators trace over $1 million l IVASHINGTON (AP) — Con gressional investigators, relying on Swiss bank records and other ■terial provided by businessman Stert Hakim, have confirmed the Hersion of more than $1 million in . Iranian arms sale profits to Contra Kbtls fighting the Nicaraguan gov- Bment, sources said Thursday. now have a way to trace the liey from Tehran” to the rebels, said one source, who asked not to be identified by name. No precise estimate of the size of the diversion was available, although sources said investigators have told members of House and Senate com mittees that the amount was over $1 million. It was not clear whether investiga tors have been able to confirm a di version in the range of $ 10 million to w 95 pfliel cilled wfef more ofia i thiscoiE | iy doe noil onallys is affect:,-! tendne pra ouse approves ew bill banning pen containers I bv Chse: odraDz' alia. Je iei ice Offot ded to it 1 te at tlx I ■8a.ni.Tu Mrs. Bti ulting Ixt irijab " ■ AUSTIN (AP) — The “open ftntainer” bill that bars drinking ■hile driving won final House ap- loval Thursday, sending it back t| the Senate with minor amend- tients. I The measure would go to Gov. flill Clements if the Senate con- dns in the amendments, which Rake no substantial changes in ftp bill as approved by the Sen- til'’ ■ Clements supports the ban on (linking alcoholic beverages vliile driving, and, pending a re view of the bill, plans to sign it into law, according to Jay Rosser, alpokesman for the governor. ■ House members gave voice- vote final approval to the bill Thursday. ■ ItiflVeddy had won preliminary House approval Wednesday. ■Under the proposed law, po lio could issue a summons to a di ver caught drinking an alco holic beverage. ■ The bill is somewhat weaker than similar measures proposed in past years in the Texas Legis lature. Some of those proposals would have allowed fines for mere possession of alcoholic bev erages by a driver. The bill, authored by Sen. Bill Sarpalius, D-Amarillo, won final House approval with no debate. Rep. Paul Moreno, D-El Paso, re iterated his opposition to the bill. During Wednesday debate, Moreno called the measure “just another of those bills that confuse the public. “You know very well that un der present law if an officer sees a driver with a can of beer in one hand he is going to stop that driver and see if he is drunk,” he said. But bill supporter Rep. Bill Blackwood, R-Mesquite, said, “People who operate a motor ve hicle have a responsibility to op erate it in a responsible manner. And when a driver drinks in pub lic it becomes a public matter.” $30 million that Attorney General Edwin Meese III referred to on Nov. 25, 1986, when he first disclosed the movement of funds. The confirmation of the diversion by congressional investigators came as Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, chairman of the Senate investigating committee, told reporters that Sen ate investigators probably will never be able to trace the affair’s complex, international money trail com pletely. Inouye said that “on a scale of 10, we’ve got nine.” Inouye spoke after a closed-door committee session at which lawmak ers voted limited immunity from prosecution in order to compel the testimony of two witnesses. He described the two as “very mi nor figures” but refused to identify them. Inouye also said that a key figure in the case, former Air Force Major Gen. Richard Secord, may agree to testify voluntarily at committee hear ings. Other principal figures, including former National Security Adviser John Poindexter and his former NSC aide, Oliver North, have cited their constitutional rights against self-incrimination in refusing to tes tify. Poindexter has been granted lim ited immunity, and investigators are expected to begin questioning him in private on May 2 or shortly after. The public hearings are sched uled to begin on May 5 and last through July. Hakim was questioned under a limited grant of immunity in Paris on Monday, and the material he pro vided gave investigators a major break in their effort to track money from the Middle East to Central America. It was not clear whether Hakim, in addition to providing Swiss bank records, also handed over records from Caribbean bank acounts where money reportedly was placed for use by the Contras. Here To Spay Fourth-year veterinary student Cindy Allen fin ishes spaying a pet ferret. Female ferret pets often Photo by Bill Hughes are spayed because they may die from blood loss if they don’t mate when they are in heat. )ffiCi Jpeculator pleads guilty to violating SEC laws ■EW YORK (AP) — Ivan F. Boesky, the millionaire stock speculator whose meteoric I Ifvk Wall Street career crashed in an insider trad- _ ingjscandal, pleaded guilty Thursday to one com of violating federal securities laws. ■ Hi faces penalties of up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine when sentenced Aug 21 by U.S. District Judge Morris E. I’ 1- ' Lask;r. irentsii’-jMajkgj-, who has a reputation among de- fensi attorneys as a fair judge but a lenient ll - 1 ftnttncer, cautioned Boesky that in view of ^yVo iplpublicity surrounding the case and the to starts ''' rancisBrt'i sentencing practices of some judges at Man hattan federal court, “I want to talk turkey.” He then asked Boesky if he understood that it was in the judge’s power to sentence him to the maximum. Boesky said he did. The 50-year-old financier, looking sub dued and exhausted, entered his plea in a courtroom packed with nearly 200 reporters, sketch artists, lawyers and other defendants. He was released without bail and, flanked by his two lawyers, left the courthouse tographers swarmed around the limousine that whisked him away. The Securities and Exchange Commission announced on Nov. 14 that Boesky had set tled charges that he engaged in illegal insider trading, or the illegal use of non-public infor mation to profit from securities trades. Boesky, who had been the leading specu lator in stocks of companies that were poten tial takeover targets, settled the charges by paying the government $100 million. He agreed to cooperate with the continuing in vestigation into stock trading improprieties and to plead guilty to a criminal charge which was left unspecified until Thursday. The count to which he pleaded guilty charged him with conspiring to make false statements to the SEC. He admitted to conspiring with others, who were not identified, to file a false regis tration statement with respect to purchases of stock in the Fischbach Corp. in 1984. The registration statement must be filed with the SEC when an individual or an entity acquires at least 5 percent of a company’s stock. M professors plan research in hot field Superconductivity studies proposed By Olivier Uyttebrouck Senior Staff Writer iat t'ott '* ' werepotj ipaitislu" art. If' 1 ; I At least four Texas A&M profes- Ijcdw fors are planning research projects Spanish, Involving the new breed of high- Spatiish temperature superconductors devel- )a ignsa» l! |pe<! during the last yeai‘ and con- :ores ' iden il io be at the cutting edge of jtyofsilt physics. its genet. Bi, t researchers are reluctant to tionali 1 divulge many details concerning i in ni' Ihesr projects, citing the “highly oi.i' competitive atmosphere” that cur- , !< rently reigns in the field of super- kutcanfi conducting physics. |A&M physics professor Wiley P. Kit said that he and professor Don- liU. Naugle, together with a hand- ullf gracluate students, are plan ing to make samples of the copper oxide material “sometime in the next few weeks,” in a basement laboratory - ofthe new physics building. Ivll ■They’re going to be easy to Itakr. Kirk said of the ceramic-like .materials, noting that the biggest popehft' l^t.cle they’ve encountered so far rnoteTerras ordering the needed materials. 3U riststoif'»lt might be on the order of a k p°n: li-and-a-lialf, two months be- jtsl dM# re we have this all pinned down,” t n tpelet'^ Kitk said of the measurements and , on diet inclusions they intend to make with sia je# ! ’he samples. “Not too long by most ■ndanls.” jjsosijf I In a separate project, Karl T. -itiiis F am ig Jr., associate professor of „ r asU’^Bianical engineering said he and = pfOclaTpliydcs professor Peter M. McIntyre off'® ' I -d# I are trying to put together funding for an experiment that could lead to the creation of a high-current, su perconducting wire. “My feeling is that there’s so much potential in this field that funding, initially anyway, is going to be unre stricted,” ITartwig said of his chances of getting the money he needs. “To approached him for information concerning their research plans. “I’d be glad to give you some gen eral background on superconduc tion,” he said. “But considering the competitive atmosphere in this field I wouldn’t want to make any public statements about this project right uperconducti vity prove a concept — you don’t need much money to do that.” Hartwig said it will take six to nine months to see if his idea is viable. Although researchers were glad to describe their projects in terms of broad objectives, they were much more guarded when it came to dis cussing specifics. The day after Kirk granted The Battalion an interview, he asked that the particulars of the project — which he had described in detail the day before — not be published. Naugle, Kirk’s colleague, was even more hesitant when The Battalion Hartwig was also reluctant to de scribe his ideas in detail. When asked how he intended to overcome the problems of fabricating the brittle copper oxide ceramic into wire, Hartwig replied with only a smile and an excuse. “I wouldn’t want to talk about it at this point because I haven’t heard anybody mention it as a manufactur ing possibility,” he said. “I don’t have the ability some other people in this field do to try out a new idea and see if it will work.” In reference to discussions he has had with McIntyre, he said, “I think we have a good idea. In one sense I’d be surprised if somebody hasn’t thought of it because so many peo ple are working on this — but you never know.” The event that inspired these A&M researchers — as well as thou sands of others around the world — was an announcement Feb. 15 by University of Houston professor Paul Chu that he had fabricated a material that lost all electrical resis tance at 94 degrees Kelvin. Although the phenomenon of su perconductivity has been known since 1906, in 80 years scientists had not succeeded in producing a material that exhibited the super conducting property at tempera tures higher than 23 K. Under these conditions, the only effective coolant is expensive liquid helium, with a boiling point of 4 K. The new copper oxide materials, however, can be cooled with liquid nitrogen — an inexpensive and com- momly used laboratory coolant with a boiling point of 77 K. This is one reason Chu’s an nouncement hit the scientific com munity like a bombshell and prompted a special conference on high temperature superconductiv ity, drawing thousands of physicists to New York on March 18. Chu’s material is in fact only one variety in a family of superconduc tors composed of barium, copper, oxygen and one of several kinds of rare earths. The rare earth Chu used is ytterbium — a brittle, shiny metal which is fairly abundant and easy to extract from ores. Kirk said ytterbium seems to be the most successful of the rare earths tried so far. Basically, Kirk and Naugle are trying to find out why Chu’s copper oxide material works. Once they do, refinements can be made that may raise the critical temperature of the material still higher. In addition to critical tempera ture, there are two other limitations on the superconducting property of materials: critical current and critical magnetic field. For example, the strongest exist ing magnets, those using conventio nal niobium superconductors such as the one here at A&M, can create a magnetic field of about 150,000 gauss, Kirk said. (The earth has a magnetic field of one-quarter of a gauss.) In stronger fields, the mag net loses its superconducting prop erty. The strongest existing magnet in the world, located at the Massachu setts Institute of Technology in Bos ton, combines conventional and su perconducting magnets and produces a field of 300,000 gauss, Kirk said. But recent experiments with the new copper oxide superconductors at the National Magnet Laboratory See Superconductors, page 14 Dissident gets Soviet permit to emigrate MOSCOW (AP) — Anatoly Ko- ryagin, who spent six years in a labor camp for accusing authorities of sending sane dissidents to mental hospitals, has been granted permis sion to emigrate, Soviet news media said Thursday. The two-sentence statement by both the English- and Russian-lan guage service of the official Tass news agency was believed to be the first time the Soviet media has an nounced a dissident’s departure. “Anatoly Koryagin, who was re cently released from detention, has been allowed to leave the U.S.S.R., it was confirmed to a Tass correspon dent today at the U.S.S.R. Ministry of Internal Affairs,” Tass said. “Koryagin is leaving for Switzer land for permanent residence,” the statement said. It provided no other information. Dissident sources in Moscow said Koryagin arrived in the Soviet capi tal from the Ukrainian city of Khar kov on Wednesday. But they said he did not want to speak to reporters. The sources said Koryagin would leave Moscow this afternoon. Koryagin, a 48-year-old psychia trist, was pardoned by the Supreme Soviet in February in a review of dis sident cases and released from a la bor camp where he had been impris oned since June 1981. He had been sentenced to seven years in prison camp and five years in internal exile on charges of anti- Soviet agitation and propaganda, a charge often used against dissidents. Koryagin accused Soviet authori ties in an article published in a Brit ish medical journal of sending men tally healthy dissidents to hospitals, where they were treated with drugs. Koryagin was an adviser to the Working Commission to Investigate the Use of Psychiatry for Political Purposes, a dissident group formed as an affiliate of a Moscow organiza tion that monitored compliance with the Helsinki accords. The Frankfurt-based Interna tional Association for Human Rights reported Tuesday that Koryagin and his family had received permis sion to emigrate.