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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 21, 1989)
M'e ii became, n ew at theeni casks outdoon although it It ind’s weather pness, cold wj icrs. Texas A&M The Battalion take longforn ran or archer! sant saw oil ih > and haul it iir Vol.88 No. 10QUSPS 045360 10 pages College Station, Texas WEATHER V \ V \ 1 1 1 //y FORECAST for WEDNESDAY: Mostly sunny and cool. Normal temperatures for mid-February s // /rwwvx are 64 and 43. HIGH:52 LOW:28 Tuesday, February 21,1989 s (made of elan but thev havet) glu to preren ng- s more of a ro nice, like llit on them, that they, too seem ir. Players todai :ls with rheii ss darts. Tit len dart into a nit forgotten; Report suggests radical changes in foreign aid WASHINGTON (AP) — A gov ernment report released Monday calls for a “radical reshaping” olTJ.S. foreign assistance programs because current aid concepts are based on a world that no longer exists. “The challenges of today’s prob lems, and tomorrow’s, cannot be met with yesterday’s solutions, suitable as they may have been to yesterday’s problems,” said the report, issued by the administrator of the Agency for International Development, Alan Woods. The 158-page study said the aid program no longer seems able to ful fill its original mandate of helping poor countries achieve the transition “T I he challenges of today’s problems, and tomorrow’s, cannot be met with yesterday’s solutions, suitable as they may have been to yesterday’s problems,” — Government report from dependency to self-sufficiency. Somewhere between 1949 and the present, the concept of aid as a tran sitional means of helping countries become self-sufficient was lost, it said. A principal conclusion of the re port calls for “radically reshaping” future assistance programs to face new realities and to complement the contributions to development of the U.S. private sector in providing hu manitarian aid, education and over seas investment. This reshaping “must be both an immediate concern and a major long-term national priority. Nothing less will serve the national interests of the United States,” the report said. Woods noted in comments to a group of reporters that no country has “graduated” from less developed to developed status in the last 20 years. All this is in sharp contrast to the Marshall Plan of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when an ambitious U.S. aid program helped put Western Europe on its feet after World War II. One problem highlighted by the report is that “succeeding Con gresses and administrations, prodded by the dominant crises — and interest groups — of the mo ment, have piled differing and often conflicting foreign assistance objec tives on top of each other. T his “dizzying” array ranges from winning friends for the United States, to alleviating poverty, to countering the Soviet Union and to finding markets for American farm products, the report said. In a December speech, Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-lnd., a member of a bi partisan House task force on foreign aid, said the 33 separate statutory objectives for foreign assistance “are so numerous that they do not pro vide meaningful direction. “All of these 33 objectives may be worthy. I probably voted for most erf them. . . . However, a program that pursues all objectives risks accom plishing none of them,” he said. Complicating fulfillment of these objectives has been a decline from $19 billion to $14 billion in the for eign aid program from 1985 to the present, Hamilton said. ITION DATES: February24-26 iptions.Ma hip round willb? : ree!!!PMYB£ NT: Each pate- rinners keeptiit COMPETim igle eliminatioa -eceive a t Mil receiveacei- aceiveaGeiw sted on the Into ay, February?! USHA Rules*'. ;to 21 points an Sponsored b 1 EG I STRAW forastartingtir e entries will3 'R ELIMINATE February 23lr» NALS: Topfos h 4 at half time AWARDS: h ) a All-Universi will awardIheK r Nike socks as > will received re r from the la ag. RULES: h )ffice, 159 Rea k . Up, up, and away! Despite the wet conditions early Monday, 4- and-a-half-year-old Blake Anderton gives his Photo by Mike C. Mulvey new kite a try at Central Park in College Sta tion. ouble Eliminai> Staff and Spots; >t 8 teams in oio sions as tl ipions willrece 1 i shirts with2cc eceive Penber hirts and a trap per team. TS 67 Read Build! will receiveaf! Tayerofthega’ I for the ft ve food avails: Refugees seeking asylum face jail if INS qualifications can’t be met BROWNSVILLE (AP) — Political asylum ap plicants will be arrested, jailed and marked for deportation if they do not qualify under a new plan to provide same-day decisions in southern Texas, where Central Americans continue to pour across the border, Commissioner Alan Nel son of the Immigration and Naturalization Serv ice said Monday. The new expedited asylum adjudication is de signed to discourage the thousands of frivolous asylum applicants and “serious abuse of the asy lum system that’s undercutting our immigration laws,” Nelson said. INS will begin phasing in the new procedure Tuesday and has authorized 500 additional im- UARYJI migration personnel to be sent to its J-lariingen District in southern Texas. “We intend to send a strong signal to those people who have the mistaken idea that by merely filing a frivolous asylum claim, they may stay in the United States,” Nelson said at a hotel about 100 yards from the Rio Grande. “This will ful manipulation of America’s generosity must and will stop.” At the current rate of Central Americans crossing the Rio Grande illegally near Brownsville, the INS estimates that 100,000 this year would pass through the area, the main entry point for asylum-seekers from that war-torn and poverty-stricken region. Roughly half of the Central Americans seek ing asylum are from Nicaragua, Nelson said. Applicants approved will be granted asylum for one year from the date of approval, will re ceive work and be allowed to travel. The U.S. government provides political asy lum for those who can show they are fleeing per secution. The INS, however, maintains that most of the Central Americans are here for economic reasons, and therefore do not qualify. Those denied under the new plan will be held in the custody of the INS and be given a deporta tion hearing. They will receive a “prompt hear ing” before an immigration judge, Nelson said, but he did not know how long it would take. Mandatory wei; 1 be posted ii NCAA. WEI National Guard fills in for striking nurses S: Upper LW , 134, 142, IS T, 177, 190 d. AWARD: All Universijl ssB-certificals awards. ** E* II consist of tW He periods*^ o has won I 3lass during 1 : s year m# n Class A"A r has wrestled 1 <as A&M C- elast yearisis ^rticipants 0 a student on I ID at weigt ch time. RCI ‘.'Class A-big! \ Champions* )ions willrece layprovidedi! 11 rectly north of! :s. EQUIPME h 3 on the W ) in doubles iw CRANSTON, R.I. (AP) — Na tional Guard troops in combat fa tigues bathed and fed patients Mon day at state-run General Hospital after scores of nurses and attendants walked out in a contract dispute. The state, citing a law against strikes by state employees, sought a court order forcing workers to re turn to the 480-bed, mostly long term-care hospital. Superior Court Judge Antonio S. Almeida said he would rule Tuesday. Thomas Romeo, director of the state Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals, accused the members of Local 1350, Ameri can Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, of “walking away from patients” and said pa tients’ lives were threatened. “Not all the individuals up there right now know exactly what they’re doing,” Romeo said. “There’s not a lot of tolerance for error.” Seven of the 1 10 Guard troops on duty Monday had nursing training; the rest were given non-medical tasks like feeding, washing and dressing patients. More than a dozen acute-care pa tients were transferred to other hos pitals, and the facility stopped ad missions. “I think this is totally uncalled for,” Connie Prior, 56, a quadri plegic who has been at the hospital for two years, said of the job action. “Number one should be the pa tients.” A four-day sickout ended Jan. 31 when the Guard was called in. Doctors on Monday reported as usual, but about one-fifth of the 89 attendants and fewer than half the 13 licensed practical nurses showed up for the first shift, officials said. About half of the 26 registered nurses honored the picket line, Dan Caley, an MHRH spokesman, said. Only one of 117 attendants sched uled to work at the state Institute of Mental Health, also staffed by union members, reported for work Mon day morning, Romeo said. Gov. Edward D. DiPrete called out the Guard late Sunday after the union voted 4-1 to reject a proposed 53-cent-an-hour raise offered in re turn for concessions on staffing, in cluding a reduction in overtime and greater management leeway in transferring staffers from ward to ward. San Antonio police seize airplane with $13 million worth of cocaine SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Federal agents confiscated 715 pounds of cocaine worth $13 million after seizing a small plane that made suspicious aerial maneuvers on two roundtrip flights to Mexico, authorities said Mon day. U.S. Customs officials arrested two men, a Mexican national and a Florida resident, after the pair landed at San Antonio International Airport Sunday evening, said Neil Lageman, special agent-in-charge of the U.S. Customs office in San Antonio. The individual packs of cocaine, found in suitcases and boxes inside the plane, were wrapped in fiberglass material and had “USA 6” written on it, a mark to de termine the destination and the narcotics group to re ceive it. The seizure was the largest of its kind in the San An tonio area, said Vernon Parker, head of the Drug En forcement Administration in San Antonio. J.J. Johnston, head of the U.S. Customs Aviations unit, said the single-engine Cessna 210 plane caught the attention of a radar technician in Houston after the plane took off from San Antonio in bad weather Satur day and after reaching its altitude it turned off its trans ponder. The plane went into Mexico and returned to San An tonio Saturday evening. On Sunday, it duplicated its flight and when it arrived in San Antonio, Customs offi cials stopped it after it did not dear customs. Parker said that along with the $60,000 aircraft, po lice also seized a pickup truck that they believed was going to be used as ground transportation for the men. Europe withdraws diplomats from Iran ASSOCIATED PRESS European Common Market gov ernments decided Monday to with draw their top diplomats from Iran to protest Ayatollah Ruhollah Kho meini’s renewed order for Moslems to kill novelist Salman Rushdie. Brit ain went further by pulling out its entire embassy staff. Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe said the death threats against Rushdie and the publishers of “The Satanic Verses” for allegedly blas pheming Islam were “unwarranted interference” in Britain’s internal af fairs. He left open the possibility of ex pelling Iran’s lone diplomat in Lon don, where Rushdie lives. The 12 European Economic Com munity governments, in a sharp blow to Iran’s hopes of improving relations with Western nations, de cided to Recall their diplomats for consulations and suspend high-level visits to and from Iran. They said they also will restrict the movement of Iranian diplomats in their countries. Howe told a news conference that the EE.C foreign ministers, meeting in Brussels, had sent “a strong, con certed signal to the Iranian lead ership that Khomeini’s threats are an affront to international standards of behavior and will not be toler ated.” For Britain’s part, he said, “it is no longer sensible to maintain a diplo matic presence in T ehran.” Iran’s charge d’affaires in Lon don, Mohammad Basti, will be sum moned to hear “the reasons for this action along with the implications for Mr. Basti and his mission,” Howe said. Asked if that meant closing the Iranian Embassy, he replied, “I leave it for your own conclusions.” Rushdie, 41, apologized Saturday for any distress the publication of his book caused to Moslems, after Ira nian President Ah Khamanei indi cated that could lead to a pardon. On Sunday, however, Iran’s offi cial Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Khomeini as ruling out any reprieve for Rushdie and urging Moslems to “send him to hell” for his writings. Neither Khomeini’s statement nor IRNA referred to Khamanei’s com ments, reflecting a widening rift in the Iranian hierarchy over the Rush die affair. “There plainly is confusion amongst the Iran authorities,” Howe said. He added, however, “If the threat were turned into fact, that would call for an even more serious response, but I hope that it will not come to that.” Iran’s deputy parliament speaker, Mehdi Karrubi, reaffirmed Khomei ni’s execution order Monday, IRNA reported. “Without doubt, Salman Rushdie, and those following the same line of thought, have no other fate but death and destruction and banish ment to hell,” it quoted Karrubi as saying. Rushdie, and Indian-born Mos lem, has been in hiding, reportedly under armed police guard, since Khomeini decreed Feb. 14 that he should be killed, and two Iranian re ligious leaders put a $5.2 million bounty on his head. In London, Archbishop of Can terbury Robert Runcie, spiritual leader of Anglicans worldwide, ap pealea to Britain’s Moslem commu nity to contain its anger. Commenting on the controversy for the first time, Runcie said: “Only the utterly insensitive can fail to see that the publication of Salman Rush die’s book has deeply offended Mos lems both here and throughout the world.” But he condemned the murder call and appealed to Moslem leaders “to have regard to the expression of profound regret that Salman Rush die issued on Saturday.” The Swiss foreign ministry in Bern called in Iran’s ambassador Monday to express concern about the death threat, but did not plan to withdraw its ambassador from Teh ran, said ministry spokesman Lo renzo Schnyder von Wartensee. Howe said normal relations between Britain and Iran would be impossi ble until Iran repudiates violence and respects other countries’ laws. Asked whether the latest rupture would worsen the plight of Western hostages in Lebanon and British businessman Roger Cooper, who is jailed in Tehran, Howe said: “No body can pretend that it makes our task . . . any easier.” The two countries had all but sev ered diplomatic relations in 1987 following the arrest of an Iranian diplomat for shoplifting in Britain, and the retaliatory beating of a Brit ish diplomat in Iran. Bill calls for reducing teachers’ child-care tax AUSTIN (AP) — A bill filed Monday would mandate school districts deduct the cost of child care payments from their em ployees’ salaries, thus allowing the workers to avoid paying fed eral taxes on the money. State Rep. Lena Guerrero, D- Austin, said her legislation would “help the very people who teach our children.” By having child-care costs de ducted from their salaries, school district employees would avoid paying federal taxes on that por tion of their pay, Guerrero said. The school district also would not have to pay taxes on that part of the employee’s salary, she said. John Cole, president of the 15,000-member Texas Feder ation of Teachers, said the deduc tion would save school districts — especially larges ones, such as Dallas and Houston — millions of dollars annually. Current law allows school dis tricts to deduct child-care costs on a voluntary basis, but only three districts statewide — Corpus Christi, El Paso, and Northside in San Antonio — have taken ad vantage of the deduction, Cole said. Guerrero’s bill would make the action mandatory. “1 think there would he some people” who would consider the bill “one more mandated thing,” she said. But Guerrero and Cole said the law would benefit the dis tricts. “It truly is a case of forcing the districts to do something that is for their and the taxpayers’ own good,” Cole said. Cole said the legislation is im portant because more than 60 percent of all preschool children have mothers in the workforce, and the cost of child care is in creasing. “Working women make our schools run and many of those working women cannot afford day for their own children,” Cole said. He said many school districts are not aware of the current op tion, while others have failed to act “because of inertia.” “This law gives them a little nudge,” he said.