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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (March 2, 1989)
m >lay woes v 1 loss to ’ eb ’ 8, si PPer lo ^Ives in $i t wasn’t sr y garni ed me sc ne home am else. in the % °f Mondji °f empha; 1(1 the effor. at Dense da y and hoi Sunday. TIk i record Hindi W/A W i v. ■npany Dke" device Texas A&M The Battalion Vol.88 No. 107 USPS 045360 16 pages College Station, Texas WEATHER FORECAST for FRIDAY: Mostly to partly cloudy and warm with a 20 percent chance of showers. HIGH:73 LOW:53 Thursday, March 2,1989 Education boosters seek more funds from state AUSTIN (AP) — High-powered educa tion boosters said Wednesday the state needs to spend about SI billion more on higher education to restore cuts made four years ago and make adjustments for infla tion and increased student enrollment. “It is critical that this deficiency be erad icated," Jess Hay, former chairman of the University of Texas Board of Regents told a joint session of the Senate Education and Finance committees. Hay, joined by others with the Texas Foundation for Higher Education, said law makers should increase funding to the state’s 34 general academic institutions and 49 community colleges bv about $919 mil lion for the two-year budget period that be gins Sept. 1. The bulk of the increase would go to ward adjustments for inflation ($292 mil lion), covering the cost of increased enroll- “I I f we are to compete with other states like New York and California ... then we cannot retreat now.” — Kent Caperton, chairman, Finance Committee ment ($279 million), and proposed faculty pay raises ($200 million), Elay said. The net result would be to bring the state’s higher education budget in line with the 1985 budget, prior to cuts made when the state’s economy was rocked by the col lapse of oil prices. Senate members of the two committees responded favorably to the request. “If we are to compete with other states like New York and California — all of the 10 most populous states — then we cannot retreat now,” said Sen. Kent Caperton, D- Bryan, and chairman of the Finance Com mittee. Sen. Chet Edwards, D-Dunanville, asked those testifying to help lawmakers raise ilw revenue for their budget request. He said temporary taxes, that are set to expire Sept. 1, must be maintained toUoost higher edu cation funding. Gov. Bill Clements has said he wants the temporary taxes to expire. Hay said maintaining a quality “higher education enterprise” is critical to helping the state’s economy. He said Texas would not have had a chance to win projects, such as the super conducting super collider, without legis lative support of higher education. Federal designation of Texas as the site of the atom smasher, “simply would not have hap pened. We would simply not have gotten past that academic screen.” Faculty pay should be increased 10.1 per cent for each of the next two years in order to keep the best instructors and attact oth ers, Hay said. The average faculty salary in the 10 most populous states is $40,000, while in Texas it is $34,500, he said. Larry Temple, who headed a Select Committee on Higher Education, called for an increase in faculty salaries. “One reason faculty salaries are so im portant is because they provide the easiest and best basis of comparability between states,” he said. “They are a barometer of a state’s com mitment to higher education.” In addition, Temple said student enroll ment has grown nearly 10 percent in the last two years — from 681,292 in the fall of 1986 to 746,002 last fall. Without adjustments for inflation and student enrollment growth, funding of higher education for the next biennium at the current level would have a “practical ef fect of a reduction of almost 19 percent,” Temple said. Tower vows to continue fighting for confirmation WASHINGTON (AP 1 — John Tower, his nomination as defense secretary in grave trouhh made an extraordinary public ad mission of marital infidelity Wedn esday but vowed to keep fighting to win Senate confirmation. T shall never surretu der or re treat,” Tower said .is he fi< sided ques- tions at the National 1 •Vess Club about allegations conc ei t ling exces- sive drinking, womani/it ig and lu- crative consulting lees li t >m defense contractors. The embattled nomine ■e also said he regards his weekend \ ow to quit drinking if he wins confi t ination as “sacred . . . and 1 can as sure you I will abide by it.” In a development th at further dampened Tower’s co nfirmation chances, Senate Majori tv Leader George Mitchell announc ed his op- position to the nominal iot Vice President Dan i Quayle, meanwhile, conceded th at the ad- ministration still lacks the votes needed for Senate appt o\ But President Bush <<> ntinued to court Democrats in a last-c Inch effort to save the appoint n rent, and spokesman Marlin lit> serled, “We’ll pist keep u p the good fight." Tower delivered a 1 >usiness-as- usual speech at the pres s club, ad- dressing himself to defem sc policy is- sues, matters that he said “normallv occupy tite mind of the t rominee of secretary of defense* " But he unflin- chingly fielded question 1 e from his audience about his personal behav ior. Asked if he had evei broken his wedding vows, the twice-divorced Tower said, “As a matter of fact, 1 have broken wedding vows. I think I am probably not alone in that con nection.” Tower’s second wife, Lilia, alleged “marital misconduct" in court pa pers in the couple’s divorce case. There was no letup, meanwhile, in the political storm surrounding the nomination. Republicans w'ere trying to decide whether to seek a delay in the begin ning of the debate on the nomi nation, which has drawn widespread opposition from Democrats. The administration is trying to hold all 45 Republicans and sway five of the Senate’s 55 Democrats to get a tie vote that Quayle could break in favor of Tower. Mitchell, D-Maine, the Demo cratic leader, announced his opposi tion to the nomination in a midday speech on the Senate floor, citing Tower’s ties to defense consultants and his drinking. Mitchell’s position was widely an ticipated, particularly since all Dem ocrats who have expressed an opin ion on the nomination have opposed it, and almost all Republicans have endorsed it. He said he hoped the Tower struggle would not have “an adverse impact on relations” be tween the Democratic majority in the Senate and the administration. “It is not moral perfection or the qualifications of senators that are at issue here,” Mitchell told his col leagues. “It is the ability to serve ef fectively in a position of unique power and responsibility.” Mitchell said he read the FBI re port on Tower and met with Bush to express his concerns. Martial law fails to end violence in Venezuela CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) — Ri ots broke out Wednesday in the western slums despite martial law, and a newspaper said more than 200 people w r ere killed in the Caracas area alone in three days of violence over price increases. At least nine people were re ported killed Wednesday. The newspaper El National said in its early Thursday edition that more than 1,000 people were in jured and 2,000 were arrested in Caracas since riots — triggered by a wide-ranging government austerity program — began on Monday. The newspaper listed the names of 159 persons whose bodies were in the Caracas morgue, which it said was “congested with corpses.” It said there was a high number of corpses in other Caracas morgues. The independent newspaper quoted unidentified police sources and gave no details. Wednesday, Venezuelans jammed the few remaining food stores, which were guarded by soldiers. Witnesses in outlying areas of Caracas said police exchanged gun fire with snipers and drove mobs away from stores. Other witnesses said a woman had been killed by po lice early Wednesday in the town of Catia as she tried to loofc.a store. Radio reporters said delinquents tried to break into homes in Guare- nas, 30 miles west of Caracas, while homeowners were defending them selves with guns. President Carlos Andres Peres de clared martial law late Tuesday, say ing the “incredible tragedy” of the violence threatened Venezuela’s “consolidation of democracy.” His spokesman said people must realize the rich years of the oil boom are over. The president announced an agreement between industry and la bor for an immediate wage increase that would raise the pay of those earning the minimum wage by more than 50 percent. Bus fare increases of 30 percent to 50 percent were the immediate cause of the riots, but oil accounts for 90 percent of Venezuela’s export income and the economy never re covered from the plunge in world prices several years ago.Inflation is expected to reach 70 percent this year, double the 1988 level, and the foreign debt is $33 billion. Students go to and from the Blocker Building Though Ireland is now a one-way street, traffic Monday on the sidewalk along Ireland Street. moves both ways on the sidewalk. Tax facts for students By Juliette Rizzo STAFF WRITER According to the Tax Reform Act of 1986, some of the money from scholarships arid fellowship grams awarded after Aug. 16, 1986 musl be included in the re cipient’s taxable income. Before the reform, all scholarships and fellowships were tax free. Internal Revenue Service pub lications define scholarships as “an amount paid or allowed to or for the benefit of a student at an educational institution to aid in the pursuit of studies.” A fellowship grant is defined as an amount paid to a student to aid in the pursuit of study or researc h. A student who is single and has gross income that exceeds $4,930 has to Hie a tax return. If a stu dent’s gross income is less than this amount but his employer withheld earnings, the student should file in order to get a re fund. „ If a student is claimed as a de pendent by his parents, the fol lowing information mav he help ful. Two types of income exist: un earned, which consists of divi dends and interest earned on sav ings accounts; and earned, which consists of salaries and commis sions. II a student has unearned in come of $1 or more and the com bined total of his unearned and earned income is more than $500, he must tile a tax return. If he lias no unearned income, lie does not have to file unless he has earned a total of $3,000 or more. If the student is a degree can didate, the money received through scholarships that is used for tuition, fees, books, supplies and equipment is subject to taxa tion. Any education-related ex pense, exclusive of living ex penses, can be excluded from tax able income as qualified expenses. If a student is excluding part of ,i scholarship, tax form 1040 must he used. Dr. Lanv Crumbley, an ac counting professor at Texas A&M specializing in taxation, said students need to have rec eipts lot their expenses, other wise it may be difficult to get a tax red action. Students who have a fellowship grant are not necessarily exempt from taxation. Although earnings for teach ing or research are taxable and must be reported as gross in come, some government pro gram scholarships an d fellowships are not taxable. The money students receive from spe cific full armed forces schol arships is not taxable. Loans also are not taxable. If students need assistance with filing tax returns, (hey should meet with a local tax consultant or call the IRS toll-free at 1-800-421- 1040. Tax forms are available in the Documents Division on the sec ond floor of the Sterling C. Evans Library. Villagers blame Stalin for massacre of Soviets despite claims of officials BYKOVNIA, U.S.S.R. (AP) — Thousands of skulls and skeletons found entwined with grass and bits of clothing testify to the years of murder concealed in a mass grave in a forest outside this Ukrainian village. The single bullet hole in each skull offers the most chilling evidence that these victims — up to 300,000 by one unofficial estimate — were killed by Josef Stalin’s secret police, not the Nazis as the Soviet government claims. Stalin’s men shot people in the back of the head. The Nazis usually lined up their victims on the side of a ravine and machine-gunned them, said Mikola G. Lysenko, a retired economist who is crusading to end what he considers a conspir acy of lies. After 50 years of silence, elderly residents of this village near Kiev are speaking up, blaming their government for the bodies buried in the forest. Petro Z. Kukovenko says he summoned the courage to speak after a Soviet commission rebu ried the bones and erected a memorial in May blaming the Nazis for the killing. On the spot where Soviet government trucks once dripped blood on the forest floor, the monument carved the official version in granite. “When they put up this monument, I became ashamed that they were blaming this on the wrong people,” Kukovenko, 74, said in an inter view. “My father may be buried there,” Kukovenko’s wife, Halyna, said. “My father was a collective farmer, and they killed him for nothing,” she sobbed. Western historians estimate 20 million Soviets were killed under Stalin, particularly during the Great Purge of the late 1930s. But it was only in 1987 the Soviet government, as part of the reforms instituted under President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, began to admit that Stalin was responsible for even thousands of deaths. The monument blaming the Nazis for the vic tims at Bykovnia was built in May, Lysenko said. In December, he succeeded in forcing the gov ernment to form a fourth commission to find the murderers. The last three commissions all blamed the Ger man occupation army. But Kukovenko said, “While the Germans were here, no one touched the gravesite.” That statement is supported by 50 villagers, Lysenko said. IVIy father may be buried there. My father was a collective farmer, and they killed him for nothing.” — Halyna Kukovenko, villager All four commissions have involved officials with connections to the secret police, Lysenko said. Kukovenko lived through that terrible time from 1936 to 1941, when canvas-covered trucks night after night hauled their mysterious cargo to the green-fenced compound in the Darnitsia Forest. He first saw the horror for himself when a German officer forced him and four other men to exhume one of the graves just four days after Nazi troops occupied the area in September 1941. “I know that this pit we dug up was a fresh grave — maybe the people had been buried there a week earlier,” just before the Red Army re treated, Kukovenko said. Since that time, further excavation has found the remains of thousands of Soviets in the pits, stacked like canned sar dines. Government estimates range from 6,000 to 68,000 bodies, but Lysenko said there are five to eight victims in every two square yards of the 80,000-square-yard site. That amounts to 200,000 to 300,000 people. The German officer photographed the exhu mation, and the pictures were published in an oc cupation newspaper, Kukovenko recalled. The Nazis were playing on Ukrainian nationalism to win over the people in the occupied region. The effort soon failed in the face of the Germans’ own atrocities. “The Germans were looking for Polish offi cers,” Kukovenko said, but they found only Sovi ets. A year later, the Germans unearthed 4,250 Polish officers buried 310 miles away in the Ka tyn Forest. Western historians say the Soviets wiped out the Polish officer corps in a massacre that nearly a half century later still haunts rela tions between Warsaw and Moscow. Oles Shevchenko, head of the Helsinki Watch group in the Ukraine, believes Col. Gen. Ivan Hladush, the Ukrainian Minister of Interior, has covered up the crimes of his predecessors. Lysenko is trying to have Hladush removed, and he is still striving to obtain government docu ments on secret police activities in the 1930s. Attempts to reach the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs were unsuccessful. Kukovenko says he’s offended by constant ref erences to the “myth” that Stalin’s secret police killed the victims at Bykovnia. “Am I a myth? Are my friends a myth?” he asks.