Image provided by: Texas A&M University
About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (April 24, 1989)
joins ess cal school, includingin. organic chemistr)’, rganic chemistry and want to downplay the if science,” he said, id a 16-member corn- ting of medical faculty, ifficers, undergraduate cl advisers, physicians i researched to ensure test retained reliability. ring the new test will be than the old,” Rankin director of education for Bryan Public Library, scuss Roe vs. Wade at applications are due by S: Dr. Joyce Davis will i.m. in 228 MSC. at 7:30 p.m. in 410 Rud- ve a pizza party at 6:30 ior dinner at 7 p.m. Call te C.D.P.E. at 845-0280 Y: will present "The Col- IO p.m. in 206 MSC. m. in 410 Rudder for all on, peer review and se- 8 a.m. - 5 p.m. in 159 !• rs at 7 p.m. in 115 Kle- e C.D.P.E. at 845-0280 ead. i, 216 Reed McDonald, i date. We only publish > to do so. What's Up is )s. Submissions are run an entry will run. It you unding lieges vice area of each com- ;, and residents in the district and the pro- on area would vote on Ison said. s now are based on in- nents by community gh the Regional Conn- rdinating Board. ) Texas laws, bounda- unity college districts :t signed by all prop- the territory and pre- ■ district’s governing the taxpayers in the Lory. territory contiguous oundaries with appro- ers in the district as roposal would make >s dependent on gov- funding, and would itions lower tax rates id expand their tax said. £ING ATE? semester, the ssions. ns and meet 4:00 p.m. L5 it (409) 845- dss from the _ 5:00 p.m. Monday, April 24,1989 The Battalion PageS Warped by Scott McCullar THE FOLLOWING IS A Waldo by Kevin Thomas A5THE CORPS GOF5 /NTO FINAL AEVEW, WE FIND THE FIR5T tfOMEN IN THE BAND WHO mz it through... AT THAT MOMENT, A GREAT EARTHQUAKE .SHOOK A+M AND THE EARTH OPENED UP AND SWALLOWED THE DISSENTERS- AND FROM THAT MOMENT ON AGGIES EVERYWHERE REALIZED THAT THE ONLY REAL TRADITION A*M HA5 IS CHANGE ITSELF... 111 tiMi F 5 WIN WEAR BY BLOTCHSKY'5 Proboscis by Paul Irwin wtsU lump ^OhETMllX EUSe- I IHfMkC. EVE^OKfEL !£. BEIMP BUT OS>. UIE UVE- IM CjCLXE&E. ^WlOKl. IT^, A CUCIUPAL BLMK. HCUE saT^WCLEP t3T" THE OtOfce. HCL-D -rpAomoM. -THErTke saHulu WEfeE MC5T 4CfKlt- IKl THE giu-rr DTUPCTlCK. 4-iA ipuuJ fri Reverend says legislators not AIDS-aware DALLAS (AP) — The former chairman of the state Legislative Task Force on AIDS says too many lawmakers still do not know enough about the deadly disease. The Rev. Chris Steel, who spent more than a year studying the statewide AIDS epidemic and track ing its wide-reaching effects, said too many state legislators continue to “blame the victims.” “I thought we’d done such a good job educating people on AIDS,” said Steele, an Episcopal priest. “Now I Find out that some legislators don’t know that we issued a report on AIDS. Some don’t even know that we had a task force.” The lack of understanding was most evident, she told The Dallas Morning News, at a recent Senate subcommittee hearing on a bill to re quire mandatory testing of prosti tutes to determine whether they carry the AIDS virus. A lawyer testi fied about a Las Vegas, Nev., prosti tute he believed was spreading the AIDS virus to her customers. Subcommittee members pored over photos that showed the wom an’s face deteriorating over several years, said Ms. Steele, who attended the session. “There was a lot of smirking and smiling,” she said. “It was anything but compassionate or cognizant of the overall tragedy of her situation. I will always remember it as a statement of where we are with too many of our public leaders. It was awful.” With the 1989 legislative session nearly two-thirds over, not a single AIDS bill has won approval from the House or Senate. The lagging pro gress has placed a damper on the ex pectations of AIDS service groups that have worked for more than a year to win a broader state response. Although Texas ranks Fifth in re ported cases, it ranks near the bot tom in per capita spending for the fatal disease, according to the Morn ing News. Federal Witness Protection Program accepts convicted murderer of judge HOUSTON (AP) —Jimmy Chagra, target of the most expensive criminal investigation in FBI history, was accepted into the federal Witness Protection Program 16 months after lie was pros ecuted for the murder of San Antonio federal JudgeJohn H. Wood, the Houston Chronicle re ported Sunday. Chagra, an El Paso narcotics dealer and high- stakes gambler, was accepted into the program in 1984 in exchange for promising to testify against a Boston man he hired to murder an assistant US. attorney, according to the copyright report. Chagra never testified after the government reached a plea bargain with trigger man James R. Kearns, who accepted a life term in exchange for the Justice Department’s promise not to pros ecute his wife. The prosecution of Chagra for hiring Charles V. Harrelson of Dallas to kill Wood ended in the defendant’s acquittal in February 1983. Although the government secretly had taped more than 1,000 hours of conversations involving the sus pects and spent more than $11 million to prove its case, Chagra was in the witness security pro gram by June 1984, the Chronicle reported. Chagra’s acceptance into the witness program was part of a plea bargain negotiated by assistant U.S. attorneys Ray and LeRoy Jahn of San Anto nio and Lawrence Lippe, chief of litigation in the criminal division of the Justice Department in Washington, the newspaper said. The deal was approved by trial judge William S. Sessions, who succeeded Wood as chief judge of the federal Western District of Texas and now is director of the FBI, according to the newspa per. Sessions ordered records of the agreement sealed in 1984 and it continues to be off limits to public scrutiny. Chagra’s whereabouts are known only to a handful of federal officials. Jahn said Chagra is no longer in the maximum security prison at Marion, Ill., where he was serving 30 years with out parole for his 1980 conviction as a drug king pin. The attacks on Wood and assistant U.S. attor ney James Kerr occurred in San Antonio during the federal government’s crackdown on the in ternational narcotics trade directed by Chagra from El Paso and Las Vegas. Kearns opened fire on Kerr’s car on Nov. 21, 1978, as the prosecutor drove to work. Kerr, who escaped serious injury by sliding to the floor board of his Lincoln Continental, was unable to identify his attacker. A single rifle shot killed Wood outside his styl ish North San Antonio townhome on May 29, 1979. Harrelson was convicted of the murder. Jimmy Chagra’s wife Liz was convicted of deliv ering the payoff money — an estimated $200,000 — as part of a conspiracy to kill Wood. Because Jimmy Chagra never testified against Kearns, no details of the agreement that placed him in the witness security program were re vealed until lawyers for Chagra’s wife accused the Justice Department of reneging on its prom ise to reduce Liz Chagra’s sentence. In addition to placing him in the witness pro gram, Chagra’s plea bargain provided for a 10- year reduction in his wife’s 30-year sentence. The Justice Department refused to reduce her sen tence after she appealed her conviction and won a new trial. ■ Liz Chagra was convicted again in 1986 and Sessions again assessed a 30-year term. Former U.S. attorney Jamie Boyd, who as signed Kerr to dismantle the Chagra empire in 1977 and who initially directed the investigation of Wood’s murder, said Chagra’s acceptance into the witness program is a “rank injustice.” “I didn’t make that decision and I’m out of the federal government now and I can afford to dis agree with them,” said Boyd, who was replaced in 1981 as U.S. attorney for the Western District. “He (Chagra) deserves to be in Marion,” said Boyd, now a prosecutor in the Bexar County dis trict attorney’s office. “He tried to escape from Leavenworth. That’s a matter of record. Planned his escape while he was there in Leavenworth. Frankly, I think he ought to be in a hard-time joint.” The Justice Department believed that without Chagra’s testimony against the triggerman it could not clear the Kerr case. “It’s always difficult to explain the reasoning that goes behind a plea bargain,” Jahn said. “At the same time, you have to realize there were two people facing trial in that case —Jimmy Chagra, against whom we had quite a bit of evidence, and Jimmy Kearns, who was the triggerman.” Sources requesting anonymity said the plea bargain was made possible by Chagra’s fear of prison gangs and by the approaching five-year statute of limitations in the Kerr case. Although Jahn acknowledges a plea bargain exists, he will not confirm Chagra is in the wit ness program. But in addition to references to Chagra’s spe cial status in motions pending in his wife’s case, the Bureau of Prisons’ national prisoner locater service confirmed Chagra is in the protection program. Engineering students challenge borders of robotic technology at national contest LUBBOCK (AP) — They have names like Ithinklcan, Lurch and Robo-Raider, but bear little resem blance to R2D2 and C3PO, the Star Wars robots. Six robots designed by under graduate engineering students from universities across the country matched wits, or rather, micropro cessors last weekend in the nation’s only walking robot competition, the Walking Machine Decathlon. With a whir and a hum, a rede signed version of last year’s winner was one of only two machines able to push a hockey puck while walking in the specified diamond pattern marked out on a gymnasium floor. Aptly named Lurch, Colorado State University’s entry, fitted with six legs that marched across the floor with military precision, completed the task to win the contest for the second year in a row, beating out the University of Maryland’s much smaller creation, dubbed Prototerp. “We weren’t sure it was going to make it,” said Jim Schultz, a senior CSU electrical engineering student, who along with his six teammates acted as a pit crew for the machine, which was troubled throughout the contest by mechanical problems. Hammering and tinkering with controls until seconds before the first event, the CSU team, which like the other student contestants spent thousands of hours constructing the robots, coaxed their creation on with all the anxiety of protective parents. The contest features 10 levels of increasingly difficult tasks for the ro bots to perform as quickly as possi ble. LAtrch, wearing a bumper sticker reading “What the hell, it runs!” cov ered a 10-meter sprint in less than 42 seconds, the second best time be hind Prototerp’s 34.9 seconds. But halfway through the figure eight event, Lurch’s turning mech anism became stuck, so it was back to the pits for more tinkering before trying a second run. The machine rebounded to perform a perfect fig ure eight, then push the hockey puck with a detachable arm, but it couldn’t climb a three-step platform, the fifth competition level. But neither could the other ro bots, which apparently couldn’t com pute well enough to compete. One of those was the University of Central Florida’s entry, christened NOMAD and fitted with a stripped- down personal computer as well as a joystick. “This is a third-generation ma chine,” boasted David Reimel, presi dent of UCF’s robotics club, a vet eran participant in the contest. But the high-tech gimmickry didn’t help NOMAD, which resem bled a six-legged spider, walk fast enough to keep in the running. Mechanical and electronic snafus claimed a few early victims. Paws, Penn State University’s Pro grammable Autonomous Walking System, blew out a key control panel days before the contest and was forced simply to stand while the other machines lumbered about. The $14,000 and thousands of hours’ work poured into Paws, equipped with six legs that enable it to walk somewhat like an insect, will be put toward next year’s contest, project leader Steve Pattison said. “We were disappointed, because we spent a lot of nights working on it and lost a lot of sleep,” he said, add ing that while some teams had started building their robots eight or nine months ago, Paws was just three months old. New Mexico State University’s Ithinklcan never made it out of the starting gate either. The contest, which has grown from three participating schools in 1987 to eight and gained further le gitimacy this year through the sponsorship of the Society of Auto motive Engineers, aims not only to advance robotic technology by pos ing some problems no expert has yet solved but to teach engineers how to work with people from other engi neering fields. “We want to show the students real-world problems and how to work within the disciplines,” said Texas Tech University assistant me chanical engineering professor Jaime Cardenas-Garcia, who founded the competition. “This re quires mechanical engineering, work with electrical circuits and computer programming.” Cardenas-Garcia wasn’t surprised that no robot could advance beyond the fourth level of difficulty. “We made it hard, so that students really think about the problems,” said Cardenas-Garcia, adding that the top three levels are not attainable by current technology. Northgate <Z> 0 ° Southgate PUT YOUR COLLEGE DEGREE TO WORK. Air Force Officer Training School is an excellent start to a challenging career as an Air Force Officer. We offer great starting pay, medical care, 30 days of vacation with pay each year and management opportunities. Contact an Air Force recruiter. Find out what Officer Training School can mean for you. Call SSGT HENDRICKS STATION TO STATION COLLECT 409-696-2612 TAMU Italian Semester Spring 1990 Study and live at the TAMU Center, “Santa Chiara, ” in Castiglion Fiorentino INFORMATIONAL MEETING TUESDAY APRIL 25,10:00-11:00 A.M. ROOM 410 RUDDER FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT Study Abroad Office 161 Bizzell West, Phone:845-0544 (TOYOTA | or comaoc. At" STUDENT PURCHASE AND COLLEGE GRADUATE BUYER'S PROGRAM WELL BUY YOUR GAS JUST FOR COMING TO WESTERN FOR A TEST DRIVE. STUDENT I.D. REQUIRED 1409 1-45 NORTH IN CONROE HWY. 105 TO 1-45, THEN NORTH 1/2 MILE TO WILSON RD„ LEFT UNDER BRIDGE & BACK ON 1-45 SERVICE RD. M-F 8:30am - 9:00pm SAT. 8:30am - 7:00pm (409)539-9191 The Center for Entrepreneurship and The College of Business Administration invite you to the Master entrepreneur of the year AWARD CEREMONY for 1989 Honoring NORMAN E. BRINKER Chairman & CEO Chili's, Inc. V Thursday, 27 April 1989, 11:00 a.m, Rudder Theater