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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 23, 1994)
t Wednesday, February 23,1994 The Battalion Page 3 r^Nine men, corporation charged in NASA sting The Associated Press HOUSTON — Nine men, including two NASA workers, and one corporation were charged Tuesday with taking kickbacks, solic iting bribes and accepting inside information during a 20-month FBI sting focused on the Johnson Space Center. ■General Electric Corp. and Martin Marietta Corp. were not directly implicated, but the com panies agreed to jointly reimburse the govern ment $1 million for the cost of the FBI probe. U.S. Attorney Gaynelle Griffin Jones said. The investigation started with tips from contractors and NASA employees and culmi nated in Operation Lightning Strike, a sting that began in December 1991 with undercover FBI agents posing as executives of a fictitious company known as Southern Technologies Di versified. NASA's Office of Inspector General and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service also took part in the probe, Jones said. Those charged waived indictment by a fed eral grand jury and were cited in six criminal informations. Jones said they were not consid ered flight risks and had not been arrested. None has entered pleas. Jones said the investigation continues and prosecutors expect to file charges against oth ers later. Astro International Corp., of League City, a NASA subcontractor, was charged with solicit ing and receiving space agency documents rer lating to the bidding process for a $3.3 million contract. Learn to SCUBA Dive! ama/ISoa Get Certified For SPRING BREAK! drdUl^e MAUI & PAW Cleeses cube 696-DIVE Classes Starting March 4th We are MOVING to the Kroger Shopping Center March 14.... INDOOR POOL! Keyboard wrist-injury case may spark stream of suits The Associated Press ng/Tm Bin HOUSTON — Compaq Com- Iputer Corp.'s victory — believed Ithe first jury verdict in a case in- Jvolving keyboard-related wrist [injuries — could prove to be [meaningless or set the tone for thousands of suits yet to reach the [nation's courthouses, lawyers say. jOn Feb. 16, following a 2 1/2- week trial, Houston jurors found for Compaq after a quick 55- minute deliberation in the case of Patsy Heard Woodcock. oHWoodcock, a former legal sec ret i\ from Houston, claimed in 3r their cum su jt filed in 1991 that a Corn- noon onfcplb keyboard was responsible for Kidering her wrists useless for ■' Brk. Bshe is now on disability and Hi't lift more than five pounds with her hands. |^ e suc d Compaq for $800,000 in damages and lost wages, claim- Ives arerapig Compaq should have warned jn biolog!i: users. emeritus;!! |But jurors found because the as at DallsiHoiiston-based computer compa- earlion. ny didn't know its computers r plants;;could cause injury, it was not re- radiatioiKiiSponsible. people art; l"The key to the verdict, the aid Jaggerturning point was that there was dvocatesrno connection proven between sal in Teulhe aches and pains of the plain- and infctiff. and the keyboard," Ed Hub- level radkbard, an attorney for Compaq, Hd Tuesday. on of orpT: ,Hut Steven Phillips, a New America:rYbrk City attorney representing . has piitoip nportancecpi • • •uc’ .r-arr used in va some 2,000 keyboard-wrist injury cases that will surface in courts beginning this summer, down played the significance of Com paq's victory. "From my perspective, I have always said, in all of these mass torts, the deck is stacked at the be ginning for the defendant," Phillips said. "It always takes the plaintiffs attorneys a year or two to get up to speed. I'm extremely confi dent." Phillips compared the emer gence of the first keyboard prod uct liability cases to the first as bestos cases that made their way to courtrooms decades ago. "The first dozen asbestos cases were lost," Phillips said. "It takes a while to get the skeletons out of the closet. "The way it works is this: Sooner or later a critical mass of information develops and we start winning," he said. Phillips' 2,000 clients are com prised of journalists, bank and brokerage house employees, sec retaries and clerks. In recent years a flood of wrist injury cases have been filed against computer keyboard oper ators. Those who suffer from the in juries claim repetitive operations on keyboards cause them pain and numbness that ruin their ca reers after crippling their hands. Three other cases are pending against Compaq, filed by Wood cock's co-workers. Is America a bad influence ? Immigrants' performance drops in U.S. school system The Associated Press SAN FRANCISCO — Immigrant children do better in school than their American classmates but their performance declines as they become more Americanized, a new study says. The study released Tuesday is key to helping immigrant chil dren advance as the nation loses the manufacturing jobs where their parentshave traditionally found work, said Ruben G. Rum- baut of Michigan State University. "The longer you are in the United States, the more you learn, among other things, the bad habits, such as wearing headphones while studying or waiting to the last minute to study for a test," Rumbaut said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Many studies have shown that the children of immigrants do better in school than American children. This study shows that as immigrant children become Americanized they move in the di rection of their American counterparts. Rumbaut's study showed that foreign-born children who have lived in the United States for five to 10 years had a grade point average of 2.58, higher than that of U.S.-born children of immi grants. The U.S.-born children of immigrants had a grade point aver age of only 2.44. The foreign-born children spent an average of 2.59 hours per day doing homework, compared with 2.40 hours per day among the American-born children. The figures are based on analysis of school records of 5,000 children in San Diego and Miami. Rumbaut himself was born in Cuba and moved to the United States at age 12. "I have gone through the story myself," he said. Judith Treas, a professor at the University of California, Irvme, said other studies have found similar effects. "There does seem to be this extraordinary draw of American culture for immigrant children, not always with good conse quences," she said. w , rt • J Guillermina Jasso, a professor at New York University, said, "More research is needed before we can have a better assessment. But one of the things we do know is that U.S.-born immigiant children outperform American children. okidata OL400e LED Page Printer i ■ ■ ■—i : ss m elSmEj choice 11/23/93 Student Aid. 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