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iume 103 • Issue 153 • 6 Pages
College Station, TX
Tuesday, June 24, 1997
ill
Iews
Briefs Prof sets precedent as AMA’s first female president
ugh named head of
ectrical engineering
Die electrical engineering depart-
ntnamed Dr. Chanan Singh, a
ssA&M professor of electrical
jneering, the new head of the de
tent this week.
iingh, who has been at A&M
;el978, specializes in electric
>er systems, power electronics
urban transportation systems,
^managed the National Science
ndation’s power systems pro-
u He also served as engineer for
railways in India and for the trans
lation ministry in Canada.
is the co-author of four
Iks on power systems,
tesucceeds interim department
*jDr. Norman Griswold.
of takes honors for
akespeare CD-ROM
Jr,James Harner, an English pro-
sorat Texas A&M University, was
ted the Besterman Medal for his
ion The World Shakespeare Bib-
sphyCD-ROM June 17 in London,
(tend. Harner is the editor of the
iography.
tie award was given by the Library
fflciation of Great Britain for the
Standing bibliography of 1996.
5isthe first time the award was
snforan electronic publication.
100 bibliographies were
mated.
shworth plans to
Texas A&M
llurof 1IISTIN (AP) — State Higher Edu-
Commissioner Kenneth Ash-
irth.whois retiring Aug. 31, plans
Texas A&M University as a
rt-timevisiting professor this fall.
Ashworth, who has been higher
Location commissioner since 1976,
ill be a visiting professor in Texas
M's College of Education during
semester and at the George
i)School of Government and Pub-
Servicein the spring. He will be
$30,000.
m Jill focuses on JFK
bssination records
Ise,
1
bs
lant-
|WS'
I
ree.
ISHINGTON (AP) — The board
iewing documents on the assas-
ition of President Kennedy would
inue working for another year un-
abillthe House passed Monday.
Hie board, established in 1992,
'esponsible for examining hun-
Js of thousands of Kennedy as-
sination documents and deciding
ter they can be made public. It
sformed to speed the release of
CIA and other records relating to
1963 assassination.
The independent panel has
nsferred more than 14,000 doc
ents to the National Archives
Records Administration for in
ion in the John F. Kennedy As-
isination Records Collection, the
Jse Republican Conference said
| n a ij iwritten statement.
TODAY
>ping Daisy’s frontman
ks about music and the
|pe f Rd’s new guitarist.
See Page 3.
aid : '
'0 ir
ENTERTAINMENT
OPINION
hafThcis: Perverse nature of
on 1 iual media permeates
^ Rerican culture, citizens.
See Page 5.
I ^
ONLINE
t-web.tamu.edu
more on
if story,
link to
s home
ige.
Hi*
16
til* 1 ^
By Joey Jeanette Schlueter
The Battauon
The Texas A&M College of Medicine has
something new to boast about.
Dr. Nancy W. Dickey, an associate professor
in the Department of Family and Community
Health at A&M, has been named the 1998 pres
ident of the American Medical Association. She
ran unopposed, and AMA delegates chose her
Sunday night.
Dickey will be the first woman president of
the nation’s largest organization of doctors.
Her responsibilities will include being the
primary spokeswoman for organized medi
cine, helping set medical agenda and influenc
ing health policy.
Dr. Michael Friedland, dean of the College
of Medicine and vice president of health affairs,
said Dickey will represent the medical organi
zation well.
"She’s a great model of what a physician
should be,” Friedland said. “She’s a doctor, a
teacher and she can balance a professional life,
a social life and her family life.”
Dickey teaches first- and second-year
medical students and trains interns and res
idents at A&M.
She chaired the AMA Board of Trustees and
has served on the association’s Council on Eth
ical and Judicial Affairs.
Janice Maldren, director of public affairs for
the College of Medicine, said Dickey focuses
her career on ethics in medicine. Her special
ization in ethics is one of the reasons she was
chosen for the presidency, Maldren said.
Friedland said assisted suicide, late-term
abortion, managed health care and Medicare
reform will be the top issues Dickey will deal
with during her term.
Friedland said Dickey is the best person for
the job to deal with such controversial and mul
tidimensional issues because of her knowledge
of medicine, her talent and her leadership skills.
“I don’t think it could have happened to a
better person,” Friedland said. “Dickey is one
of the best representatives of medicine in the
United States.”
^ ^ She’s a great model
of what a physician
should be.”
Dr. Michael Friedland
Dean, College of Medicine
The AMA, based in Chicago, has no legal
effect on government policies on medicine,
but the organization has impact on the
medical field, public policy and health
through lobbying and informational activ
ities. Publishing is the main source of infor
mational activities for the group.
Gene Charleton, a science writer for Uni-
'iHM
(jreen -ife
*
° T v
* ■ i A *
e ^ <e ._
Photograph: Tim Moog
Y0I! PrSCtrCI- 1 Tish Shanle y a sophomore biomedical science major, teaches a yell to a group of high school seniors who
v;»E 1 e are participating in the Honors Invitational Program Monday evening.
Four killed in
train collision
DEVINE, Texas (AP) —Two freight trains collided head-
on and burst into flames, killing four people and leaving
investigators searching Monday through the mangled,
smoldering remnants of locomotives and boxcars.
The two Union Pacific trains — one heading north, the
other heading south — slammed into each other about
11:15 p.m. Sunday on a single-track stretch of rail in this
town about 30 miles southwest of San Antonio.
“It looked like an explosion like in the movies,” said
Cayetano Guerrero, who was driving nearby when the
trains crashed. “It looked like the sunset coming up. That’s
how bright it was.”
The fire was extinguished by early Monday, although
smoke continued to spew from a huge clump of railcars.
The trains were carrying about 15,000 gallons of diesel fuel
but no hazardous materials. The surrounding area was briefly
evacuated immediately after the crash, authorities said.
Some of the 29 derailed cars were almost unrecogniz
able they were so badly damaged and twisted. The wreck
also damaged a railroad bridge.
Two of the dead were Union Pacific workers, one from
each train, said Mark Davis, a railroad spokesman at the ac
cident scene. Their identities were not immediately released.
The other two who died were not authorized train pas
sengers and were suspected to have been trespassers on
board, Union Pacific officials said.
A third railroad employee, identified as Randy Dennis,
37, was in serious but stable condition at Brooke Army
Medical Center in San Antonio with burns. A fourth em
ployee was treated and released.
The northbound train was headed from Laredo to near
Baton Rouge, La., and was carrying loads of rocks. The
southbound train, headed from Chicago to Mexico, was
transporting auto parts.
As workers repaired the train tracks and used a crane and
bulldozers to remove the rail cars Monday, investigators tried
to determine why the two trains were on the same track.
“That’s going to be the crux of our investigation,” said
John Bromley, Union Pacific spokesman in Omaha, Neb.
“We’re checking the orders that were issued to the trains
to see how they were written and how they were carried
out. It’s likely that human error will probably play a large
part in this.”
Investigators will question railroad dispatchers in Om
aha and the railroad employees who survived and will look
for clues in data boxes aboard the trains, Davis said.
“In each locomotive they have like a ‘blackbox,’” Davis
said. “It’s not as sophisticated as (on an) aircraft, but at least
it gives us when brakes were applied, how fast the train was
going, things of that nature.”
Former FBI agent gets
27 years for spying
Pitts charged with selling secrets to Russians
ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — A former
FBI agent was sentenced to 27 years
in prison Monday for spying for
Moscow before and after the fall of
the Soviet Union.
Earl Pitts, 44, the second FBI agent
caught spying, had been charged with
selling U.S. intelligences secrets to the
Russians for more than $224,000 from
1987 to 1992.
Prosecutors had sought a sentence
of nearly 24 1/2 years. But U.S. District
Judge T.S. Ellis told Pitts his crimes
were especially severe and said Pitts
has yet to fully apologize.
“Every time you go by Arlington,
every marker you see, every name you
see on the Vietnam Veterans Memori
al, or the Korean War Memorial, of
people who made the ultimate sacri
fice, you have betrayed them espe
cially,” Ellis said.
Pitts, looking thin and disheveled, told
the judge he understands how deeply he
betrayed his country and his profession.
“I do not wish to excuse or explain away
my actions. What I did was wrong, pure
and simple,” he said.
Pitts was snared in a 16-month FBI
sting that ended with his arrest in De
cember, when he was stationed at the
FBI Academy in Quantico. The FBI
caught Pitts by convincing him that
the Russian government wanted to re
activate him as a spy.
He pleaded guilty in February to
conspiring and attempting to commit
espionage, avoiding a possible sen
tence of life in prison.
The only other FBI agent ever caught
spying was Richard W. Miller, a Los An
geles agent who was arrested in 1984 and
later sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Earlier this month, CIA agent
Harold Nicholson was sentenced to 23
years for selling secrets to Moscow.
versity Relations, said Dickey has played a
major role in health care in the Bryan-Col-
lege Station area. Dickey is the clinical di
rector and family physician of the Family
Medicine Center in Bryan. The clinic is
staffed by residents in the College of Medi
cine’s family practice residency program.
Dickey, along with Dr. H. David Pope, trains
residents and interns at the clinic.
Dickey, 46, is from Richmond, Texas, but
moved to College Station with her husband
Frank Dickey, and joined the college faculty a
year and a half ago. She has been married for
26 years to Frank, who coaches high school
football and basketball. She has three chil
dren, ages 15, 18 and 21.
Dickey is in Chicago at the AMA headquar
ters attending the annual AMA convention and
could not be reached for an interview
More information about the American
Medical Association can be found on the
organization’s official website at www.ama-
assn.org/home/amahome.htm.
Flood leaves
Central Texas
towns ailing
LAKEWAY (AP) — A tearful Tammy
Keller helped move a television set, her
daughter’s pink bicycle and racks of clothes
out of her two-story home near Lake Travis
and into a rented trailer Monday.
Nearly everything was out of her house
except a collection of porcelain figurines
high on a shelf on the second floor.
That part of the house was expected
to be spared as water continued rising
from driving weekend rains. The down
pour turned peaceful creeks into white-
water rapids, killed three people in Ban
dera County and one man in Brown
County in Central Texas.
“Thank God for family and friends,”
Keller said through tears. “Everyone in
the world has called to help us.”
The Kellers, who were told water like
ly would fill the first floor of their home
and six inches of the second floor, were
among hundreds of families who evac
uated homes along swollen river and
lake beds from Hondo, west of San An
tonio, to Lakeway, just west of Austin.
Austin’s Lake Travis was expected to
be the hardest hit because it is the pri
mary downstream repository for the
Colorado River basin.
Although skies were sunny much of
the day Monday, scattered showers were
in the forecast for the next several days.
The Lower Colorado River Authority,
which provides water and electric ser
vice to about 1 million residents in 58
counties, projected that water levels in
Lake Travis would rise from a normal of
685 feet above sea level to 710 feet by
Tuesday morning as upstream rainwater
pours in.
That would match a record level fol
lowing Christmas Day flooding in 1991
that damaged approximately 300 homes
on the Lake Travis shoreline.
LCRA officials estimate that roughly 400
homes on Lake Travis will be damaged by
the most recent flooding, as well as 80
homes near Marble Falls and 80 more near
Llano. Both towns are along the swollen
Colorado River. Water levels in the Llano
River were the highest since 1952.
The floods left little question that last
year’s drought, which cost the state $5
billion, had been broken.
Robert Cullick, an LCRA spokesman,
said, “If you look back in histoiy, droughts
are always broken by floods. Texas just
doesn’t know how to be moderate.
“We got enough water in Lake Travis
in the last 24-hour period for about
60,000 families for a year,” Cullick said.
"I would say the drought is definite
ly broken.”
Transient alligator spotted at Wolf Pen Creek
By Robert Smith
The Battalion
A 4-foot alligator is on the
loose in Wolf Pen Creek, but no
injuries from the alligator have
been reported.
Jim Davis, a fishery special
ist at Texas A&M, said recent
heavy rains may have washed
the alligator into the creek.
“Alligators tend to wander,”
Davis said, “and when you have
a lot of water, they can move
around even more.”
Davis said alligators reside in
the Brazos and Navasota Rivers,
but they are not aggressive.
“If there’s a lot of‘people
out, they will usually leave,”
Davis said.
Steve Beachey, director of
College Station Parks and
Recreation, said the alligator
was first spotted Saturday be
hind Wolf Pen Creek Am
phitheatre.
Mario Barrientos of College
Station said he saw the alliga
tor twice.
“It was quite a shock,” Barri
entos said.
“I saw it in the water on the
backside of the creek on Satur
day. I saw it this morning
around 9:30 sunning on the
bank of the creek.”
On Monday, Beachey con
tacted the Texas Parks and
Wildlife Department, which
plans to locate and remove the
alligator this week.
Graphic: Brad Graeber