President Reagan named a panel to take full responsibility for investigating the cause of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. It is time, Mr. Reagan said, to take a “hard look” at the disaster that killed the seven members of the Challenger crew last Tuesday. The panel, the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, will take over responsibility for examining the accident, replacing the board already convened by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as the official investigative body. William R. Graham, Acting Administrator of the space agency, who attended a White House meeting where Mr. Reagan announced he was creating the panel, said the launching of future shuttles would be suspended until the commission completed its investigation. The group is to report to the President and the NASA Administrator within 120 days.
A pattern of accidents, personnel problems and low-performance ratings has marked the servicing and maintenance of the space shuttles in the last several months, according to government documents and former service-contractor employees. The tasks have been performed since 1983 by the Lockheed Space Operations Company. No one has suggested that the history of problems was the cause of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger last Tuesday, which killed seven astronauts. Nor have space agency officials investigating the disaster ruled out the management practices of contractors at the Kennedy Space Center as possible causes. A recent investigation by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, whose report is dated December 13, cited several safety violations and personnel problems in the management of the solid-rocket assembly facility at the Kennedy Space Center, a program that the Lockheed company oversees.
Wreckage from the space shuttle Challenger is being pushed up the East Coast by the Gulf Stream, and bits and pieces could wash ashore in the coming weeks as far north as Nova Scotia. Sightings of wreckage by search ships and aircraft have declined markedly over the last two days as debris has either sunk or dispersed over a wider area of the ocean in the six days since the shuttle exploded over the Atlantic, killing all seven crew members aboard. As a result, the Navy plans to pull its four ships out of the search Tuesday, and the Coast Guard says it intends to scale back surface searching off the Southeast coast. The Coast Guard will send fixed-wing aircraft searching north of Charleston, South Carolina, where floating debris was found Sunday.
In offices, cafeterias and the big shuttle hangar at Cape Canaveral, workers at the Kennedy Space Center paused this afternoon to see President Reagan announce on closed-circuit television the formation of a blue-ribbon investigation commission and to hear his words of encouragement about the shuttle program’s future. Still, they were left to wonder, all 15,500 of them, when their work would return to normal. Since the Challenger disaster last Tuesday, most work on the other three shuttles has been suspended. They have been grounded indefinitely, pending the outcome of the investigation of the accident. The launching complex that the Challenger took off from and the two control rooms where the liftoff was directed have been declared off-limits to all workers, except for a team that went to launching pad 39-B to check safety conditions and lock a service tower in place. The space agency’s interim board of inquiry ordered the areas closed as potential evidence that was not to be touched.
About 500 friends, relatives and neighbors of Christa McAuliffe gathered this morning for a funeral mass in a Concord, New Hampshire church where she once taught confirmation classes. The mass was celebrated by the Rev. James Leary, a cousin of the 37-year-old teacher who died aboard the space shuttle Challenger. It was Father Leary who married her to Steven McAuliffe in 1970. Mr. McAuliffe, a lawyer, and the couple’s two children, Caroline, 6, and Scott, 9, returned home to Concord late Sunday afternoon. The family had traveled to Florida for the launching. Mr. McAuliffe later attended a memorial service in Houston for the seven people who died in the space shuttle explosion.
Dr. Marvin Resnik borrowed words from his neighbors today to honor his daughter, Judith, who died aboard the Challenger. “There’s nothing much I can say except thank you for your caring and sympathizing in our loss,” Dr. Resnik told the thousands of people who gathered for a memorial service at Firestone High School, which the astronaut had attended. Among the speakers was Senator John Glenn, Democrat of Ohio, the first American in orbit, who challenged the space program to “turn tragedy into triumph.” Dr. Resnik quoted from a letter he had received from his neighbors. “As parents, there is a personal door to grief that no one else can enter,” the letter said. “The sheer numbers of people that mourn with you must be a great comfort to you. There is a world that has been touched.” About 20 astronauts attended the service, as did about 40 members of the high school’s class of 1966, of which she was a member.
Thousands of people from the rural tobacco community of Lake City, South Carolina joined today to pay tribute to Dr. Ronald E. McNair, a native son, on the second anniversary of the black astronaut’s first flight aboard the Challenger. About 2,000 people gathered in Robinson Memorial Auditorium for a community memorial to Dr. McNair, who was traveling on the Challenger for the second time when it exploded. Vance Brand, the commander of the earlier shuttle mission, called Dr. McNair an “outstanding astronaut, a scholar and a scientist.” The auditorium, just down the street from several large tobacco warehouses, fronts on Ron McNair Boulevard, the main highway between Florence and Charleston. The four-lane, business-lined road was renamed after the astronaut after his homecoming from the earlier flight in February 1984. Schools were closed for the day and school district officials said they would be closed every February 3 to honor the town’s most famous resident, who as a youth picked cotton and tobacco in nearby fields and later became a laser physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Reagan Administration is considering three widely varying approaches in its deliberations over how to respond to Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s proposal on January 15 calling for the gradual elimination of all nuclear weapons. The possible responses, offered by the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the State Department and the Defense Department, were considered at a meeting of the National Security Council today, Administration officials said. A White House official said the Administration was “still in the process of working on it” and that no decision would be made before consulting the United States’ European allies. President Reagan is expected to formally respond to the Soviet leader’s proposal in a letter. The specifics of the Administration’s stance may also be discussed in the Geneva arms control talks.
U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz said today that the United States would regard it as “a positive development” if the Soviet Union released any imprisoned dissidents and generally eased curbs on emigration. Mr. Shultz spoke a day after American officials said an accord had been reached on an exchange of intelligence agents that would include Anatoly B. Shcharansky, a Jewish activist. The reports said the exchange would involve East German and West German spies. Mr. Shcharansky was sentenced in 1978 to 13 years in prison and labor camp on charges of having collected intelligence for the United States.
Anatoly B. Shcharansky, the Jewish activist, reported in a letter from labor camp last month that he was being treated better, his brother said here today. The brother, Leonid B. Shcharansky, said the family did not know whether the improved conditions, including better medical care and more time for reading, walking and resting, were related to a possible release. He said the family was hopeful although it had received no word from the Soviet authorities or from the United States Embassy regarding a reported plan to release Leonid Shcharansky as part of an East-West exchange of intelligence agents. “There have been rumors before and I hoped for Anatoly’s release, but I did not really believe it would happen,” the brother said. “This time I believe it will.”
The Soviet Union ordered the expulsion of four French diplomats in retaliation for France’s expulsion of the same number of Soviet diplomats. The expulsions followed the arrest in France of Bernard Sourrisseau, 40, a retired serviceman charged with passing French naval secrets to suspected Soviet military intelligence agents, the French External Relations Ministry said. The four Soviets, who were not identified, left over the weekend. The ministry said the French diplomats were ordered to be out of the Soviet Union by the end of this week.
France is blocking a proposal that the major industrial democracies discuss joint efforts to respond to future terrorist attacks, according to officials involved in planning a May summit meeting. French representatives have objected to an American initiative, accepted by several countries, to put terrorism on the agenda of a meeting of leaders of the seven largest industrial countries, the officials said. The meeting is to be held in May in Tokyo. Most of the participants have accepted the American idea, which was most recently discussed at an unpublicized meeting held in Hawaii last week to prepare the Tokyo agenda, the officials said. But France has long resisted efforts to discuss noneconomic matters at the annual summit meeting, which brings together the leaders of the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Japan and West Germany. “In general,” a French official said, “we have resisted and even been hostile to any political departures at these meetings that would create the impression” that the seven countries were acting as an executive body.
An explosion, apparently caused by a bomb, ripped through a crowded shopping arcade on the Champs-Élysées tonight. Eight people were wounded, three of them seriously. The blast, the second in a crowded area of central Paris in two months, sent shards of glass flying through a shop-lined passage beneath the Hotel Claridge, filling it with smoke. Witnesses said that damage was extensive and that pedestrians had fled the scene in panic. The police said rescue teams had difficulty reaching the wounded because the explosion had set off automatic sprinklers that flooded the area. There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the blast.
The death toll in four days of heavy snow and freezing cold across southern Europe rose to at least 35, including a Frenchwoman asphyxiated by heater fumes and five people-three of them believed to be Americans-who were killed in an Italian traffic pileup. The deaths during one of the heaviest snowfalls in 40 years included 16 in Italy, 11 in France, five in Spain, two in Austria and one in Britain. Residents of southern France began digging out from drifts up to 10 feet deep, as new snow halted road-clearing operations.
A telltale hint of the political damage done to Margaret Thatcher by a month of sharpening controversy emerged the other day when the Prime Minister sought to remind a panel of television interviewers that unemployment was a much more important problem for the nation than the future of the small helicopter company called Westland. Her effort to change the focus of the questions had a tinge of exasperation, if not desperation, for Britain’s record level of unemployment is not a subject Mrs. Thatcher or members of her Conservative Party normally spotlight. The January figures on joblessness came out a few days later, and they represented another dose of bad news for an embattled Prime Minister who had hoped to see the upward trend reversed this year. With the latest rise, the rate went over 14 percent, meaning that 3.4 million people — one out of every seven in the work force — was out of work. By a harsher reckoning, the total can be said to be approaching four million, because an additional 495,000 people, enrolled in government training schemes but otherwise jobless, are excluded from the official tally.
A soldier was killed today by an Irish Republican Army bomb while he was on patrol near the border with Ireland, the police said. The soldier, a member of the locally recruited Ulster Defense Regiment, died instantly after the explosion near Belcoo, in County Fermanagh. Five other members of the patrol were unhurt. The I.R.A. said it had planted the bomb. The dead man was the second member of the Ulster Defense Regiment to be killed this year by nationalist guerrillas fighting to end British rule, and the 153rd since the start of the current struggle in the province 16 years ago.
OPEC fails to agree upon a petroleum production agreement after a 2 day meeting in Vienna.
A huge blast killed 10 people, wounded 21 and caused devastation in a half-mile radius in a Christian suburb of Beirut, the police said. The bomb explosion appeared to have been aimed at Phalangists. The bomb, hidden in a child’s school bag, exploded in a shopping plaza in Christian East Beirut, killing ten people and wounding 21, police said. The bomb, estimated to contain 55 pounds of TNT, wrecked a dozen shops and set an apartment ablaze but failed to damage its presumed target, an office of President Amin Gemayel’s Falangist Party, 35 yards away. It was the sixth bombing in 24 hours in the Lebanese capital’s Christian sector. Clashes and bombings have increased in Beirut since mid-January, when Gemayel in effect scuttled a Syrian-arranged peace plan. Muslim and Druze militias allied with Syria have been targeting Gemayel’s Falangist forces ever since.
The two U.S. aircraft carriers that conducted flight operations off the Libyan coast last month will return to the area next week to keep up naval pressure on Libya’s leader, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, Reagan Administration sources said. But no decision has been made on whether the Coral Sea and Saratoga, now making port calls in Italy at Trieste and Naples respectively, will enter the disputed Gulf of Sidra. Meanwhile, the State Department said that American wives of Libyan citizens, estimated to number about 100, will probably be allowed to remain in Libya despite President Reagan’s order that all Americans leave.
Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi has opened a two-day conference of radical Arab groups here with a call for them to intensify their “struggle against imperialism” in Europe and the United States, according to a Palestinian participant. The Palestinian, who spoke on condition that he not be identified, said today that Palestinian representatives at the meeting, which opened Sunday night, rejected what they considered to be the Libyan leader’s thinly veiled call for more violence in response to America’s economic boycott of Libya and its military maneuvers off the Gulf of Sidra. Colonel Qaddafi was said to have issued his appeal at the opening of an emergency meeting of a group called the Allied Leadership of the Revolutionary Forces of the Arab Nation.
The Pope and Mother Teresa meet in Calcutta. Today, even Pope John Paul II was at a loss for words. As tens of thousands of mainly Hindu, mainly destitute Calcuttans cheered outside, John Paul visited the home for the dying established by Mother Teresa in the heart of this city’s slums. Four people died at the hospice today, including a young boy, and the bodies were still in the home’s morgue when the Pope arrived. Of the 86 still alive, many were near death. To the living, the Pope carried trays of food and he spoon-fed an old man. Over the dead, the Pope pronounced his blessing. One woman cried out disconsolately to the Pope in a language he did not understand. John Paul asked Mother Teresa to translate. “She is saying, ‘I am very alone,’ ” Mother Teresa said. “She is telling you to come back again.” John Paul just took the woman’s head in his hands and tried to comfort her.
From mass mailings by the internal revenue service to traffic arrests of his opponents’ supporters, President Ferdinand E. Marcos and his backers have been displaying the full range of their Governmental powers in their campaign for his re-election. As the campaign heads toward election day on Friday, the President is putting to use his control of the news outlets, the military, the national purse strings and the powers of Government agencies, as well as of the mechanics of the election itself. His opponent, Corazon C. Aquino, has accused him of violating election laws that prohibit the use of Government agencies in election campaigns. “It’s an incredible display,” said an American election observer. “It’s an organ, and he’s hitting every stop.”
Corazon C. Aquino, the opposition candidate, delivered a detailed policy speech today to rebut what she characterized as American concern that she might lack political substance or be “naive” in handling Communist insurgents. Her remarks came amid a tough new attack on her opponent, President Ferdinand E. Marcos, whom she called a “Filipino Pharaoh.” “I was misunderstood in the United States and was in fact labeled too naive,” Mrs. Aquino declared in stressing that if elected she would exhaust “all bloodless schemes” to negotiate with the Communist guerrillas but would use military force if necessary. Mrs. Aquino did not identify the Americans she said had expressed doubts about her. But her remarks appeared clearly intended to demonstrate that she had the policies and determination to be a substantive President, a question Mr. Marcos has raised repeatedly.
Canadian Defense Minister Erik Nielsen publicly apologized today for eavesdropping on Liberal Party caucus meetings in the mid-1960’s, but dismissed his actions as nothing more than “happenstance.” “As a matter of happenstance I was able to know what was said at meetings of the Liberal caucus,” Mr. Nielsen said.
Jean-Claude Duvalier toured Port-au-Prince in a heavily-armed motorcade. The Haitian President told reporters that anti-government demonstrations that have shaken the country over the last week were the result of Haitians being manipulated by “the wrong people.” Mr. Duvalier, seeming relaxed and wearing a tan bush jacket, sped along in a high four-wheel-drive vehicle with his wife, Michele, at the wheel. It was the first business day after demonstrations on Friday in which security forces, firing guns and swinging riot sticks, chased protesters through the streets. The government said it had no official count of casualties. Some doctors estimated that 20 people had been killed, but other doctors put the number possibly as high as 50. Doctors and medical workers say dozens were injured.
Salvadoran guerrillas destroyed or damaged 10 buses and private vehicles operating in violation of a rebel traffic ban, civilian and military sources said. Bus dispatchers in eastern El Salvador reported traffic down to about 5% of normal. The ban is a guerrilla attempt to cripple the nation’s economy. Meanwhile, Salvadoran Government soldiers reported today that they had killed 12 guerrillas and wounded 6 in widely scattered skirmishes, and the rebels increased attacks on vehicles defying their traffic ban. The army said six rebels were killed in the Chirilagua-Jiquilisco area in southeastern El Salvador and four died in the San Jose Guayabal area, 15 miles northeast of the capital, San Salvador.
The governing party candidate, Oscar Arias Sanchez, emerged today as the official winner of this country’s presidential election. Mr. Arias has said he considers himself the leader of a new, younger generation and calls John F. Kennedy a role model. The image seems to fit the 44-year-old President-elect, the youngest in his country’s history. Coming from behind to win the election Sunday does not seem to have come as much of a surprise to Mr. Arias. Close relatives said he had always been convinced that he would one day gain Costa Rica’s highest office, and that he had gone after it with the stubborn persistence that is an essential part of his political character.
Suspected leftist rebels, aided by a power blackout before dawn, dynamited more than a dozen political and banking targets in downtown Lima, Peru, wounding three people and causing substantial damage. One of the blasts tore off the leg of a guard at the offices of Peruvian President Alan Garcia’s political party, the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance. No arrests were reported, and no group claimed responsibility for the attacks. However, responsibility for many recent urban bombings has been claimed by the Tupac Amaru guerrilla group. Another leftist rebel band, the Maoist-influenced Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), has terrorized the countryside.
Six American passengers and two Chilean crew members were killed today when a light plane crashed in southern Chile. Three of those killed were identified as officials of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. The plane, a Piper Navajo owned by the Chilean police, crashed into hills 13 miles north of the town of Coihaique, the police said. Five of the Americans killed were identified as Bernard Thomas, Goodyear’s general manager in Chile; his wife, Sian; two Goodyear executives, James Volk and Robert Dunsmord, and Mr. Dunsmord’s wife, Olga. The other American was not identified. The police said the crew members were Chilean police officers. The plane left Santiago, 800 miles to the north, this morning. The police did not say why the group had flown to the area or why the Americans were aboard a police aircraft.
President Reagan’s new budget proposes substantial cutbacks in projected spending on health programs for the elderly and the poor while seeking sustained increases in military spending, according to Administration officials and budget documents. The documents indicate that Mr. Reagan will propose to reduce projected spending for Medicare and Medicaid by $70 billion over the next five years. The projections, made by the Office of Management and Budget, showed the amounts that would be spent if there were no changes in current programs and policy. Under Mr. Reagan’s budget for the fiscal year 1987, which he is to submit to Congress Wednesday, the Pentagon budget would rise to $311.6 billion in 1987 and $395.5 billion in 1991. It is estimated at $278.4 billion in this fiscal year. The total military budget, including nuclear weapons programs of the Energy Department, would rise from $286.1 billion this year to $320.3 billion in 1987 and $405.9 billion in 1991, under the Reagan proposal.
President Reagan addresses 250 senior political Presidential Appointees.
President Reagan receives the annual report to the Nation from representatives of the Boy Scouts of America.
Thanks to a strong recruiting year, the nation’s active reserve forces climbed to their highest levels in history during fiscal 1985, the Pentagon said. The report also shows that 88% of all the new enlistees in fiscal 1985 were high school graduates, compared to 85% in fiscal 1984. Twenty percent of all enlistees were black compared to 21% in fiscal 1984, and 12% of all enlistees in fiscal 1985 were women, the same percentage reported in fiscal 1984. The overall strength of the so-called Selected Reserves rose by 42,200, or 4%, during the year ending last September 30, setting a record total of 1,088,100.
The Department of Health and Human Services plans to propose regulations that would require people seeking to immigrate to the United States to be screened for exposure to the AIDS virus. Charles Kline, a spokesman for the department, said the proposed regulations had been approved by the department’s Secretary, Dr. Otis R. Bowen, and sent for review to the Office of Management and Budget. Mr. Kline said the proposed regulations would add acquired immune deficiency syndrome to the list of diseases that are grounds for exclusion of people seeking immigrant visas.
Larry Wu-Tai Chin, accused of decades of spying for the Chinese, passed the only polygraph, or lie-detector, test he was given in his 30 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, prosecutors disclosed today. In papers filed in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, prosecutors said they intended to use the results of the examination as evidence at Mr. Chin’s trial, which is to open Tuesday. Mr. Chin has pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of spying for the Chinese throughout his career as an analyst with the C.I.A. Since its inception in 1947, the agency has subjected virtually all its employees to polygraph tests, both as a condition of initial employment and as part of its continuing security checks on officers assigned to sensitive tasks. Mr. Chin’s arrest last year came as the Reagan Administration was moving toward greater use of polygraph examinations to deter disclosing of classified information. Opponents of this move, noting the C.I.A.’s practice of routine testing of its employees, cited the Chin case as evidence that polygraph machines could be easily fooled.
Former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger said that he had decided not to challenge Mario M. Cuomo for governor of New York because he doesn’t have enough time to raise funds and organize a campaign. “I would immediately have to abandon all existing commitments to devote myself full-time to the substance, organization and financing of an effective gubernatorial race,” Kissinger said in a statement. “Circumstances do not permit this on such short notice.” Polls showed Kissinger badly trailing Cuomo. The decision leaves state Republicans scrambling to find a candidate.
National Guard troops blocked off a road leading to the Geo. A. Hormel & Co. plant in Austin, Minnesota, to allow workers to get past pickets as the company said it exceeded its goal of hiring 750 people to replace striking meatpackers. And state Agriculture Department agents fanned out to grocery stores in the Minneapolis area to investigate reports of sabotage to Hormel products, a department official said. Leaders of the 5 ½-month walkout, were scheduled to appear in court today on contempt charges.
The chief of staff of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board sent out mailgrams last month to about 20 Washington-area mortgage bankers soliciting a $500,000 home loan and signed them with her name and title, a board spokesman said. Shannon Ann Fairbanks told board officials she had inadvertently used her title in signing the bid requests. McKelvey said the incident, which occurred last month, had been brought to the attention of the board’s ethics officers, but he said he knew of no action contemplated against Fairbanks.
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, will spend more than $1 billion for medical research over the next five years, employing 900 scientists at 22 laboratories in 14 states, the institute has reported. It is establishing the labs at universities and university hospitals, said Dr. Donald S. Fredrickson, president of the institute. The institute was established in 1953 by industrialist Howard R. Hughes.
An eight-alarm fire burned out of control at a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, plant that makes jet engine parts, and residents were warned to stay indoors for fear the blaze would release toxic fumes, authorities said. About 16,000 people living within two miles of the TRW plant were asked to keep windows and doors closed and to shut their ventilation systems, said police Lieutenant Carroll Wagner. No injuries were reported.
A 40-year-old female factory worker dying of a viral infection received an artificial heart, hours after a Jarvik-7 was also implanted to keep a man in Pennsylvania alive until a human donor is found. Bernadette Chayrez received a Jarvik-70 heart, a miniature version of the Jarvik-7, in Tucson. In Pittsburgh, a 39-year-old unidentified man who received a Jarvik-7 artificial heart early Monday was responding to verbal commands. In Minneapolis, the first woman to receive an artificial-heart and later a human implant, Mary Lund, 40, has been removed from a respirator.
A financier who is already serving a Federal prison term for defrauding investors pleaded guilty today to state charges arising from a plot to finance former San Diego Mayor Roger Hedgecock’s 1983 campaign illegally. The imprisoned financier, J. David Dominelli, is the first of Mr. Hedgecock’s three co-defendants to be convicted since Mr. Hedgecock was found guilty last October of perjury and conspiracy.
Shipment of high-technology equipment to countries that are not supposed to receive it has become a major and highly profitable subsector of the American electronics industry, according to Customs Service agents and Federal prosecutors.
A 75-year-old disabled veteran driving a wheelchair down U.S. 1 to his home in Key West was killed by a motorist early Saturday, and a college student who turned himself in to the Florida Highway Patrol today was charged with leaving the scene of the accident. The student, George Doub, 22 years old, of the University of Miami, was released on $1,000 bond after being charged in connection with the hit-and-run death of the veteran, William A. Miller, who apparently tried to make the 160-mile trip to Key West in his wheelchair after a bureaucratic mix-up left him stranded in Miami.
Medical malpractice suits would be curbed under proposals made by the American Medical Association, but a special committee of the American Bar Association has recommended that the proposals be rejected. The committee’s recommendations are likely to intensify the sharp conflict between the legal and medical professions over what the A.M.A. asserts is a malpractice crisis.
Boat owners in New Bedford, Massachusetts spurned an offer from unionized fishermen today to return to work if the two sides entered into binding arbitration. “We don’t feel it’s appropriate to let some outside, third party compromise issues that are of primary importance to us,” said David Barnet, attorney for the Seafood Producers Association, which represents 32 boat owners.
Close inspections of 747’s are under way. The Federal Aviation Administration, concerned about possible severe cracks in the frames of older Boeing 747’s, has ordered airlines to conduct close examinations of the fuselages of up to 160 of the jumbo jets, Federal officials said. Spokesmen for several major airlines said the inspections had begun and were not expected to disrupt normal air service. The aviation agency’s emergency directive, which was sent over the weekend to all Boeing 747 operators, calls for Boeing jumbo jets that have made more than 14,000 landings to be inspected within 25 landings of receiving the order. Newer 747’s would have to be inspected within 50 landings. The inspections would later be repeated at regular intervals.
It was not long ago that people here on the Western Slope of the Rockies watched as the giant oil companies invested millions in construction and equipment used in mining and refining the country’s next energy miracle, shale oil. “I looked at all the money being spent and I said to myself, ‘this time it’s going to last,’ ” said William H. Cleary, president of Club 20, a Western Slope boosters group. “I thought there was no way the oil companies could pull out after all the money they put into oil shale.” But pull out they did, and now only one company is still active in the pursuit of extracting fossil fuel from the mountains of oil-bearing shale in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado.
Volunteers cleaned and treated hundreds of sea birds coated with oil today, while the Coast Guard reported little success in tracing the source of the three slicks off northern California. “Cleaning birds is not a laundry problem,” said Alice Berkner of the International Bird Rescue Operation in Berkeley, whose volunteers were working 15-hour shifts. “It’s a very involved process and takes a lot of time.” Nearly 1,000 oil-soaked murres, grebes, loons and cormorants were collected near San Francisco and farther south. They were being treated for dehydration and hypothermia. Investigators with the Coast Guard’s marine safety office were on the beaches near Half Moon Bay south of San Francisco as globs of the oil began washing ashore, said Petty Officer Kathleen Potter. The oil had been identified as “a heavy bunker-type oil used as fuel on ships,” she said. Investigators were trying to determine which ships might have been responsible for dumping the fuel into the ocean but were hampered because they did not know exactly when the slicks appeared.
Pixar Animation Studios (“Toy Story”; “The Incredibles”) headed by Edwin Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith, is spun off from Lucasfilm, Ltd as an independent film production company, with backing of Steve Jobs.
Dow Jones Industrial Average: 1594.27 (+23.28)
Born:
Lucas Duda, MLB first baseman and outfielder (New York Mets, Tampa Bay Rays, Kansas City Royals, Atlanta Braves), in Los Angeles, California.
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