Banner Graphic, Volume 15, Number 359, Greencastle, Putnam County, 4 October 1985 — Page 2

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The Putnam County Banner Graphic, Friday, Oct. 4,1985

Dinosaurs'demise: 65-million-year-oldsootsaidfirstlinkto extinction

c. 1985 N.Y. Times News Service NEW YORK Scientists say they have discovered the first direct evidence, 65-million-year-old soot, that fire once swept the world and contributed to the mass extinctions of dinosaurs and many other forms of life. In a report in the journal Science, published Friday, chemists of the University of Chicago said the “surprisingly large amount” of soot appeared to be worldwide, could only have been produced in flames or hot gases and represented fallout from a dense smoke cloud that must have brought a killing darkness and chill to the world. From the soot residue, found in ancient sediments, the Chicago chemists theorized that the firestorm was ignited by the impact of a huge asteroid or comet. The findings were seen as further evidence supporting the hypothesis, advanced six years ago, that an extraterrestrial object struck the Earth with such violence 65 million years ago that the airborne debris of dust, rock and vapor cast a pall over the world. In the darkness, the theory goes, plants withered, grazing animals starved and the predators that fed on them became extinct, as did more than half of all the plant and animal groups. The soot discovery introduced another lethal factor, fire, to the scenarios of catastrophe. The conflagration set off by the im-

Gun foes cheer ruling on liability ANNAPOLIS, Md. (AP) - A Maryland Court of Appeals ruling allowing crime victims to sue makers and sellers of small, cheap handguns known as Saturday Night Specials is being hailed as a landmark decision and a major victory by guncontrol advocates. “This is the one we’ve been waiting for,” Howard Siegel, the lawyer who argued the case before Maryland’s highest court, said after the unanimous decision was handed down Thursday. He said the ruling means the people who make and sell the cheap handguns often used in committing crimes can no longer “hide behind the old excuse, ‘I wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger. ’ ” Josh Sugarmann, a spokesman for the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, said the ruling means “we can now have a twofront battle to ban handguns.” Efforts can be pursued at the legislative level and in the courts, where foes can wage an economic war against gunmakers and retailers, he said. The ruling said anyone shot during a criminal act with a Saturday Night Special can sue the manufacturer, distributor and seller of the weapon. The ruling does not apply to better quality, more expensive handguns. It also applies only in Maryland, although spokesmen on both sides of the gun control issue said it could influence rulings in other states. While gun control advocates were delighted with the ruling, Dave Warner, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association, called it “a very bad decision ... I don’t know how many cases there have been in the United States, and not one has ruled that way.” The liability question reached the Court of Appeals in a case filed by Olen J. Kelley of Silver Spring, who was shot during a 1981 supermarket robbery with an inexpensive gun made by a subsidiary of Rolm Gesellschaft of West Germany. Company lawyer Louis Zimmerman said he did not know whether the Bavarian gunmaker would appeal.

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pact probably destroyed much of the world’s vegetation, the chemists surmised. The flames consumed oxygen and poisoned the air with carbon monoxide. The smoke, even more than the dust clouds, absorbed sunlight and sent temperatures plunging worldwide. The scientists also said the new discovery suggested that nuclear warfare’s wintry effects on climate could be more extensive and devastating than have been predicted. In their report, the team of Chicago scientists, Wendy S. Wolbach, Dr. Roy S. Lewis and Dr. Edward Anders, called the soot found in the sediment at three widely separated sites “an ancient analog of the smoke cloud predicted for nuclear winter.” “It may therefore help determine some important parameters for the nuclear winter calculations,” they added. As often happens in science, the investigators were looking for something else when they discovered the soot. Anders, a professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago’s Enrico Fermi Institute, said in a telephone interview that clay samples from Denmark, Spain and New Zealand were examined for traces of noble gases, such as xenon and neon, that could have been residue of the impacting meteorite. These samples were from the same sediments where geologists found anomalous amounts of iridium, an element

Ready-made decorated pumpkins are available in Winterport, Maine, as Teresa Forrest puts the finishing touches on one of her personalized pumpkins. She and her daughter

Deleted from farm bill legislation

Farm referendum plan defeated

c. 1985 N.Y. Times News Service WASHINGTON - The House of Representatives Thursday bowed to pressure from the Reagan administration and the nation’s food processors by defeating a section of the new farm bill that could have led to severely restricted production of wheat and corn and to higher prices for consumers. The plan would have gone into effect only if 60 percent of the wheat and corn farmers had voted for it in a nationwide referendum. The plan w'as deleted from the legislation by a surprisingly large margin of 77 votes, 251-174. All but 10 Republicans voted against the plan, which the administration considered to be an unwarranted intrusion of federal controls into the agricultural marketplace. Eighty-two Democrats also backed the president, who had threatened to veto any farm bill that contained the referendum plan. “The administration really pulled out all the stops on this one,” said Rep. Thomas A. Drschle, D-S.D.

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will hand decorate an estimated 3,000 pumpkins between now and Halloween for sale at their roadside stand. (AP Wirephoto).

The rejection of the referendum plan came as the House moved toward final passage of the farm bill, which would extend federal agricultural programs for five years. In general, the bill freezes most programs to support farm prices at current levels for that period. Congressional estimates say the House bill could cost $27.9 billion in the current fiscal year, which began Monday, and $l4O billion over five years. The administration, contending that the congressional estimates are based on out-of-date assumptions about the economy and crops, predicts that in the first three years alone outlays for farm subsidies would run sl6 billion above congressional estimates. In coming weeks, the Senate is scheduled to take up a more generous farm bill. Republicans from farm states who are facing tough re-election battles next year have brushed aside objections by administration officials, who would like to gradually eliminate many of the existing farm programs.

No dice

Mitterrand rejects Gorbachev's separate negotiations

PARIS (AP) French President Francois Mitterrand today rejected Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s offer of separate negotiations on nuclear disarmament. Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, said Britain would carefully consider a similar proposition, but had not yet received a formal proposal. Mitterrand opened a joint news conference with Gorbachev today by saying that “France’s problem is to remain above the threshold of credibility” with its independent nuclear deterrent. “We hardly have an intermediate nuclear force,” he said. “France does not refuse an exchange of views with the Soviet Union, but I do not think that it would be reasonable to think that there could be a negotiation,” Mitterrand said. Gorbachev, in a nuclear disarmament package announced Thursday, had for the first time suggested separate talks with France and Britain on cutting their

rare on the surface of the earth but more abundant in meteorites. It was this discovery, since reinforced by findings at more than two dozen other sites around the world, that led Dr. Luis W. Alvarez, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, and his son, Dr. Walter Alvarez, a geologist at the University of California at Berkeley, to their asteroid-impact hypothesis to explain the mass extinctions 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous geologic period. “The Alvarezes opened up a field,” Anders said, “and a lot of us wanted to get in on the act.” But the clay yielded no traces of the noble gases that the chemists were seeking. Instead, in dissolving the material for analysis, Anders’ group found substanial amounts of graphitic carbon, or soot. It was mainly in the form of fluffy particles less than 40 millionths of an inch across. Examining the particles under an electron microscope, Wolbach, a chemistry graduate student, and Lewis, a senior research associate at the Fermi Institute, along with Anders, determined that the structure of the clusters was characteristic of carbon deposited from flames. They said it was unlikely that the carbon came from the meteorite itself, for meteorites do not contain that much carbon, or from the earth where the impact occurred. Wildfires, the scientists concluded, “seem to be the most

Shiite Moslem terrorists claim to have killed American hostage

BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) - The Lebanese capital’s leading independent newspaper said today that Shiite Moslem terrorists claimed to have killed American hostage William Buckley in retaliation for Israel’s raid on PLO headquarters in Tunisia. The newspaper, An-Nahar, said it received a statement and photograph of Buckley from the terrorist group Islamic Jihad, or Islamic Holy War, which it published today. Islamic Jihad “stated it has carried out the execution,” An-Nahar said in an accompanying report. Meanwhile, about 100 Soviets, most of them women, were evacuated from their embassy in west Beirut today, seven hours before a deadline for a threatened suicide bombing of the compound. The bomb threat was made Wednesday by an anonymous caller who said he spoke for the Islamic Liberation Organization, the group that claimed responsibility for kidnapping four Soviet diplomats on Monday and killing one of them The Soviets, guarded by 150 heavily armed Druse militiamen and Lebanese riot policemen, left the embassy in three buses. Police sources said they were heading for Damascus, the Syrian capital, but some militiamen said the buses were headed for the Beirut airport. The statement given to An-Nahar, written in ungrammatical Arabic, said: “We declare that in revenge for the blood of our

The vote to delete the referendum plan was the administration’s only victory in the weeklong debate over the farm measure. A series of amendments aimed at reducing existing programs were soundly defeated as Congress continued to insist that the federal government had to take responsibility for the economic crisis in the Farm Belt. The House adjourned for the evening and planned to resume debate on the farm bill Monday. Rep. Byron L. Dorgan, D-N.D., summed up the mood of the House by saying, “People sense that there is an overwhleming drive in this country to save the family farm.” The provision defeated by the House Thursday would have allowed farmers to vote next February on a program for the next two crop years. If they approved the plan, farmers would then cut back on their total wheat production by 30 percent and corn production by 20 percent. The theory was that the reduced production would drive up prices. In addition, farmers selling their crops abroad would

nuclear forces in a European framework. The Soviets previously had wanted to count the French and British missiles in with the American arsenal in U.S.-Soviet Geneva arms talks. Howe said today in an interview on Britain’s Independent Radio News that, “Any specific proposal what is put to us by the Soviet Union will of course be carefully considered.” Howe spoke from Bonn, West Germany, where he made a speech Thursday. Gorbachev, in the midst of an official visit to France, also called for a total ban on arms in space, and major cuts in U.S and Soviet missile arsenals. He said the Soviet Union had unilaterally cut back on its SS-20 missiles aimed at Western Europe. Gorbachev also sharply criticized President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as “Star Wars.” Part of Gorbachev’s package had been presented to Reagan on Sept. 27 by the

plausible source of the soot layer Even if the object hit the ocean, the scientists said, the impact could ignite fires on continents hundreds of miles away, the result of heat radiating from the exploding fireball and the expanding cloud of rock vapor. If the impact happened in the Bering Sea, as some geologists suggest, then Europe, Asia and North America would have been within ignition range. “The surprisingly large amount of soot suggests either that much of the Earth’s vegetation burned down or that substantial amounts of fossil fuels were ignited also,” the Chicago scientists wrote in their report. Several scientists said the discovery should add to the growing body of evidence bolstering the Alvarez impact hypothesis. Still, some scientists, especially paleontologists, contend that, even if such an impact did occur, the causes of the mass extinctions were probably more complex and gradual. They suspect that before the impact the dinosaurs were already on the wane, and may have even died out, because of drastic changes in the dimate from falling sea levels, separating continents, volcanic eruptions and emerging mountains. Luis Alvarez was one of the first scientists to compare the supposed catastrophe 65 million years ago with the prospects for devastation from nuclear warfare.

world

martyrs, we announce the execution of the resident American intelligence agent in the Middle East and the first political officer at the American Embassy in Beirut, William Buckley, right after the publication of this statement.” The same text appeared in a leftist newspaper, As-Safir. “They’re telling us that by the time we got the paper out he’d be dead,” said an official at An-Nahar, who spoke on condition he not be identified. An-Nahar said the statement and photo, in which Buckley looked pale and drawn, were delivered to the newspaper’s West Beirut office at 1 a.m. today. There was no way to confirm the statement and no other word on Buckley’s fate. U.S. Embassy officials could not be reached for comment. In Washington, White House deputy press secretary Larry Speakes said the

in House

receive a subsidy to make them competitive in the world market. In effect, the battle pitted the grain farmers, who want higher prices, against the food processors, who want to buy grain at lower prices. The farm bill also contained these provisions: —lt extends for five years price supports on a variety of commodities, including sugar, wool, peanuts, soybeans, rice, cotton and dairy products. —lt continues for five years Public Law 480, under which surplus commodities are purchased by the government and shipped to poor countries abroad. It also directs the secretary of agriculture to develop an export assistance program. —To promote soil conservation, the bill makes farmers who cultivate highly erodable land ineligible for federal aid programs. In addition, the bill would extend the food stamp program for five more years and would expand consumer education programs to promote better nutrition.

Soviet Union’s foreign minister, Eduard A. Shevardnadze. On another Gorbachev pronouncement, that Moscow was unilaterally reducing its SS-20 missiles in Europe, the administration was unimpressed, seeing it as a thinly veiled attempt to dissuade The Netherlands from joining other NATO countries in deploying new American missiles. After Gorbachev disclosed his proposal for separate negotiations with France and Britain, President Reagan said “it’s more power to them” if the Soviets can arrange such talks. While one purpose of the proposal might be to sow discord between the United States and the European allies, Reagan and other officials seemed unworried “It certainly would drive a wedge if we arrogantly decided we would negotiate on behalf of other countries without their consent,” Reagan said in Cincinnati. “No, this is between them and the Soviet Union,” he added.

White House had “no independent confirmation” of the report. State Department spokesman Joe Reap said, “We have nothing on it. We are of course checking it.” Buckley, 57, was kidnapped March 16, 1984, outside his Beirut home. The photograph printed today showed a bearded Buckley wearing a gray track suit with yellow stripes across the chest. He appeared to be wearing the same clothes as in a polaroid photograph issued on May 16 along with photos of three other Americans and two Frenchmen. Islamic Jihad has demanded the release of 17 men convicted and imprisoned in Kuwait for the December 1983 terrorist bombings of the U.S. and French embassies in Kuwait. Three of the 17 have been sentenced to death.

Super test proposed for Indiana pupils INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - A super test proposed by Indiana’s Department of Education for all grades would scrap the current mixture of achievement tests. It also would allow legislators to better gauge the impact of dollars spent for education, sponsors say. The major testing change would eliminate the burden on local school districts of reporting the 4.3 million student scores they now send to the education department. But the proposal, if approved by the Legislature, would force each school district to administer the same achievement tests. Although state officials have not publicly estimated the cost of implementing the new testing program, it could easily cost several million dollars. The three-year cost of the new statewide competency test, given to third-graders last year and designed to detect poor students, will be about $1.75 million. The super test would cover all major subjects and be given all students. Results of the test would be given directly to the state and to districts. Now, districts can select the achievement tests they want among several well-known national tests, although the state mandates reporting of these test results. State Superintendent of Public Instruction H. Dean Evans and department officials gave board members their first glimpse of this major change Thursday during the board’s monthly meeting. Evans said earlier this week the proposal likely would be considered during the 1987 session of the General Assembly and, if funded, be implemented the next fall at the earliest. The plan is a major change and would have an impact on local curriculum, he said. “It should not have a negative effect, for sure. It would provide the department of education with the information we need to know where to put our energies and resources.”