UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Wednesday, January 26, 1994
Normality sought in ruins of quake
The Associated Press
LOS ANGELES — Children trooped back to earthquake-battered schools, and frightened residents started straggling home from soggy, makeshift settlements yesterday as the city crept toward a warped normality.
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President Clinton asked Congress for $7.5 billion to rebuild highways and get families and businesses back on their feet following the Jan. 17 earthquake, whose death toll rose to 61 yesterday.
And the city's 5.6 million commuters refined techniques for threading the maze of crumpled concrete, driving long detours, car-pooling and — to their own amazement — riding the train.
Lesson plans gave way to counseling sessions and group discussions when the 640,000-student Los Angeles Unified School Dis
trict — the nation's second-largest — resumed classes for the first time since the Friday before the quake.
"I guess it's safer to be here than at home," said 14-year-old Monica Renderos at James Monroe High School in Sepulveda, Calif., near the quake's epicenter in the San Fernando Valley. "At home, you run around like an idiot."
About 65,000 students had no classrooms to return to because 76 schools were closed by quake damage.
District officials weren't immediately able to provide attendance figures. Several principals in the hard-hit San Fernando Valley reported attendance was from 40 percent to 60 percent of normal.
Thousands of people who resided in Red Cross shelters instead of their own homes returned to their residences after overcoming their fear of aftershock.
Census reveals decline in Americans' net worth
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Hard times and sagging real-estate values pulled down the net worth of American households by 12 percent — that's nearly $5,000 apiece — between 1988 and 1991, the government said yesterday.
The Census Bureau report also showed that in every category of investment —real estate, retirement and savings accounts — Black families own less than white families.
The years covered by the report included an eight-month economic recession that cost more than 1 million workers their jobs.
Falling real-estate values caused much of the $4,849 decline to $36,623 on median net worth after accounting for inflation. Rising prices of stocks, cars and trucks and retirement
accounts helped offset the losses.
Real estate was America's investment of choice. Fifty-four percent of the average household's wealth was in a home, rental property or other real-estate holdings.
Savings accounts and other interest-earning accounts were the second biggest investment: 14 percent.
The boom years of the 1980s did little to lift Americans' net worth. Households' median net worth in 1988, $41,472 was little changed from the $42,934 recorded in 1984.
Median means that the households had net worth — assets minus liabilities — of more than $41,472 and half had less.
Between 1988 and 1991, the net worth of the median white household plummeted $5,796, but the net worth of black and Hispanic households changed little.
Radiation research under fire
The Associated Press
BOSTON - At the dawn of the nuclear age, a 1946 announcement in "Science" magazine sounded reveller for scientists. The Manhattan Project was offering radioactive isotopes for research and medical treatment.
Hundreds of the doctors and scientists — the most esteemed of the time among them — took up the offer from the makers of the atomic bomb. They sought to cure the incurable with this wondrous energy of the universe.
But now, some of that work is coming into question, prompted by recent disclosures of plutonium and other radiation tests that were performed without informed consent on many subjects, including children or the terminally ill.
But the full extent of the work almost defies a complete investigation. Within five years of the "Science" magazine announcement, nearly 19,000 radioisotopes were shipped to more than 600 institutions across the country. By 1954, more than 47,000 isotopes had been allocated.
And David Rothman, professor of social medicine at Columbia University, said experimentation that might raise questions today went on for decades.
At the time, little was known about the insidious effects of radiation.
Shoe store patrons, for example, delighted in the early 1950s in checking the fit of new shoes by X-ray machines, long since outlawed as unsafe. And dermatologists would give children strong doses of radiation to combat ringworm, a practice that was eventually halted.
"It was the birth of a new age," said Nello Pace, a University of California-Berkley researcher whose use of radioactive hydrogen to measure body water in humans was listed in the 1951 report. "It became obvious there was great potential here for important kinds of medical research."
But modern science has brought some of the work into question. For example, abnormal cancer rates were detected in children whose mothers were given radioactive iron during a 1948 Vanderbilt University study, which was designed to see how pregnant women absorb iron.
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11 AM - Alvamar Racquet Club
- FREE Admissionbought all your books for this semester, there is one book you may have missed. The PowerBook 145b 4/80 is so powerful that it can help you through even the most grueling schedule. The ___
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