NATION/WORLD
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Thursday, August 25, 1994
5B
NAACP looks for settlement
Fired leader agrees to talk things over
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The NAACP and its fired executive director, Benjamin Chavis Jr., said yesterday they would discuss an amicable settlement after a judge refused to force the civil rights group to reinstate him.
Judge Herbert Dixon of District of Columbia Superior Court declined Chavis' request for a temporary restraining order, saying he could no more order the NAACP to take Chavis back than he could force Chavis to continue to work against his wishes.
Chavis said he hoped to avoid a full-blown court fight with the NAACP, but he would fight settlement offers that did not satisfy him.
Dixon ruled only on Chavis' request for a temporary order and set a Sept. 2 hearing before Superior Court Judge Richard Saltzman to address the rest of Chavis' claims.
"I want fair treatment by the NAACP," he said. "If we have to go to the full-court situation, we will be vindicated."
Chavis sued the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People on Monday, arguing the group's board of directors failed to follow its own procedures when it fired him Saturday.
Chavis said the incident besmirched his reputation and left him unemployed when his wife, Martha, is pregnant with twins. NAACP general counsel Dennis Hayes said yesterday that Chavis' health benefits and paycheck had not been terminated.
Hayes said Chavis had had an
Opportunity to discuss a settlement Friday, the day before the board of directors voted 53-5 to fire him.
Still, he said, NAACP officials would try to offer Chavis a fair settlement, adding that there were no hard feelings toward Chavis for suing.
"We certainly don't fault him for doing it," Hayes said. "We stand for what Dr. Chavis has chosen to do. We teach people to stand up."
In firing Chavis, board members cited his failure to disclose that he used NAACP money to settle a $332,400 sex discrimination claim by former employee Mary E. Stansel.
According to an affidavit by board Vice President Larry Carter, other aspects of Chavis' leadership also were a factor in his firing, including the group's nearly $3 million budget deficit and the alliance he struck between the NAACP and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
Minorities exposed more to waste
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Seven years after the complaint of "environmental racism" was first raised, a report said Blacks, Hispanics, Asians and American Indians are even more likely to find themselves neighbors of commercial hazardous waste facilities.
Instead, it suggests, the situation results from shifts in population or from an attempt to stop the dumping of toxic wastes, with their potential health hazards, in community landfills, leading to the creation of new and potentially dangerous facilities.
But the report, citing "the intractable nature of environmental injustice", does not charge that such facilities are being deliberately located near places where minorities cluster.
The report was issued by three organizations: the Center for Policy Alternatives, which works with community activists and policy makers in the states; the Commission for Racial
Justice, an arm of the United Church of Christ, which first called attention to the situation in a 1987 report; and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, whose recently ousted director, the Rev. Benjamin Chavis Jr., campaigned against "environmental racism."
In 1980, 25 percent of the people living in a ZIP code that contained one or more hazardous sites were nonwhite, and by 1993 that proportion had risen to 31 percent, the report said.
The study focused on the location of 530 commercial toxic waste sites.
Put another way, a member of a racial minority has a 47 percent better chance than a white person to be living near such facilities, the report said.
"It is important to note that this situation has not been caused solely by lack of government regulation," Chavis and Charles Lee of the Commission for Racial Justice wrote in the report.
"These sites were created because the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act identified toxic chemicals that needed better disposal facilities than traditional municipal solid waste sites. While the act's intent was to isolate these wastes and reduce illegal dumping, certain segments of our society are bearing a disproportionate burden of this regulation."
The report recommended that the government concentrate its spending on education and training, infrastructure improvement and development of small business in communities that house waste sites.
Otherwise, it said, "communities with the least wherewithal will inevitably be forced by necessity to trade off environmental health for economic subsistence."
The report also recommended that states address the problem by requiring waste-producing facilities to devise plans for changing their methods to reduce the amount of toxins they generate.
Drugs create new hazards on highways
The Associated Press
BOSTON — Reckless drivers who don't seem drunk may be high on cocaine or marijuana, according to roadside tests that indicate drugs may rival alcohol as a hazard on the highway.
Police in Memphis, Tenn., gave urine tests to reckless drivers who appeared not to be drunk. They found that more than half were on cocaine or pot.
"It was a surprise that so many were under the influence of drugs, although we suspected there would be a significant number," said police Inspector Charles S. Cook.
Police routinely give breath tests to bad drivers whom they suspect to be drunk. However, on-the-spot testing for other drugs is rare, since it requires taking a urine specimen, something that is not practical on the highway.
For an experiment in roadside drug testing, Memphis police put together a "drugvan,"a former ambulance fitted out with toilet, interview area and videotaping equipment.
In the summer of 1993, they gave drug tests on the spot to any reckless drivers who were not obviously drunk. Police took urine samples from 150 drivers, and 89 of them, or 59 percent, tested positive for cocaine or marijuana.
The standard for a positive test was the same as that used by the federal government to measure recent drug use in the workplace, which can give results in 10 minutes.
Unemployed trained to combat wildfires
The Associated Press
"We don't normally enlist civilian firefighters. It's very definitely an indication of how bad things are out West," said Bill Terry, the agency's northeast rural fire defense coordinator, from his office in Radnor, Pa.
BARTOW. W.Va. — With firefighters exhausted after weeks of combat against wildfires in five western states, the Forest Service has begun a pilot program to train unemployed people to join the battle.
The 140 trainees, many of them laborers idled by West Virginia's sluggish economy, were to begin lessons today in the Monongahela National Forest on how to build fire lines and use firefighting tools. They were scheduled to leave for the West on Saturday.
This is the first time the Forest Service has trained civilians for out-of-state firefighting, Terry said. If it works out, the service will consider expanding the program.
The trainees, all men because no women applied, will earn $12 an hour. The application process consisted of a physical fitness test.
Celestial theory challenged
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — A study of small galaxies challenges a popular idea for what constitutes most of the matter in the universe.
Scientists know the universe contains more matter than they cart see. In fact, so-called missing or dark matter may make up 90 percent or so of the matter in the universe.
Nobody knows what this stuff is, but one popular candidate is "cold, dark matter," a class of exotic, hypothesized particles that have never been seen.
That theory is challenged in the study by Ben Moore, a research associate in the astronomy department at the University of Washington in
Seattle.
Moore took advantage of the theoretical prediction that cold, dark matter would surround galaxies in huge, invisible haloes and affect the galaxies' rotation in a predictable way. Using observations by other scientists of four small "dwarf" galaxies, he found that the inner parts of the galaxies were rotating much more slowly than one would expect if their haloes were made of cold, dark matter.
"This challenges the basis of the whole cold, dark matter theory," Moore said in a telephone interview.
Moore presented his study in the Aug. 18 issue of Nature. He did most of the work while at
It's not clear what the missing matter really is, he said.
Ray Carlberg, an astronomy professor at the University of Toronto, said Moore's paper highlights an issue that really needed to be straightened out. More observations of galaxies should be done specifically to study the question, he said.
the University of California at Berkelev.
Other scientists cautioned the result may mean that scientists do not understand how cold matter behaves in dwarf galaxies or that dwarf galaxy haloes are mostly ordinary matter while the universe's dark matter might still be mostly cold or a mix of cold and some other kind. Moore said the cold, dark matter theory predicts that haloes would also be cold, dark matter.
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