University Daily Kansan / Monday. April 22, 1991
11
Earth Day festivities promote education
The Associated Press
Earth Day became Earth Weekend in some parts of the country, as environmentalists got a head start on the annual ecological holiday.
There was a beach cleanup in San Francisco, a salmon release and tree planting party in Seattle, educational events in New Orleans, and concerts in Massachusetts and soggy New Jersey
The is day the designated as
Earth Day. Daily commemorations
are held and applied around
In San Francisco, more than 200 people spent yesterday on the beach, enjoying a mild breeze, walking on the sand and picking up trash.
"Cleaning up the beach is only going to last one day," said organizer Maria Brown. "But people here are learning there's lots of trash on our beaches. So next time they're here, they're not so likely to tolerate it."
There also was a volunteer beach cleanup in Seattle, which lived up its green image with several Earth Day events. Thousands of salmonDay events in Salt Lake City in the city's Carkeek Park, and trees were planted at another park.
In addition, a weekend festival at the Seattle Center offered free exhibits, workshops, entertainment and speakers who exhorted people to change their lives in environmentally friendly ways.
In Holmdel, N.J., soaked Earth Day celebrants thought it was appropriate that Mother Earth rained on their party.
"You've got to love it. It's Earth Day and it rains," said one revereler as she huddled under a sopping poncho at the state-sponsored tribute to the environment at the Garden State Arts Center. "I think this is a sign Someone's trying to tell us something."
Or teach something. Messages were everywhere for the estimated 8,000 people who attended the event, which featured a concert starring Souhide Johnny, the Turtles, Joe Sidee and Johnnie Winning song writer Juelie Gold.
Before the music, a group on the stage led concertgoers through the Earth Day pledge. They said they would pledge to learn how the earth's natural systems worked and would restore it and restored the health of the planet.
In one of the first Earth Day events, about 35,000 people gathered at Foxbor Stadium in Foxbor, Mass., on Saturday for a benefit concert featuring Willie Wilson, Jack Browne, Bruce Hornsby and many Manias. Indigo Girls and rappers KRS One and Queen Latifah
In New Orleans, Earth Day activities also began Saturday with exhibits and a poster contest at a mall or suburban Kenner and displays and games in a park in Chalmette, another suburb.
Gay rights groups gain respect
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — Gay rights groups that a few years ago couldn't get a phone call returned by Establishment Washington say they're now being welcomed, if not open arms, at least with open arms.
"We're treated with the respect that we should always have had but we had to establish," said Urvashiyani and Mr. Saadh. The general Gav and Lesban Task Force
Most recently, Vaid said she was a little surprised to be invited to a news conference at the Justice Department, where the FBI released the first national data on bias crimes. The FBI even paid tribute to the task's work to include homosexuals in the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990.
"In the '50s and the '60s, the FBI kept files on gay and lesbian organizations," she said afterward. "And today, there we were, welcomed by the director of the FBI, considered equal partners at the table," she said, that convert their community and a lot of other people in this society."
Gay activists point to several other recent mileposts: passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
which prohibits discrimination against people with the AIDS virus and other disabilities; and the repeal of a ban on homosexual immigrants
Even their longtime foes admit the gav lobb has clout.
"I have nothing but respect for the extent to which they network in this country and the extent to which they've been able to influence public policy," said conservative Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California. "Alarming thing is the willingness of leaders in our society to stand up and affirm our values."
Dannemeyer is author of a book entitled "Shadow in the Land," which attacks gay activists for attempting the wholesale restructuring of American society by demanding "special rights."
Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., who sponsored the immigration bill, said attitudes toward gay people are changing in society and, as a result, on Capitol Hill The immigration bill, he noted, was repealed without a blasphem from conservatives like Demneyer or Sen Jesse Helms. R.N.C.
"The fact that the people who hated that policy were so unable to oppose it was an interesting sign, said Frank, one of two openly gay
Frank said that AIDS made it necessary, and politically easier — for members of congress to vote for extending rights and protections to
members of Congress
"It's one thing to give in to prejudice, but it's another thing when you're talking about life and death," he said.
The two largest gay lobbies — the task force and the Human Rights Campaign Fund — say their top priority this year is overturning the ban on gay people serving in the armed forces.
Lisa M. Keen, senior editor of the Washington Blade, a gay weekly newspaper in the nation's capital, said he was surprised finally paying off for the gay lobby.
"And I guess Washington has grown accustomed to hearing that voice and slowly but surely is understanding, that this minority voice is very similar to the voices of other minorities in that it is a group of people who are discriminated against." she said.
But Vaid credits some colder, harder facts: "The movement has proved that it can muster bodies, votes and money."
An increasing number of gay peo
"In the old days — 10 years ago, eight years ago, even five years ago."
ple are spending money to try to influence elections, said Timothy McFeeley, executive director of the Human Rights Campaign Fund. The campaign fund operates the only national gay political action committee, which last year contributed more than 15 percent to federal candidates. They hope to trouble that amount in the next election cycle, McFeeley said.
— it was hard for people to take money from the gay and lesbian lobby. he said, “That is almost a thing of the past. I wouldn't say it's totally a thing of the past. I think there are still some states and districts where police afraid if they take gay PAC money it will be political suicide for them.”
McFeely won't name the politicians who used to shun gay money but now take it. But, he said, if a formerly reluctant candidate comes calling, the fund is happy to contribute.
"I'm very realistic about counting
votes and getting votes," he said.
"And even though the (gay) community may not like the system, they like the fact that we're in there playing the system."
Brady Bill misses heart of problem
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — A proposed seven-day waiting period for handgun purchases and President Bush's crime package satisfy the need to dispense don't attack the heart of America's crime problem, criminologists say.
The handgun measure, dubbed the Brady Bill, and the president's proposals to relax search and seizure laws, are the most great political and symbolic value.
But neither measure "is going to make a significant dent on crime," said criminologist Alfred Blumstein, dean of the school of public affairs at the University of Chicago. "Both of them are impressive exercises in symbolism.
Critics of Bush's proposal say the damage it would do to the Bill of
Rights is too high a price to pay to save the handful of cases that are dismissed each year in federal court. Police conducted improper searches.
Opponents of the handgun measure, particularly the National Rifle Association, contend it wouldn't prevent criminals from buying handguns but would impose great inconveniences on the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens to protect themselves
Criminals are just not lining up at gun stores to fill out papers and have their backgrounds checked" Jim Irwin, AOA's legislative chair, said last week.
Attorney General Dick Thornton burtham notes that only 17 percent of guns used by felons to commit crimes are bought in stores. The rest are obtain
ed illegally on the street
The Brady Bill has symbolic importance for both supporters and opponents and carries great emotional appeal.
It is named for James Brady, the White House press secretary who was severely wounded by a gunman who tried to kill President Reagan in 1961. Reagan recently endorsed the bill.
The measure would allow, but not require, local police to conduct record checks to determine if would be gun buyers are convicted felons and therefore ineligible to purchase a handgun.
Bush, who has opposed the bill in the past, has signaled a willingness to pressure of Congress passes his crime pledge to civil libertarians opposed by civil libertarians and
some liberal Democrats.
Among other features, the president's bill would revive and expand the federal death penalty, applying it to such crimes as terrorism, use of weapons of "mass destruction" and political assassinations.
But criminologists said that a death penalty for federal crimes would be used so iniquitely that its effect on the crime would be mainly symbolic.
"Most things the federal government does have very little to do with the crime problem," said James Alan Fox, a criminologist.
"The federal government having the death penalty is really silly because there are very few capital offenses in the federal system and they are certainly not street crimes." he said.
Break up of Waggoner Ranch may be near
The Associated Press
And now, the big showdown.
VERNON, Texas — It's Texas myth come to life: big land, big oil, big family, big fortune.
Many among the 12,000 people inhabiting Vernon, where the ranch
The W.T. Waggoner Estate, an empr built from a ranch two-thirds the size of Ribbe Island, appears to be crumbling under the weight of a squabble between the founder's third and fourth-generation descendants. Presiding over it all is W.T.'s grandmother, 78-year-old sculptor and socialite Electra Waggoner Biggs.
and its offshoots provide an annual $1 million payroll, watch with worry the company's debt levels.
"You remember when you were a kid and you wondered why are Mommy and Daddy fighting?" said Mayor Emmett Maxon.
Miss. Brigs has asked a court to help sell off the 550,000-acre ranch. Dotted by oil wells and cows, mansions and aircraft hangars stalls and ranches cover most of two north Texas counties and reaches in to four others.
You thought, 'Which side is going to choose me?' That is their ap pro position.
With land in the area selling for $200 to $600 an acre, the estate is conservatively valued at $110 million for the land alone. With the assets thrown in, the price could rise to $330 million.
Ranch history stretches back to pre-Civil War Texas when Dan Waggoner William Thomas Waggoner's father, bought land a few counties east of the present ranch. In 1870, legend says, father and son drove a herd of Longhorn cattle to stockyards in Texas with $5,000 in their saddlebags.
They set themselves up near the Red River, north of the present town
Paying about $1 an acre, the Waggoners slowly built their cattle and horse empire westward.
When oil was discovered on Wagoner land in 1903, W T wished for wagon roads.
"oil, oil, what do I want with damn he reportedly said "I look in my pocket."
But oil's potential was clear and the Waggons' reversed triple-D cattle brand was soon emblazoned on oil wells.
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