Almost three years after Buendia was gunned down in a Mexico City parking lot, the question is still unanswered. It is being raised again because May 30 will be the third anniversary of his death--and because the lack of progress in finding his killer has become an issue in Mexico's presidential campaign.
Buendia's killing, along with the unsolved killings of several other Mexican journalists in recent years, sent shock waves through the country's newspaper establishment.
"The bullets that killed Manuel Buendia . . . were not directed at one man but at freedom of expression," the daily newspaper Excelsior said on its front page the day after the killing.
Buendia wrote for Excelsior, a leading Mexico City paper. He made enemies in many places because of his reports on everything from government corruption to the activities of the CIA in Mexico to the violence of extreme right-wing groups. At the time of his death, Buendia was said to be planning to write about ties between drug traffickers and Mexican officials.
The investigation into his killing has gone virtually nowhere. He was shot four times at close range, witnesses said, by a tall, mustachioed man who fled on foot through Mexico City's entertainment district, the so-called Pink Zone.
Two men who are now candidates for the presidential nomination have had responsibility for solving the Buendia mystery: Manuel Bartlett Diaz, secretary of the interior, who is considered a strong candidate for the nomination, and federal Atty. Gen. Sergio Garcia Ramirez, who is ranked among the second-tier candidates.
The nominee, who will run under the banner of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), will be designated this fall by President Miguel de la Madrid. The president's choice is regarded as certain to be elected, given the PRI's dominance of electoral politics in Mexico. Election Day itself is not until next year.
Any mention of the Buendia case in the press is considered an indirect criticism of the candidacies of Bartlett and Garcia. Sometimes the criticism is direct.
Manuel Moreno, a former PRI leader in the Senate, said in an interview with the magazine Proceso: "I exclude, among the aspirants, all those who have to do with repression. I concede no chance to Bartlett while the question of who killed Manuel Buendia is not resolved. The same goes for Sergio Garcia Ramirez."
The two candidates avoid the subject. They generally limit their remarks to praise for De la Madrid or to their records as public officials.
Nor do other candidates mention the Buendia case, although some encourage their journalist friends to bring it up.
Publicly, the government has given high priority to the Buendia investigation. After the shooting, De la Madrid told the attorney general's office to put all its "effort and resources" into finding the killer. It soon became a ritual of incoming police chiefs, Mexico City attorneys general and other law enforcement officials to promise a quick solution.
A year after the shooting, the slow pace of the investigation was underscored when the Mexico City attorney general's office announced that it had put together an accurate profile--of the victim.
At first, suspicion fell on right-wing groups at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara, groups that Buendia had criticized for terrorizing the campus. But attention has recently turned to drug traffickers and officials alleged to be in league with them. Local press reports have pointed to the Federal Security Directorate in this connection. The directorate, which has the Spanish initials DFS, is an agency of the Interior Ministry. Its mission might be compared with that of the FBI.
Directorate agents were first on the scene of the killing. Later they cleared out Buendia's office files. Where these files are today, no one will say.
Jose Antonio Zorrilla, who at the time was head of the security directorate, was later identified by U.S. officials as having ties to people involved with drugs, and in May, 1985, he fled the country, reportedly settling in Spain. Since his departure, 400 directorate agents have been dismissed.
Mexican journalists are agitating for action, or at least some public comment, and the pressure is expected to build as the May 30 anniversary draws nearer.
American Suzuki Motor Corp., staggered by a catastrophic decline in Samurai sales and weakness in its other automotive lines, said Monday that its president has been reassigned to corporate headquarters in Japan, and the three top officials of the auto division have resigned.
Kenji Shimizu, chairman of Brea-based American Suzuki since July and a longtime executive and managing director of the Suzuki Motor Co. conglomerate in Japan, will replace Toshiyuki Arai as president of American Suzuki.
Yoshi Fujii, another longtime Suzuki executive from corporate headquarters in Hamamatsu, Japan, has been named to the new position of executive vice president of the American Suzuki automotive division, which markets cars and sports vehicles. Other American Suzuki divisions market motorcycles and such miscellaneous products as outboard motors and snowmobiles.
A company spokeswoman said no replacements have been named for the three U.S. automotive division executives who resigned Monday: Doug Mazza, vice president; John Dorsey, sales director, and Larry Messelt, national sales manager.
Mazza and Dorsey were hired in 1985 to create American Suzuki's auto division, the same year Suzuki introduced the Samurai.
The Samurai quickly caught on with younger drivers interested in low-cost sports vehicles, and sales soared to 81,349 cars in 1987. But in June, 1988, Consumer Reports magazine criticized the Samurai as being susceptible to rolling over, and sales began to plummet.
Even though a federal study has since concluded that the Samurai is no more prone to rolling over than are similar vehicles, sales slumped to about 50,000 in the first eight months of 1988, and in the first eight months of this year, just 3,399 Samurais have been sold.
Sales of Suzuki's other vehicles--a line of subcompacts and another sports vehicle introduced within the last year--have also been hurt by the publicity. As of Sept. 1, Suzuki had sold just 21,389 cars and sports utility vehicles in the United States.
In American Samurai's only statement about the management changes, spokeswoman Laura Segall said the company "has undergone significant changes in the past year."
"When Mazza and Arai started in 1985, they had only one automobile product, the Samurai, and the goal was to establish a following for and generate sales of the Samurai, which they did," she said.
"But now Suzuki is in a situation where we have a full line, including the Sidekick and the Swift passenger cars. The complexion of the company has changed, and there are different goals and philosophies on how best to run what essentially is a new company."
Also Monday, American Suzuki announced its 1990 automobile lineup. The Samurai is being de-emphasized, with fewer models and options being offered. Meanwhile, the Sidekick--a squat version of the Samurai with a lower center of gravity, is being offered in several new configurations. As last year, there will be three models of the Swift.
American Suzuki Motor Corp., based in Brea, reorganized its executive suite Monday amid a continuing sales slump.
*Suzuki sold only the Samurai Jan.-August 1988. Other vehicles were introduced later in the year and in 1989.
Nissan Lets 115 Go at U.S. Headquarters : Autos: The shake-up in Carson underscores tough times Japanese car makers are experiencing. Pressure is on others to cut costs too.
Signaling for any doubters that the Industrial Era is over, Fortune magazine has retooled its famous Fortune 500 list to include service companies.
The change--evident in the May 15 issue, which hits newsstands May 1--means that hundreds of manufacturing and other industrial companies can no longer claim to be of Fortune 500 stature, while other breeds of businesses, from AT&T to McDonald's to Wal-Mart, now can.
Fortune attributed the change to fundamental shifts in the U.S. economy that have blurred once easy distinctions between industrial and service companies. General Electric, for instance, got 40% of its nearly $65 billion in revenue last year from service businesses such as mortgage writing and airplane leasing.
"Phone companies compete with broadcasters, software manufacturers offer personal finance services, airlines sell mutual funds, auto makers write insurance," the magazine said.
For four decades, the Fortune 500 listing of the largest U.S. industrial companies--as measured strictly by sales--has been a prestigious club. Many companies have touted the connection in advertising and annual reports.
Fortune began publishing a separate list of non-industrial companies in 1956; that evolved in the early 1980s into a full-scale Service 500, published several weeks after the industrial list. But the ranking of service companies never carried the same cachet.
Times have changed, Fortune editors figured, and financial services giants and retailing behemoths warranted inclusion on a single list with their muscular industrial counterparts.
As it happens, service companies dominate the new list, with 291 entries, including three in the Top 10: Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (4), AT&T Corp. (5) and Sears, Roebuck & Co. (9). Even so, General Motors Corp., with $155 billion in sales, again grabbed the top spot, as it has 31 times before.
AT&T praised the change. "With the inclusion of service corporations, we think the new list more accurately reflects the reality of corporate America," the company said in a statement.
As a result of the lists' merger, many well-known companies, including B.F. Goodrich Co. and Clorox Co., no longer made the cut. Last year, the No. 500 position was held by a company with $614 million in revenue. This year, a company needed $2.2 billion in sales to make the grade.
"Certainly, it was great to be included," said David Kaye, a spokesman for Thousand Oaks-based Amgen, the nation's largest biotechnology company. "But they just added a bunch of bigger companies. They kind of changed the rules in the middle of the game."
Clorox, the Oakland-based maker of household products, said the Fortune 500 listing is "not something we dwell on." (On a competing list, the Forbes 500, Clorox did not warrant inclusion based on total sales or assets, but it did measure up on market value and profit margins, which it views as more indicative of strength and performance.)
Ethyl Corp., a Richmond, Va.-based maker of petroleum additives, said it was surprised and disappointed to be among the flock of also-rans, after about 30 years of inclusion on the nation's best-recognized corporate A-list.
"We would mention (the Fortune association) in corporate descriptions where appropriate," said spokesman Robert P. Buford IV. "It had its prestige for a lot of companies over the years."
However, Buford noted, Ethyl does not regard sales as the most important measure of a company's performance. In recent years, the company--like many others--has spun off operations in an effort to become more competitive. As a result, its sales have shrunk by about two-thirds from the $3 billion of three years ago.
By inviting service companies to the Fortune 500 party, the magazine knocked a number of familiar industrial companies off the guest list. Companies needed $2.2 billion in 1994 revenue to make the new list, up from $614 million the previous year. The 10 biggest industrial firms bumped from the list and where they now rank:
Drawing Line on Boss Digging Into Private Life : Security: Corporate spying to curb drug use or in-house theft is widespread in business. Some contend that a right to privacy is violated.
"Vanaja," a film exploring the tensions of the caste system in contemporary rural India, boasts a compelling story on-screen and off.
It tells of a 14-year-old girl who takes on domestic work in the home of a wealthy landlady, both to aid her impoverished, alcoholic father and to fulfill her own dream of mastering the classic art of Kuchipudi dance.
Off camera, "Vanaja" is the work of Columbia University student Rajnesh Domalpalli, the movie's director, who wrote the script for a class and shot the movie mostly with amateurs for his thesis. In India, he says, he battled bureaucracy and the southern Indian region's so-called Tollywood establishment (the Telugu-language version of Bollywood) to unearth performers not jaded by high theatrics.
"Vanaja" can be enjoyed without that background. It's a touching, believable, often funny but ultimately sad tale of how one class can take advantage of another, even in the guise of patronizing benevolence. The cagey, ambitious Vanaja (played with pert humor and empathy by Mamatha Bhukya) slyly wins over the stern landlady (Urmila Dammannagari), who begrudgingly begins to instruct her in classical dance and music.
That Cinderella tale is abruptly interrupted by the return of the landlady's son (Karan Singh), a dumb but handsome would-be politician who rapes Vanaja, unleashing a series of dismal developments and the birth of a baby boy.
Though sometimes shifting abruptly in time, "Vanaja" is an arresting story of modern-day hardship and class exploitation, recalling Charles Dickens as well as Western fairy-tale lore. Domalpalli's settings are ultra-real in detail and color, from the crude, almost feudal deprivations of Vanaja's dirt-floor background to the stately rituals and autocratic entitlement of the well-to-do. Yet, to the movie's credit, Dammannagari's portrait of the landlady includes moments of sympathy and grace.
Heightening the story's fable-like feel are the compelling dance performances, which are presented straightforwardly as rehearsals or concert outings. These provide artistic gloss on the harsh story and a showcase for the fleet-footed, gestural Bhukya, who learned the Kuchipudi art in a crash course in the director's basement.
"Vanaja" also shines with a tapestry of colorful characters, including Vanaja's father, lovable but sad, and her plucky best friend, whose father, a superstitious holy man, looks to his elephant as a psychic arbiter. This is a movie exotic in look but recognizable in truth, the venture of a novice filmmaker very much ready for prime time.
"Vanaja." MPAA rating: unrated. Sexual situations, nudity. In Telugu with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 51 minutes. In selected theaters.
June 09, 2008|Craig J. Nevius | Craig J. Nevius is producing "A Wing and a Prayer," a documentary chronicling Farrah Fawcett's battle with cancer and her efforts to protect her privacy.
The National Enquirer proudly proclaimed a worldwide exclusive on its website on May 16, 2007: "Farrah's Cancer Is Back!" (Please note the excitement and enthusiasm indicated by the exclamation point.) Adjacent to this attention-grabbing headline was an advertisement offering this inducement in bold, colorful type: "GOT GOSSIP? WE'LL PAY BIG BUCKS."
Just 48 hours earlier, actress Farrah Fawcett had received the devastating diagnosis from her doctors at UCLA Medical Center. The Enquirer's story ran before she was able to tell her son or her closest friends about the recurrence. This was, in fact, the second such "scoop" the Enquirer published while Farrah was still in shock from a diagnosis; it had done something similar in October 2006.
I'd worked with Farrah in 2005 when I produced "Chasing Farrah," a reality TV series about her life. But the title took on new meaning when I heard how tabloid reporters and paparazzi were stalking her as she faced this life-threatening illness. In 2007, the paparazzi even ran Farrah's car off the road after she left a doctor's office, as I listened helplessly by cellphone. So I once again began following her everywhere she went -- with my camera -- to capture this invasion of her privacy.
Three tabloid photographers who ambushed Farrah at LAX last Thanksgiving as she departed for Germany to receive alternative cancer treatments didn't seem to think that this turnabout was fair play. They scuttled away like cockroaches under a bright light when I aimed my video camera at them.
Reporter Alan Smith, however, came across as more aggressive -- like a rat going after whatever morsel it believes it can make into a meal. The star reporter of the Enquirer (whose byline appeared on dozens of stories about Farrah's medical condition) was so confident that he allowed me to record a telephone conversation we had about the coverage.
I expressed my belief that he and his newspaper took one confirmed truth (such as Farrah's cancer diagnosis) and then used it as the foundation to build numerous lies, such as Farrah having a hysterectomy, suffering from shingles and losing her eyesight and her hair -- just to name a few.
Smith's response was no ringing endorsement of his or the Enquirer's journalistic integrity: "I'm not responsible for everything that's in the paper" was followed by "other reporters do have input" and that old, reliable standby, "I'm only as good as my sources."
Marc Rupp, general counsel for Enquirer parent American Media Inc., defended the tabloid's coverage of Farrah's illness much more vigorously when he replied to a demand for a retraction from her lawyers, who outlined the tabloid's inaccuracies, some of which I mentioned above. Rupp cited "exceptional sources directly in a position to know the information reported."
As it turns out, one exceptional source may have been Lawanda Jackson, an administrative specialist at UCLA Medical Center who has since been indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly violating medical privacy laws. According to the indictment, Jackson accessed Farrah's medical records and sold information from them to an unnamed media outlet (which the Los Angeles Times later reported was, indeed, the National Enquirer) for $4,600 or more.
What makes this revelation all the more disturbing is the fact that, if the tabloid truly was in possession of Farrah's medical records, wouldn't it have known that much of what it was reporting were lies?
The Enquirer and the Globe, another American Media tabloid, refused to print an apology or retraction for their false stories -- which was all Farrah asked for at the time. Cameron Stracher, senior media counsel for American Media, replied with a letter stating that even if the tabloids were incorrect in their reporting of "some details" of Farrah's condition, the "gist" of their reporting was accurate. I suppose that what Stracher means is that cancer is the "gist" -- and "details" about hysterectomies, shingles, blindness and baldness are not really worth confirming, let alone retracting.
With UCLA Medical Center under intense scrutiny for the breach of at least 61 patients' medical records, and Jackson facing arraignment today, perhaps it is time to take a closer look at the role tabloids may play in such crimes. In a letter to U.S. Atty. Thomas P. O'Brien on April 30, Farrah put it this way: "It is my personal belief that what Lawanda Jackson is most guilty of is being a pawn. She worked in a hospital system that did not provide strong enough deterrents to stop their employees from breaching their patients' medical records -- which made it all the easier for the tabloids to financially induce her to invade my privacy as well as the privacy of others."
MONTICELLO — The Jefferson County School Board, in a hastily called special meeting Wednesday afternoon, voted to create a new assistant principal's position at the county's only high school in an effort to end a black boycott of county schools.
Nearly two-thirds of all students -- 1,300 of 2,141 -- in Monticello stayed home Wednesday, the first day of school.
Black parents decided at a meeting Wednesday night that they would permit their children to attend school today because of the school board's action.
The parents were angry about the replacement of a black administrator with a white at Jefferson County High School. They said the boycott was the only way to get the school board's attention.
All three of the county's schools -- Jefferson County Elementary School, Howard Middle School and the high school -- had more students absent than present Wednesday. The schools are from 63 percent to 70 percent black. All are in Monticello, about 25 miles northeast of Tallahassee.
The boycott saddened both black and white educators who have pointed proudly in recent years to high scores on state assessment tests. The scores have drawn national media attention and awards from state officials. The boycott also broke a tradition of harmonious race relations in the schools that dates to desegregation in 1970.
''Nobody teaches blacks better than Jefferson County,'' said Kelly Kilpatrick, principal of the 560-student high school. ''Ninety-seven percent of our blacks are passing state assessment tests, compared with a 53 percent state average. Where are the kids in all of this? Let's talk about what's best for the kids. I cannot think of anything that's justified to keep kids out of school.''
''People who attack this high school might as well attack my family,'' he said. ''If I hadn't been fair and just with the black students, I wouldn't have survived.''
Though most black parents say they aren't unhappy with Kilpatrick, it is clear his influence has made some blacks uncomfortable.
''It looks like they're making children sour toward their parents, sour to their neighborhoods,'' said Dressie Mae Sloan, a lifelong Jefferson County resident who helped organize the boycott. ''They the children say what the principal says, what the white man says.''
Blacks believe Kilpatrick's assistant should be black. Kilpatrick thinks so too, and that's the way things were until July when Assistant Principal Pink Hightower was promoted to principal at the middle school.
With board endorsement, school Superintendent Stephen ''Hoot'' Walker replaced Hightower with a white woman who previously had been a teacher at the high school.
''The way they're working it now, they're pushing the blacks out,'' said Willie Olliver, a nursery company employee and father of four children who stayed home Wednesday. ''My oldest boy plays football and he is upset about missing practice, but we want things straightened out.''
Marie Gamble, whose two grandchildren stayed home, said she has never seen such racial tension in Jefferson County.
''This is the worst situation we've ever been in,'' Gamble said. ''There's never been anything like this. The blacks feel like since we've got more blacks in the school we ought to have a black assistant principal.''
Hightower said he can't recall previous racial problems in Jefferson County schools. ''There's never been too much trouble. Even with integration, this was an easy county,'' he said. ''Here we are, 15 years later, and this is happening.''
Black parents complained repeatedly to Walker during the summer and he asked the school board to create a second assistant principal's position at the high school that presumably would be filled by a black.
The board met Monday to consider the proposal but couldn't vote because only 2 of 5 members attended. Blacks then announced the boycott, which has a major economic impact on the county because school districts receive money from the state based on the number of students in school each day.
There is no guarantee a black will be hired for the position created by the board, but members said that is their intention. Walker said he hopes to fill the job by the first week of September.
The issue has been monitored since July by the U.S. Justice Department and also has drawn the interest of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
Black administrators and teachers are sympathetic to the concerns of black parents, and some of them come close to condoning the boycott.
''I'm in the business of educating students and I'm sick today because our students are out of school. But I know the reason why and I can't say I'm against it,'' said Rosa Sloan, principal at Jefferson County Elementary School. ''Suppose I had a little boy at that school and he wanted to be a principal. There's no way, from what he can see.''
Hightower said it is essential to have a black administrator at the high school. ''It just makes for more harmony and it creates a more positive attitude on the part of all the students,'' he said.
The children affected by the boycott played in yards and streets Wednesday. ''I don't know the real reason for this, but it's got something to do with the school board,'' said Alvin Teat, a 16-year-old 10th grader.
shallow water near the shore of Lake Ashby while his family prepared for a picnic about noon Friday.
Trappers continued to search the rural Volusia County lake early today for signs of the alligator they think grabbed the New Smyrna Beach boy. The trappers plan to kill and inspect any alligator more than 8 feet long.
Adam's mother, Lorri Ann Binford, 31, told officials she didn't see an alligator but said her son disappeared in ''a big splash.''
''She said, 'I just saw a big splash,' and she knows her son couldn't have made that big a splash, so she is assuming it was an alligator,'' Volusia County Fire Services spokeswoman Elizabeth Glasgow said.
Lt. Joy Hill of the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission said an alligator attack is possible because gators would have been attracted to the dog. It was unharmed.
''We caution people not to walk their dogs at the edge of the water because dogs are about the same size as an alligator's natural prey,'' Hill said. Signs at the park warn that bringing animals into the water is prohibited by state and county regulations.
If confirmed, this would be the first alligator attack at Lake Ashby park, a 64-acre county property in rural Volusia, and the eighth alligator-related death in Florida since 1948. There were two nuisance complaints at the lake in 1996, but no one was hurt.
The Binford family - Lorri Ann, three children and two dogs - came to the park for a quiet afternoon, enjoying tacos at a picnic table.
Once Adam vanished, Binford, son Evan, 8, and a cousin, Cassidy, 9, searched the water but couldn't find any trace of Adam.
The mother sent the two children running to a pay phone in the parking lot while she continued to look. Binford told officials that Adam doesn't know how to swim.
After receiving the 911 call at 12:43 p.m., emergency workers were dispatched to the 3,200-acre lake.
Sheriff's Office divers, a Volusia Beach Patrol member on a water scooter and officers with the game and fish commission combed the 7-foot-deep lake.
Wildlife Officer Mike Thomas said alligator attacks against humans are rare. He added that March is the beginning of the mating season and the reptiles may be establishing their territory.
Thomas said the alligator population at Lake Ashby is too small to allow hunting during the fall season, but it is difficult to estimate the population.
CAPE CANAVERAL -- A NASA solar probe is expected to blast off this week on a dramatic mission to catch some rays.
Not only will the $164 million Genesis spacecraft collect samples of our sun's solar wind, it will bring them home to scientists. The project will mark the first time extraterrestrial material has been returned from beyond the moon.
The goal of Genesis is to shed light on the solar system's makeup and evolution. Scientists suspect the solar wind still contains the same basic ingredients that formed our star and planets.
"This is the best and most complete picture that we will get," said Meenakshi Wadhwa, a cosmochemist at Chicago's Field Museum. "Having the actual composition will have a tremendous impact on our understanding because it will let us ascertain how good or not so good our assumptions have been."
The basic assumption by most astronomers is that an ancient solar nebula -- a giant swirling cloud of dust and gas -- gave birth to our sun and planets about 4.5 billion years ago. As the primordial cloud began to spin and flatten, our sun formed at the center. Smaller bits of material lumped together farther out to form the planets.
Distribution of elements throughout the solar system was far from uniform, however. Today, the planets range from small, rocky worlds such as Earth to massive gas giants such as Jupiter and Saturn. Exactly how those differences evolved remains a mystery.
Researchers think a sort of fossil record exists of the original solar nebula that might provide some answers. The sun accounts for more than 99 percent of the mass of our solar system. However, bits of our star's outer atmosphere or corona constantly are being spit into space. The resulting stream of charged atoms -- the solar wind -- contains the same mix of elements found in the sun's surface layers. That mix is thought to mirror the contents of the solar nebula.
"Until we actually have a sample of the sun we can analyze in our laboratories with high precision and get some very precise chemical information, we cannot be sure of the exact composition," Wadhwa said. "Genesis will fill a fundamental gap in that knowledge."
Genesis was scheduled to begin its mission with a liftoff this afternoon aboard a Delta 2 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. However, NASA managers decided late Sunday to delay the launch for at least 24 hours to review a potential technical issue. Liftoff has been tentatively reset for Tuesday at 12:32 p.m.
Once in space, the compact-car-sized probe will make a three-month trek to a spot about 930,000 miles from Earth where our planet's atmosphere and magnetic field won't contaminate the samples.
Genesis will use five round collecting panels -- each about the size of a bicycle wheel -- to capture the particles.
The panels consist of 55 small hexagonal tiles made of pure materials such as silicon, sapphire, gold and artificial diamonds. As the solar wind zips through space at speeds up to 1.4 million mph, tiny chemical traces will hit the tiles and become embedded.
Two and a half years of sunbathing are expected to yield a science bounty weighing no more than several grains of salt. But the sampling should contain every element found naturally in the solar system. By comparing elements' abundance in the solar wind, researchers hope to fine-tune models of how planets formed and materials were distributed.
While Genesis' solar-wind study will be the most detailed ever, it won't be the first. Astronauts on five Apollo moon landings briefly deployed primitive solar-wind-collection devices made from strips of aluminum foil mounted on poles. Five NASA spacecraft are studying the sun and solar wind as well. But those probes are limited by the capabilities of their instruments.
"By bringing the material back, we can turn loose all of the analytical firepower of terrestrial laboratories," said Donald Burnett, a researcher at the California Institute of Technology and the project's principal scientist.
After a roundabout five-month voyage back to Earth, Genesis is scheduled to make its dramatic homecoming Sept. 8, 2004. The five collection panels will fold up inside a return capsule jettisoned just before the probe hits Earth's atmosphere. While the main craft burns up over the Pacific, the heat-resistant capsule will descend toward a desolate military test range in the Utah desert.
Scientists want to avoid jarring the delicate samples with a thump-down on Earth. So a helicopter will hook the capsule's parachute in midair and gently lower the capsule to the ground.
Within hours after landing, the samples will be transported to the same facility at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston where moon rocks are stored. There, scientists likely will spend decades poring over the minute bits of sun.
"The Genesis sample, when it's recovered in 2004, will actually be the first returned sample in almost three decades since the lunar samples in the 1970s," researcher Wadhwa said. "There is a whole new generation of planetary scientists with their new generation of analytical equipment who are extremely eager."
In a major boost for U.S. power in international sports, a Los Angeles business leader was elected vice president of the IOC on Wednesday and America's top Olympic official was chosen as a committee member.
James Easton, whose company makes aluminum baseball bats and arrows, easily won the vice presidency over Canada's Paul Henderson, 52-32. Easton's new position returns a U.S. member to the IOC's powerful executive board.
IOC officials said Easton's election was based on both his personal qualities and the desire to have an American voice on the board.
Russian cross-country skier Natalia Baranova was tossed from the Winter Games for testing positive for the endurance-boosting hormone EPO. The Russian, who turns 27 the day after the Games end, tested positive in an out-of-competition test on Jan. 18 at Tauplitzalm, Austria, said the International Ski Federation. EPO, or erythropoietin, boosts production of oxygen-carrying red blood cells.
The cost of a seat for the opening ceremony at the Salt Lake City Games: $885. The cost of a warm seat: priceless.
Mitt Romney, president of the Salt Lake City Organizing Committee, warned that Friday night's frozen festivities will leave any unprepared attendees shivering in the stands of Rice-Eccles Stadium.
"I doubt one person will say, `I wore too much clothing to the Opening Ceremony,' " Romney told a news conference where he displayed insulated rubber boots, gloves bearing the Salt Lake Olympic logo and long underwear. Even that may not be enough, he warned: "We're strongly encouraging people to buy two sets of long underwear."
KNOX - David A. Michel, 44, died Monday in his home after an illness. Survivors include his wife, Carla; two daughters, Emily and Lindsay Michel, both of Knox; a son, Ryan; his mother, Shirley Michel of Decatur, Ala.; and two brothers, Michael of Texas and James of Decatur. Services will be held at 1 p.m. Saturday in Rannells Funeral Home, Hamlet Chapel, where friends may call from 5 to 8 p.m. Thursday, 4 to 8 p.m. Friday, and one hour before services Saturday.
MISHAWAKA - Joy A. Horvat, 84, died Tuesday in Rosewood Terrace, Elkhart, of natural causes. Survivors include a son, Paul of Mishawaka; and a son, Paul of Mishawaka; and a sister, Kimberly Eberd of California. Services will be at 1:30 p.m. Friday in St. Monica Catholic Church. Friends may call from 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Friday in Hahn Funeral Home.