Datelines

...Samuel H. Day Jr...

...It has commissioned a private firm to conduct a three-year study of the Bureau's statistics-gathering methods...

...The industry will merely factor compensation into the costs and pass it along...

...Catlin suggested that another 45,000 short-term employees might also seek compensation...

...An Air Force JROTC program was later established in DeWitt Clinton, a Bronx high school with a minority enrollment of 98.1 per cent...

...At worst, I think that possibly [it is] subverting, if not the State Department's intent, at least the Congressional intent...

...A newly enacted municipal ordinance declares the city to be a "nuclear-free zone...

...With such a jump, Houston led all American cities in the increase of crime rates...

...Pinkett agrees that JROTC should have no place in school: "Students can do more than practice being toy soldiers...

...In 1982, the Board voted to expand JROTC to Curtis High School on Staten Island...

...Other ads suggested that the ordinance would cost the city jobs and might even banish sunshine from Ashland since the sun, after all, is a thermonuclear reactor...

...That was exactly the point, replied John Stahmer, co-director of the Southern Oregon freeze campaign, in a letter to the editor: " 'Don't dock ships on Main Street.' Especially Trident submarines, and other such ghastly instruments of death...

...This year, the Board terminated a program for the disabled, "High School of the Air," which had served homebound students since 1948 with radio broadcasts of coursework...

...This proposal is sort of like Ashland deciding it does not Keeping Cancer Out of Court WASHINGTON, D.C...

...Though Sta-ten Island has the lowest minority population of the five boroughs of New York City, Curtis has a 45 per cent minority enrollment—the borough's highest...

...In the nation's heartland, a "Nuclear-Free Wisconsin" campaign has begun...

...Under such a "stipulated risk" system, the industry would be permitted to make out-of-court settlements based on calculations of the probability that radiation caused a certain type of cancer in a worker under a given set of circumstances...

...However, the shock baton license is not an aberration...

...Opponents of JROTC object that in the face of other program cuts, the Board continues to contribute two-thirds of JROTC's annual $144,000 budget...

...The Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC), complete with uniforms, close-order drill, and classes taught by retired Navy and Air Force personnel, is officially described as one of the "various ways in which the Division of High Schools cooperates with the Armed Services in publicizing military opportunities...

...The designation has not been made...

...Rather, more than 1,000 crimes committed in 1979 had either not been reported to the FBI or had been downgraded to lesser offenses...

...In the case of Washington's relations with the Apartheid regime in Pretoria, part of the context is a U.S...

...But many union representatives don't believe that is reason enough to trust the system...

...Some police departments either deliberately or accidentally submit incorrect data to FBI headquarters...

...Jack Harward, claims manager for American Nuclear Insurers, speaks for a sizeable segment of the industry when he warns that such a system "would really be opening the floodgates to one in four Americans who are expected to get cancer and [who] want to blame it on someone...

...There's no compulsion to protect the worker if compensation becomes just another cost of doing business," Mazzocchi maintains...

...Similar antinuclear efforts are under way, with help from Ashland enthusiasts, in Corvallis and other Oregon communities...

...When the FBI figures were released, Philadelphia looked as if it had conquered the urban crime epidemic...

...therefore, on that particular provision, the Foreign Assistance Act does not apply," says Denysyk...

...Suspicious Statistics WASHINGTON, D.C...

...Before it moves to approve or disapprove the compensation system, the industry wants to see Judge Bruce Jenkins's decision in the Salt Lake City fallout trial...

...In Salt Lake City, a Federal judge will rule soon on claims that radiation from atmospheric atomic weapons testing caused cancer among "downwind" residents in Utah and Nevada...

...Nevertheless, it carried by a convincing margin of 3,676 to 3,011...

...They are, in fact, made in Everytown, U.S.A...

...It is the latest in a series of moves by the Reagan Administration to facilitate exports of strategic and military goods to South Africa...

...The nuclear industry is not unanimous in its support of the stipulated risk compensation system...

...Much to the edification of American newspapers, magazines, and newscasters, the FBI will release its annual crime report again next August...

...But Ashland now has an added cultural and ecological feature, a civic product that the Chamber of Commerce isn't likely to brag about soon...

...FBI officials concede the report is less than accurate, and explain that the FBI's greatest problem in compiling crime statistics is that the agency depends on local police departments for its figures...

...Following the actions of the Washington, D.C, suburb of Garrett Park, Maryland, on May 3, 1982, and the Baltimore suburb of Sykesville a month later (see "A Separate Peace" in the July issue of The Progressive and "In Another Country" in the December issue), Ashland has become the third and largest nuclear-free zone in America...

...Michael Duffy (Michael Duffy of Washington, D.C, is a co-author of the Field Newspaper Syndicate's "Here and Now" column...

...The FBI neither collects its own data nor audits the police numbers...

...According to the Foreign Assistance Act, "Licenses may not be issued for the export of crime control and detection instruments and equipment to a country, the government of which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violation of internationally recognized human rights...

...And the Denver-based Man-ville Corporation has filed for bankruptcy in the face of about 20,000 health damage claims against its asbestos-making subsidiary...

...Mazzocchi believes that by admitting risk, compensation will "institutionalize" cancer in the worker population...

...Perhaps then they will get the message...

...In 1975, the now-defunct U.S...

...The ultimate vote of no confidence in the FBI figures came in October 1982, when the Bureau's six-month figures showed that violent crime in Houston had increased by 17.7 per cent over the same period in 1981...

...Some opponents see it as a discriminatory, if not racist, program geared toward steering minority students to the military...

...Board member John Christen, the lone dissenter when the JROTC program was approved in 1979, says military discipline "inevitably runs counter to the emphasis on freedom of inquiry, on questioning, on what, in short, are the academic freedom qualities which I would expect to find in our schools...

...Back to Basic Training NEW YORK CITY The military have staked out a beachhead in the New York City public schools, where 310 high school students now participate in a joint venture between the Board of Education and the U.S...

...At best, the Commerce Department is inept in this matter," counters Representative Don Bonker, New York Democrat...

...The community is a focal point of cultural activity," says the Ashland Chamber of Commerce in a full-color brochure depicting snow-covered mountains, hot-air balloons floating lazily in an azure sky, spectators packing the galleries at an outdoor Elizabethan theater...

...So long as the industry sets the rules, they say, the workers will lose out...

...Approval of the ordinance by 55 per cent of the voters at the November general election, despite opposition by the Chamber of Commerce, the mayor, the city council, and the city's daily newspaper, has put Ashland on a lot of maps...

...Denysyk contends that though the license was granted "inadvertently," it was legal because South Africa is not listed by the State Department as a gross violator of human rights...

...Justice Department officials believe that since many crimes are never reported to the police, the UCR reports, at most, half the crimes committed in the United States...

...Nuclear weapons are not made in 'nuclear weapons development centers,' but only finally assembled or deployed there...

...If the 1,192 Utah and Nevada plaintiffs win, their success is likely to ensure industry support for a nonjudicial procedure...

...The nuclear power industry is trying to head off an avalanche of lawsuits from former employees who claim to have contracted cancer from exposure to radiation...

...By granting the export license, the Commerce Department is "contravening the human rights provision of the law," said Representative Howard E. Wolpe, Michigan Democrat, who heads the House subcommittee on Africa...

...Other programs, including one for students with truancy and learning problems, also suffered drastic budget cuts...

...In recent months, representatives of reactor manufacturers and utilities have been trying to devise a legally sanctioned system of compensation that would keep the cases out of court...

...The program went off the air on the same day the Board voted to expand the military training...

...To Donald Skinner, a divinity school dropout and part-time carpenter who moved to Oregon two years ago, the idea of a nuclear-free Ashland seemed like a natural when he first heard of the concept in the fall of 1981...

...The weapons were manufactured by the Universal Safety Corporation of Largo, Florida, and distributed to South Africa by American International Marketing, a New Jersey-based company...

...Then they tried to split the nuclear-free-zone measure from the popular and unopposed nuclear weapons freeze initiative by focusing on its nuclear energy prohibition...

...He calls the incident "a clerical oversight...

...That means no nuclear weapons or "associated products" may be positioned or manufactured in Ashland...

...The Julia Richman High School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan was the first to establish a JROTC program three years ago...

...DATELINES Apartheid's Baton Twirlers WASHINGTON, D.C...

...He and other Ashlanders, veterans of various peace and safe-energy campaigns, decided to "piggy-back" a nuclear-free Ashland initiative on the Oregon nuclear weapons freeze campaign, which was then gaining momentum in Ashland and elsewhere in the state...

...the definition must be derived from context...

...asked the "Pro-Ashland Committee" in an advertisement showing a winsome child under treatment in the Nuclear Medicine Department of the local hospital...

...Designed for police use, each baton is thirteen inches long and carries 6,000 volts...

...nor will the city permit the production of "nuclear energy in any form, experimental or commercial," or the storage of nuclear wastes within its limits...

...Such timing, union officials say, demonstrates that the stipulated risk system is just another way of ignoring necessary health and safety improvements in nuclear power plants...

...At the opposite end of the country, Mobilization for Survival is promoting a nuclear-free zone in Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of M.I.T., the Draper Laboratories, and other major contractors for nuclear weapons guidance systems...

...Such a system could help workers by eliminating the steep costs of legal action...

...Ashland ski resort...

...nuclear weapons freeze referendum campaign, which carried nine of ten states in 1982...

...Though adoption of a stipulated risk system would compel the nuclear power induswant to become a deep-water port for oceangoing shipping," The Daily Tidings observed in an editorial entitled, "Don't dock ships on Main Street...

...But according to a February 9,1982, article in the Baltimore Sun, a state police audit revealed that crime had not really skyrocketed in 1980...

...Violations are punishable by a $500 fine or sixty days in jail or both...

...Also troubling to the nuclear power industry are figures released last October by Robert Catlin, a research scientist for the utility-funded Electric Power Research Institute, who estimates that claims for damages from some 76,000 nuclear power plant workers could top $400 million by the year 2045...

...Though Houston police had supplied the figures, Police Chief Lee P. Brown repudiated the data and blamed a faulty computer...

...Law Enforcement Assistance Administration found that under the tough law-and-order administration of Mayor Frank Rizzo, five times more robberies had been committed in Philadelphia than the city's police department had reported to the FBI...

...Annapolis, Maryland, recently reported, for example, that crime in that city had increased 26 per cent in 1980 over the previous year...

...On July 19, they presented the city recorder with petitions bearing 1,650 signatures, more than enough to put the measure on the November 2 ballot, along with the statewide freeze initiative...

...All these schemes are ways to eliminate rigid standards and rigid enforcement," says Tony Mazzocchi, a lawyer affiliated with the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers International Union...

...The alpine town is surrounded by natural forests, mountain lakes, and rivers— spectacular for outdoor sports, camping, and ecological studies...

...Joe Volz (Joe Volz covers the Justice Department for the New York Daily News...

...These changes have been an integral part of the Administration's new approach of 'constructive engagement' toward the Pretoria regime," says Wolpe...

...At least two groups, Nuke watch in Madison, Wisconsin, and Nuclear Free America in Baltimore, are giving national focus to the emerging U.S...

...Irwin Nesoff (Irwin Nesoff is a New York City-based free-lance writer and member of the Coalition Against Militarism in the Public Schools...

...Component parts for Trident subs and missiles are manufactured in many towns and small cities-like Ashland—all across the country...

...The nation's media will, as usual, transmit the figures to the American people, reporting, on the basis of the FBI's work, that the crime rate in the United States is either up or down...

...The school's student body is 94.5 per cent minority...

...The skier is only thirty minutes from the 7,500-foot Mt...

...Congressional reaction to the shock baton sale is also reflected in a House resolution introduced by Representative Charles B. Rangel, another New York Democrat: "The House of Representatives condemns the Department of Commerce for its clear contravention of the letter and the spirit of the law, and expresses its horror that a license was approved for the export of shock batons to South Africa," the resolution states...

...Department of Defense...

...Donald Skinner and others estimate that the business-orchestrated opposition campaign, some of it mounted in the final hours on television, cost Measure 56 about 900 votes—the amount by which it trailed the nuclear weapons freeze in Ashland...

...The Board of Education is a mirror of society as a whole," she adds...

...Other ways listed by the School Board's executive director, Nathan Quinones, in a memo to high school principals include school visits by recruiters, administration of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, and the distribution of recruiting materials to high school juniors and seniors...

...Commerce Department license for the export of shock batons...

...A Message from the Siskiyous ASHLAND, OREGON Ashland, a city of 15,000 nestled in the foothills of the Siskiyou and Cascade mountains, is known for its annual Shakespeare festival, its ski slopes, and its bountiful yields of fruits, nuts, berries, Christmas trees, grass seed, mint, grapes, hops, and specialty horticultural crops...

...Research assistance for this report was provided by Kathy Jarvis...

...Over the last decade, the Justice Department's annual crime victimization study has reported the violent crime rate as remaining virtually stable, a marked contrast to the fluctuating FBI figures...

...But it appears that competition from the Justice Department's study has finally spurred the FBI to improve its data...

...The opposition tried to block the measure from the ballot on grounds it had nothing to do with Ashland...

...But Bohdan Denysyk, deputy assistant secretary for export administration at the Commerce Department, says Commerce did not intend to grant the license...

...Philadelphia's crime statistics are equally dubious...

...It's time for the nuclear power industry to anticipate the problem, rather than play catch-up ball like the asbestos industry," says Washington attorney William Schaf-fer, who handled Federal radiation cases when he served as Assistant Attorney General in the Carter Administration...

...For example, a worker with a calculated 20 per cent likelihood of having contracted cancer on the job would be compensated at a lower rate than one with a calculated 50 per cent probability...

...The Board sees the JROTC program not only as a means of supporting the military, but of coping with the school system's 50 per cent dropout rate, introducing students to career options, and providing a "disciplined atmosphere for students who lack discipline elsewhere in their lives...

...Thpn opponents obtained an opinion from the state attorney general's office that Measure 56 was unconstitutional...

...That's one of those meaningless terms so highly prized in statecraft...

...The document has long been touted as the national crime statistics barometer...

...Samuel H. Day Jr...

...It has seventy-seven co-sponsors...

...But criticism of JROTC doesn't stop there...

...Matthew Rothschild (Matthew Rothschild, editor of the Multinational Monitor in Washington, D.C., joins The Progressive next month as an associate editor...

...New York City high schools are, in effect, telling their minority students to look to the military for careers, says Mary Pinkett, a black City Council member from Brooklyn...

...The license, issued in April, permitted the sale of 2,500 batons to a private South African holding company...

...The remaining one-third comes from the Pentagon...

...The FBI believed Brown and removed the Houston figures from the 1982 statistics...

...Two recent legal developments have imparted some urgency to the question of compensation for former nuclear workers...

...In fact, though, the FBI shouldn't even be giving the UCR away free...

...Should we really ban all nuclear energy...

...After providing its Uniform Crime Report (UCR) to the media at no charge for fifty years, the FBI began charging for the document last year as part of the Administration's cost-cutting effort...

...is a contributing editor of The Progressive...

...Promoters of "Measure 56," as it came to be designated, rallied behind the slogan of "Keep Ashland a Nuclear Free Zone," arguing that Ashland already was nuclear-free in effect and ought to remain that way...

...nuclear-free-zone movement, tying it to older nuclear-free-zone campaigns in Europe and to the U.S...

...Ashland's principal newspaper, The Daily Tidings, reflected the disdain of most of the city's officialdom...

...The concept may catch the imagination of more and more cities, states, and countries until we have reduced the number of nuclearized zones to just two, Moscow and Washington, D.C," said Carl Eggers, one of the Ashlanders who helped keep Ashland nuclear-free...

...Employment opportunities do not exist for minority youngsters, and many enlist as a way to gain a future career...

...But even if local police departments discovered every crime in their districts, UCR's accuracy would not be ensured...

...try to admit responsibility for radiation-induced cancer, the method promises protection to the companies by setting limits and standards for compensation claims...