ECHOES AND UPDATES

The scandal of yachts, bedrooms, furniture, flowers etc. for Stanford President Donald Kennedy at government expense [AtE May 91] has now led to (good news) his resignation, but (bad news) not effective until Sept. 1992. (He has the reputation of a womanizer on the Stanford campus, and there was much specula-tion about the justification for his $7,000 bed.) As his career and resignation were widely discussed in Science, Nature, and the general media, not one of them mentioned the case of anthropo-logy student Steven W.Mosher, who had studied the forced abor-tions in rural China and was ready to defend his Ph.D. thesis on the subject (he later published Broken Earth, Free Press, New York/London 1983). But the Red Chinese protested, and in what was not only an outrage of "liberal" cowardice but also besmir-ched the good name of the entire USA, the Kennedy worm prostrated itself before the totalitarians and appeased them by denying Mosher his Ph.D. defense.

Greenhoax effect: The National Weather Service has estab-lished that all of its electronic thermometers in the Southwest run about 2 degrees too high (NYT 8/18/91, p.190). A recent analysis of data from nearly 1,000 US weather stations showed no signs of a warming effect; average US temperatures decreased by a fraction of a degree over the last 70 years (DoA Quarterly Report, Apr-Jun 91, p. 5).

The Eco-Industrial Complex: Union Carbide Director Rus-sell Train is Chairman of the World Wildlife Fund and Board member of the World Resources Inst.; Alice Rivlin, another UC Director, is Chairman of the Wilderness Society. British Petroleum coordinator Heather Ross is Council member of the World Resources Institute. Ford Motor Co. Director Marian Heiskell is Board member of Ntl. Audubon Soc., as is Waste Management Corp. President Phillip Rooney, and the same company's CEO Dean Buntrock is Board member of the Ntl.l Wildlife Federation, and on and on . . . (AP 8/18/91).