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The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 1

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TUESDAY RACING RESULTS-ENTRIES MORNING FINAL LARGEST CIRCULATION IN THE WEST, 1,020,479 DAILY, 1,289,183 SUNDAY VOL. XCVI SiX PARTS-PART ONE 100 PAGES TUESDAY, MARCH 8, 1977 MORNING FINAL Copyright 1977 Los Angeles Times DAILY 15c WW ge Panel Heare Manuel Confirmed; First Black on State High Court BY GENE BLAKE Timts Ltgal Affairs Writtr SAN FRANCISCO The state Commission on Judicial Qualifications Monday unanimously confirmed Wiley Manuel as the first black to sit as an associate justice of the state Supreme Court, but did not immediately act on the controversial nomination of Rose Elizabeth Bird as chief justice of the high court. Manuel's confirmation, which came after a daylong hearing by the commission, had been expected. He made only a brief appearance before the commission, and no opposition to his appointment was expressed by any witnesses. That was in sharp contrast to the lengthy testimony on Gov.

Brown's nomination of Ms. Bird, who was the third witness to appear before the three-man commission. Answering in part questions submitted to her by Atty. Gen. Evelle J.

Younger, a member of the commission, she pledged to uphold any death penalty law that is constitutional-regardless of her personal convictions. She did not specifically mention the death penalty, but said she was responding to one of Younger's questions that had raised that issue. "If you are asking that if a statute was passed that was in conformity with the U.S. and California constitutions, would I strike it down based upon my personal conviction my answer is, no," Ms. Bird said.

She said she intends to adhere strictly to the oath she would be required to take to support and defend the Constitution. But she said it would be inappropriate for her to state what position she FIRING LINE Rose Bird facing, from the left, Atty. Gen. Evelle J. Younger and Justices Parker Wood and Mathew O.

Tobriner. AP Wlrepholo Kremlin Reaps Whirlwind by Signing Helsinki Accords U.S. Accused on Southland Sale of Offshore Oil Rights Europe: Human Rights Now a Burning Issue BY DON COOK Timts Staff Writtr PARIS When President Carter wrote his now-historic letter to Soviet dissident Andrei D. Sakharov on White House stationery, he tossed a torch into a tinder. Since then, the human rights question has been burning like a forest fire in Europe, East and West.

Because Europeans have lived with the human rights problem in their midst through centuries of revolution and dictatorship, there is a lot more inflammable human material on this side of the Atlantic than there is in the United States. In every country of Western Europe, there are thousands or millions of citizens who know at first hand what oppression, occupation and loss of freedom can be. There are thousands more who have been uprooted or managed to escape from the dictatorships Europe has spawned in the last half a century. Human rights is a cause Europeans have suffered for, and their response to Carter's concern has been overwhelming. Not all governments, or governmental leaders, are happy about this sudden upsurge of public expression, but all are having to respond to it, and even the most cautious politicians find themselves swept up in it.

Please Turn to Page 13, Col. 1 YOU IN CLAREMONT: CRAFTS AND CULTURE The community of Claremont its colleges, crafts and culture is explored in today's issue of You magazine. Also in You: How to get involved in racquet-ball. Tips on how to save water. A guide to low-cost dental care.

BY ROBERT Timts WASHINGTON The federal government sold offshore oil and gas exploratory rights on Southern California's outer continental shelf in 1975 without reliable knowledge of the value of the properties, the General Accounting Office charged Monday in an attack on the national mineral leasing program. The GAO, auditing arm of Congress, said that the Interior Department had tried to sell offshore leases covering the maximum amount of acreage in the shortest time possible without any assurances of when oil and gas could be produced or of what prices consumers ultimately would pay for the oil. Offshore oil and gas resources should be systematically explored and evaluated before leases are offered to private industry, the GAO suggested. Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and former Sen.

John V. Tunney (D- Calif.) had requested the GAO study. The report covered the Dec. 11 sale A. UNOPPOSED Wiley Manuel, whose nomination to court was approved by a judicial panel.

AP photo might take on any particular issue that might come before her. She said that would violate the canons of judicial ethics, and go against advice given by Justice William H. Rehnquist, a conservative member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Ms.

Bird's nomination was supported by all but two of the first 24 of 65 witnesses scheduled to testify. The hearing will resume Friday. The leadoff witness was retired Chief Justice Phil S. Gibson, who filled the position to which Ms. Bird has been nominated for 24 years, from 1940 to 1964.

After outlining the duties and requisite qualifications of a chief justice, Please Turn to Page 21, Col. 1 ROSENBLATT Staff Writtr of lease rights on 1.3 million acres in federal waters ranging from Point Mugu south to Dana Point. Oil companies bid $417 million for the right to develop oil and gas resources in the tracts. The Interior Department, which held the sale, had estimated that industry would pay $2.3 billion. According to the GAO, more than half the tracts offered were in water too deep for oil and gas production under current technology.

Another 20 of the tracts were added to the sale simply to meet an ambitious acreage goal, although the Interior Department believed there was little potential for oil and gas discoveries, the GAO said. It said that the Southern California sale was the first under an accelerated leasing program ordered by President Richard M. Nixon in 1974. The report concluded that America's energy production could be ham- Please Turn to Page 8, Col. 1 light as the Romanian government battled with the aftereffects of the quake and found its human and economic costs enormous and still mounting.

Although the government stuck to unbelievably low figures on the death toll, one army captain said Monday the dead numbered close to 10,000 more than double the previous Western estimates. Hospitals were jammed with thousands of the injured. The government has admitted that 20,000 dwelling places in Bucharest alone were lost, either from the immediate effects of the Friday night temblor or from later inspections that caused buildings to be condemned. Many Western diplomats and observers said the 20,000 figure might be far too conservative. One estimate was that it would take 10 years to rebuild Bucharest.

The city will be pulling down con-Please Turn to Page 16, Col. 1 Carter Welcomes Rabin-Words Stir Controversy BY DON IRWIN Timts Stiff Writtr WASHINGTON-President Carter appeared Monday to have tilted U.S. Middle Eastern policy toward Israel until Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance and a White House spokesman denied that any policy change was in the making. In an off-the-cuff greeting Monday to visiting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Carter said a U.S.

goal in the Middle East is "that Israel might have defensible borders." In the Middle East, "defensible borders" is a term loaded with controversy. As used by Israeli officials, it has come to mean former Arab territories that have been occupied by Israel since the 1967 war. Carter's use of the phrase generated news dispatches suggesting that U.S. support for a key Israeli position would increase the problems confronting the Administration in its efforts to reconvene the Geneva conference on a Middle Eastern settlement later this year. Vance rejected such interpretations, as did Presidential Press Secretary Jody Powell at a briefing.

"There's no change of position by use of the words 'defensible Vance said in reply to reporters' questions. "There was no geographical connotation and it is not inconsistent with our position on 242." (Vance was referring to U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which proposes conditions for a negotiated Middle Eastern peace settlement that include the right of all states to "live in peace within secure and recognized Powell was asked if it was correct that Carter's use of the term "defensible borders" should be construed as an indication of a new pro-Israeli tilt in U.S. policy. "It should not be construed as any sort of departure or a breaking of new ground," Powell said.

Powell was clearly braced for the question when he was asked early in the briefing for an explanation of the President's reference to "defensible borders." Please Turn to Page 16, Col. 1 FEATURE INDEX ASTROLOGY. Part 2, Page 6. BOOK REVIEW. View, Page 5.

BRIDGE. View, Page 2. CLASSIFIED. Part 5, Pages 1-18. COMICS.

View, Page 13. CROSSWORD. Part 5. Page 18. EDITORIAL COLUMNS, Part 2, Pages 4,5.

FILMS. View, Pages 6-11. FINANCIAL. Part 3, Pages 8-18. METROPOLITAN NEWS.

Part 2. MUSIC. View, Page 11. SPORTS. Part 3, Pages 1-7.

STAGE. View, Page 8. TV-RADIO. View, Pages 12, 14. VITALS, WEATHER.

Part 1, Page 19. WOMEN'S. View, Pages 1-6. PRICES SOARING Alaska: Our last Frontier' Is Land Poor BY WILLIAM ENDICOTT Times Staff Writtr EAGLE RIVER, Alaska-Dale and Ruth Briggs still live in the log home here that Briggs built when the couple came north from Kansas in 1948, drawn by the mystique of Alaska and the promise of free land. "When we first came," Ruth Briggs told a reporter the other day, "we were without electricity.

We hauled our own water. There were no modern conveniences. "Believe me, it was not easy. I still say you can't live off the land here. You really had to work and you had to have some means of support.

Dale worked at the local Army base. You couldn't just go out in the backyard and shoot a moose. "At my age, I wouldn't do it again. But I've never been sorry. It was worth it.

But free? Don't you believe it." Hardly a day goes by when letters are not delivered to state and federal land officers in Anchorage from people in the lower 48 states looking for a new and simpler life in what they imagine to be the "last frontier." Chuck Albrecht, an information officer for the Alaska Division of Lands, pawed through a stack of mail on his desk last week, found a typical letter and handed it to a visitor. "We got 25,000 like it last year," he said. The letter, both poignant and hopeful, was directed to Gov. Jay S. Hammond by a man named Kenneth D.

Ryan. "Several months ago I left my home in South Dakota to embark on an adventure," Ryan wrote. "I fulfilled a lifelong dream and came to Alaska (but) I find it impossible to buy or lease land in Alaska. "It is incomprehensible that there Please Turn to Page 9, Col. 1 PEACEFUL CHANGE Young Sees BY JACK NELSON Tlmti Washington Burtau Chltl WASHINGTON-South Africa's black majority will achieve control of the country's government through peaceful means within the next 10 years, U.N.

Ambassador Andrew Young predicted Monday. "I can't be a having seen what has happened in this country," Young said, referring to the growing political power of blacks since the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Young, a former top assistant to the nation's foremost civil rights leader, the late Dr. Martin Luther King believes that the same kind of nonviolent resistance that worked for blacks in this country will "slowly Moscow: Russia Finds Pact Has Backfired BY ROBERT C.TOTH Times Stiff Writtr MOSCOW The Helsinki agreement has backfired on the Kremlin. Communist Party leader Leonid I.

Brezhnev must be looking for someone to blame for letting him sign it. The Russians could not have known that the agreement's vaguely worded human rights provisions would prove to be such an effective means of showing the world how tightly closed the doors are here. Nor could they have known that the agreement would have such a An article in Monday's Times examined President Carter's human rights policy. Today The Times looks at the issue from the West European and Soviet viewpoints. unifying effect on the Soviet people, pulling together such diverse groups as Jews and Germans, Pentecostalists and Lithuanian Catholics, Ukrainian nationalists and Marxist reformers.

The Kremlin had every right to think that this would not happen. It had signed other high-sounding pronouncementssuch as the 1948 U.N. Declaration on Human Rights and the 1966 U.N. Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It had not complied with either but it had not been called to task for it, even though both have stiffer provisions than the Helsinki agreement.

Emigration, for example, is mentioned only elliptically in the Helsinki document, but both documents state flatly that citizens have the right to emigrate without needing an excuse. The Russians, moreover, modified more internal regulations in order to conform with the Helsinki agreement than they did for the U.N. covenants. For example: On emigration, fees for applying to leave were reduced somewhat, and Please Turn to Page 11, Col. 1 could take on South Africa" and they are not interested.

Young said that if South Africa does find itself facing an invasion, he does not think the United States would, under any circumstances, align itself with that government, even if Soviet-backed Cuban troops were part of the invasion force. To do so, he said, would cause "civil war at home." He added that blacks who constitute 30 of U.S. armed forces "would refuse to fight on the side of South Africa." In an unusually candid interview at a luncheon with a group of reporters, Young also discussed the diplomatic and political aspects of his job and said that the days of a U.N. ambassa-Please Turn to Page 14, Col. 1 Human and Economic Costs Mount in Romania Quake BY MURRAY SEEGER Timts Staff Writtr IN 10 YEARS PREDICTED Black Control in S.

Africa BUCHAREST, Romania-The old woman stood in front of the official's table after a long wait in line. She gave her name, address and story. Like thousands of other residents of Bucharest, the woman had been ordered out of her home because it was judged unsafe three days after a severe earthquake hit Romania. Like the other thousands, she had been told where to register to get temporary quarters. The official wrote down the information the woman gave him and then told her to move on.

"But wait," she said, "where am I supposed to go?" "That is not my responsibility; move on please," the official answered. The old woman pleaded but finally gave up and moved on. She later told her story to some foreign friends who gave her temporary shelter. Her plight was typical of the multitude of human tragedies that came to bring down" the white South African peaceful transition is the only Eossible solution for South Africa's lacks, he said, because the government "is a master of oppression" and "militarily, nobody but the Russians THE WEATHER National Weather Service forecast: Variable cloudiness today and Wednesday. Increasing low cloudiness Wednesday night mainly along the coast.

Highs today in the low 70s and Wednesday near 70. High Monday 78; low 54. Complete weather Information and smog forecast In Part 1, Page 19..

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