Longview Daily News from Longview, Washington • 1

Cm This Day Area News Sports Also inside Portland Police Museum tells about robbers, killers: CI Viewpoints: A10 Calendar: C4 Comics: D3 Blazer guard Terry Porter signs offer sheet with Denver: Dl Coach uses RAT as 'Right Approach for Training: Bl The Daily ews Thursday, August 10, 1989 Serving the Lower Columbia area from Longview, Washington 35 Cents Hostage talks mulled 'Nutty Narrows' has fallen down, fallen down FlPl so 6) Jiuv? fov WASHINGTON (AP) President Bush's chief spokesman today held out the possibility of direct talks with Iran over the hostages under certain conditions, but cautioned, "We're nowhere near that." Among the preconditions toward any such direct dialogue with the new leaders of Tehran, Peacekeepers injured: Page A2 said presidential Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater, would be a clear sign from authoritative Iranian officials that they are willing to enter such talks. A published report in Tehran said indirect U.S.-Iranian talks on the hostages would open within a few days, conducted through a third country, probably Pakistan. Fitzwater said it was "premature" to expect direct talks with Tehran. "We're nowhere near that," he said. The spokesman indicated, however, that indirect contacts will continue.

He said the United States was likely to take advantage of Pakistani Foreign Minister Sahabzada Yaqub Khan's visit to Iran next week to send the Tehran government another message. Khan met with Vice President Dan Quayle last week and Quayle urged Pakistan to "become involved in helping facilitate the release of the hostages and to reveal information that Pakistan has accumulated on the situation," said Quayle spokesman David Beckwith. Fitzwater also said the United States and Israel were being "forthcoming" with each other about efforts to free their hostages in Lebanon, but were not coordinating their efforts. Israeli officials had claimed that Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir persuaded Bush in a 10-minute telephone call Wednesday night to coordinate efforts to release foreign hostages and Israeli prisoners held in Lebanon. The English-language Tehran Times said in an editorial today that indirect talks between Iran and the United States on the hostage crisis will begin within days.

It said the talks would be conducted through a third country, probably Pakistan. IWy Meat pinto by Greg Ebenoic Longview's Nutty Narrows Bridge tilts after one of the trees it was attached to fell onto Olympia Way Wednesday. Police officer Denny Parkhill stands nearby. Oh, nuts: Squirrels' road rocky after bridge collapse said. The tree's primary root was totally unsound, he said, so the only thing holding the oak up and keeping it green was a system of smaller feeder roots.

Gibbens said he didn't know whether it was likely that other trees planted by Longview's founders might be in a similar predicament. "There is really no way of determining what the root structure is beneath them," he said. Both Gibbens and the Peters family hope somebody will restring Nutty Narrows in other nearby trees, not let it be squirreled away in some warehouse. For now, it'll be stored in the Parks and Recreation shop. If any of the other aging oaks show signs of rot, Peters said, there's likely to be an outcry like none before.

"It's a little known fact that that tree was a prime roosting spot for spotted owls," he said. More acorn in cheek. Longview a disaster area." Ever since the squirrel-span was slung across Olympia Way in 1963, it's lured attention from local residents, tourists, national television and magazines. The park setting around the city's Civic Center is home to dozens of bushy-tailed critters that bound from tree to tree and often from one side of streets to the other. Worried about the potential for high squirrel mortality in the high traffic area, Peters a local contractor and civic leader decided to build a bridge for the furry creatures.

Cables threaded through a length of fire hose served the function but Peters' metal replica of a bridge framework mounted in the middle was the piece de resistance that turned it into a landmark. "Dad had a lot of fun with that tree and I'm sure he was both laughing and By Kathleen Reinholdt The Daily Newt There was no howling wind, no crackling lightning, no trembling earth before one of the two mighty oaks that held Longview's "Nutty Narrows" squirrel bridge aloft toppled dead and twisted onto Olympia Way early Wednesday evening. But Roger Peters, son of the bridge's builder, Amos Peters, thinks he knows what laid the leafy giant flat. After he heard the tree and bridge had fallen, Peters went to inspect the scene. Not far away, the 10-foot carved squirrel erected in his father's memory after his 1984 death seemed to have a bit of a smirk on its face, Peters said.

"It's very possible he got up there and bounced up and down on the bridge" and caused the collapse, he said. "I'm saying that acorn in cheek, of course," he said. "It might behoove Mayor Dennis Weber to declare crying when it came down," his son said. "It put Longview on the map in some respects," Bill Gibbens, Longview Parks and Recreations director, said this morning. At about 7:30 Wednesday, the 60-some-year old oak simply fell over, breaking off at ground level.

With it went the squirrel bridge, which stayed attached but slanted groundward. No cars were driving by at the time so there were no injuries or damage. City workers cut the tree into chunks and shoved it to the side of the street, where it remained this morning. "The root structure just gave way," Gibbens said. The tree had previously been treated for a cavity of rot near its base, he said, and was thought to be healthy.

Not so. "Evidently that rot just continued down into the root system," Gibbens Signal sparks hope of finding lawmaker Sf8 emergency ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) Rescue crews searching for a plane that disappeared with U.S. Rep. Mickey Leland and 13 other DC-10 landing DENVER (AP) A Northwest Airlines DC-10 carrying 256 people made an emergency landing in Denver after its tail engine apparently began break- people on board were told today that a weather satellite detected an emergency Those signals, and similar ones broadcast by ships, are tracked by weather satellites in a search-and-rescue system operated by the United States, the Soviet Union, France and Canada. James T.

Bailey of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in Washington today: "We got one signal on one satellite pass (Wednesday night). There is no way to be sure it is coming from that aircraft." Bailey said subsequent satellite passes have not been able to confirm the signal because of radio interference. Haley said it would probably be several hours before anyone reached the site of the signal because it was dark and the signal came from rough terrain. "We're talking about 20 miles in rough country," he said in a telephone interview, adding that the road conditions in the area were not known. Officials in Goba, 200 miles southeast of the capital, were instructed to dispatch searchers to the site immediately, Haley said.

Most commercial aircraft carry radio transponders that send out a signal allowing the plane to be located in the event of an accident. area 130 miles south-southeast of Addis Ababa, the capital. Haley said the region is well outside the area rescue workers have been searching since Monday, when the twin-engine plane carrying the Texas Democrat and his party disappeared in remote, rugged country near the Sudanese border. At the Pentagon, spokesman Pete Williams said a U-2 recon-naisance plane allowed to fly over the area Wednesday had taken pictures of the region but that the photographs had not been developed. He also called the report of the signal "very preliminary." signal from an airplane.

James Haley, a spokesman at the U.S. Embassy. said the faint ReP- Mickey Uland locater signal was picked up by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or-biter and was coming from an Views of the News By Ted M. Natt Into your pocket REMEMBER THE debacle a few years back when the Washington Public Power Supply System defaulted on $2.25 billion in bonds? It was the biggest municipal bankruptcy in American history. Standing next to the bailout of the U.S.

savings and loan debacle, the WPPSS default is peanuts a few weeks interest on what it will cost U.S. taxpayers to keep the nation's from insolvency. At a minimum, U.S. taxpayers will be paying $166 billion to bail out the sick in the country. Some good estimates are that the real cost over 33 years will be $306 billion from taxpayers.

At this point, the higher estimate is more believable. Why? The answer is an utter lack of confidence in the competence of the people who will be overseeing the bailouts. If most of them come from what was the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, then the bailout program will be in big trouble and will be more costly than it need be. These are the same folks who permitted the to get into such deep trouble in the first place. Then when they tried to do something about it, they tended overwhelmingly to make things worse, not better.

Too many of them were inexperienced, dumb or caught up in the bureaucratic Please see Views, Page A2 1st black, youngest ever military chief named Nose gear stuck: Page A3 ing up. Officials said they found shrapnel-like holes in the engine cover. The incident bore striking similarities to the engine failure that preceded last month's crash of a United Airlines DC-10 in Sioux City, Iowa, in which 111 people died. Flight 308 from Los Angeles to Minneapolis landed safely at Stapleton International Airport about 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, said airport spokesman Richard Boulware.

Less than 30 minutes earlier while cruising at 39,000 feet, the crew reported a loss of oil pressure and severe vibration in the tail engine and shut it down, said Greg Feith, a spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board in Denver. NTSB investigators from Washington, D.C., were due in Denver today, agency officials said. Accidents that do not involve fatalities or massive damage to aircraft normally are investigated by regional offices, but the Northwest failure was "too much of a coincidence," Feith said, referring to the Sioux City crash. Study says aspirin helps avoid pregnancy problems Los Angeles Times LOS ANGELES Low doses of aspirin can prevent pregnancy-induced hypertension and related toxemia in some women, according to two new studies that offer hope of the first effective method of averting a common and potentially fatal complication of pregnancy. The studies, published in today's edition of The New England Journal of Medicine, found that small amounts of aspirin during late pregnancy reduced the women's risk of high blood pressure and thus averted the need for sometimes-dangerous premature delivery.

The results are the latest in a string of recent findings on possible new benefits of the 90-year-old painkiller. Aspirin was shown recently to cut in half the risk of heart attack in men over 50; researchers are also exploring its uses against Please see Aspirin, Page A2 WASHINGTON (AP) President Bush today named former White House national security adviser Colin L. Powell as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, making him the youngest man and the first black selected as the nation's top military officer. With the 52-year-old, four-star Army general at his side, Bush said: "As we face the challenges of the '90s it is most important that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff be a person of breadth, judgment, experience and total integrity. Colin Powell has all those qualities and more." Powell well-respected: Page A3 Replied Powell: "Mr.

President, I am ready to go to it and I look forward to the challenges ahead." At the Rose Garden ceremony. Bush heaped praise on the nominee. "Colin Powell has had a truly distinguished military career and he's a complete soldier," Bush said. Following confirmation by the Senate, Powell would take over the prestigious position from Adm. William J.

Crowe who is due to retire Sept. 30..