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The Prince George
IINV-LUL/CO
TV
TIMES
Citizen
FRIDAY, JULY 8, 1988
50 CENTS
Fall election scuttled? 5 Iran not after revenge 7 Argos grab Jeff Boyd 9
Ann Landers................35	Entertainment...........30-33
Bridge......................20	Horoscope..................20
Business.................14,15	International ................7
City, B.C...................2,3	Lifestyles...................34
Classified................17-29	Movies ... ................32,33
Comics.....................30	National.....................5
Crossword..................19	Sports.....................8-11
Editorial.....................4	Television ..................19
TELEPHONE: 562-2441
 Prince George’s world-class Die Meistersinger Children’s Choir takes a break after receiving a standing ovation at gala Thursday night.
Citizen photo by Brock Gable
NATIONAL FIGURES DOWN
Area jobless rate takes another dip
The ‘face’ on Mars.
SPHINX-LIKE FACE
Work of Martians?
 WASHINGTON (AP) — Huge rock formations on Mars that resemble a human face, a pyramid and a fortress could be the work of a lost civilization or “just a trick of nature,” say scientists urging a close-up look at the outcroppings.
 Four scientists including a former astronaut said Thursday that the mysterious formations should be scrutinized further by spacecraft.
 Photographs taken in 1976 by the Viking 1 spacecraft as it orbited Mars show a sphinx-like face staring outward into space. The image resembles a death mask, with a long shadow obscuring one side of the face while emphasizing a human-like brow, nose, eye socket and mouth.
 Nearby is an angular mountain, suggesting the sharp lines of a pyramid, and a grouping of rocks that some view as a fortress near the centre of what they suggest could have been an ancient city of a lost civilization.
 Or, the scientists said at a news conference Thursday, the images captured by the Viking camera could all be “a trick of light and shadow.”
 “We have found something that is so interesting that it demands we go back to Mars and get more data,” said Richard Hoagland, founder of The Mars Project, an organization that is studying the Viking photographs.
 Gerald Soffel, the mission scientist on the Viking project and currently chief of the space and Earth sciences branch at the Goddard Space Centre, said in a telephone interview that the face-like image captured by the camera has been dismissed by most scientists and geologists as an illusion caused by bright sunlight and shadow.
 But in an article published in Applied Optics, Mark Carlotto, an optical engineering expert, said a new, sophisticated computer study of the Viking photographs shows the rock shapes appear to have been carved by “intelligent design” and not by the random forces of nature.
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"The fingerprint evidence is pretty conclusive, your honor."
       Citizen news services Prince George’s unemployment rate dropped 0.3 per cent to 10.7 per cent last month, the lowest rate for June since 1981, Statistics Canada said today.
   A year ago the rate was 13.6. In 1986, the June jobless rate was 14.8 and in 1985 the area showed the sharpest effects of the recession with a 17.7 per cent unemployment rate.
   For British Columbia as a whole, the seasonally-adjusted rate rose to 10.7 per cent from 10.4.
   The local drop came as Canada’s unemployment rate hit its lowest level in seven years in June — dropping two-tenths of a point to 7.6 per cent, on a seasonally-adjusted basis.
   Because of the small size of the samples used to estimate the rate for individual areas of the province, only unadjusted rates are given.
   These show that the best places to job hunt in the province are the north Coast and Peace River areas where the unemployment rate is
 6.8	per cent.
   The worst area, with a rate of
 13.8	per cent is the Thompson-Lil-looet-Squamish regional districts which are strongly influenced by Kamloops, the largest population centre in their area.
   The lowest seasonally-adjusted rate of unemployment in the country was in Ontario where there were 4.8 per cent unemployed, while the highest rate was 17.4 per cent in Newfoundland.
   Nova Scotia was the only province in which the rate was unchanged — at 9.9 per cent — while Prince Edward Island fell to 13.1 per cent from 13.4, New Brunswick to 11.5 from 12.1, Quebec to 8.9 from 9.6, Ontario to 4.8 from 4.9, Manitoba to 7.4 from 7.8 and Alberta to 7.5 per cent from 7.6.
  Rising unemployment was recorded in all other provinces with Newfoundland going up from 17.2 per cent and Saskatchewan to 7.2 from 6.9.
Pulp unions back strike
   Pulp mill workers in British Columbia have voted 89 per cent in favor of strike action to back their wage demands, says a local representative of the Canadian Paper-workers Union.
   “It is confirming the message the wage delegation has been telling employers for the past lOVi weeks, that our members think it is time the employers gave us our share of the proverbial pie,” Hans Suhr said in an interview this morning.
  The CPU and the Pulp, Paper and Woodworkers of Canada held strike votes earlier this week among their 13,000 members working at 21 mills across the province.
   Local results will not be released; said Suhr. There are about 600 CPU and 800 PPWC members working at three pulp mills in Prince George.
 MILL
 POLLUTION
 CHARGES
   The first air pollution charges against a Prince George pulp mill were laid Wednesday involving Prince George Pulp and paper Ltd. and mill manager John Dougherty.
   The first court appearance on the charges is scheduled Aug. 25.
   Charges against the mill allege: “(the mill) did introduce waste into the environment, to wit: air contaminants, without having complied with the requirements of the (mill’s) permit.”
   The charges are for April 22, 23, 24 and 26 and come under section 34(5) of the Waste Management Act.
   Other charges, under section 3(1.1) of the act, cite both the mill and Dougherty, for the same days. The charges allege that they: “in the course of conducting an industry, (did) introduce or cause to allow waste, to wit: air contaminants, to be introduced into the environment.”
   The maximum fine on conviction for either charge is $50,000.
   Mill officials were not available for comment.
   Air quality within the Bowl area of Prince George has been monitored for the past several years.
   The monitoring station at Plaza 400 recorded 677 hours in 1987 during which totally-reduced sulphur (TRS) compounds exceeded government standards.
   The Prince George Regional Correctional Centre’s station recorded 1,028 hours and the Lakewood subdivision station recorded 110 hours.
   Studies cite emissions from pulp mill effluent ponds, low level stacks, the oil refinery and vehicular traffic all contribute to the TRS buildup when weather conditions trap air in the Fraser and Nechako rivers’ valley.
Gala evening raises bundle for choir trip
by ARNOLD OLSON Staff reporter
   Die Meistersinger Children’s Choir received $15,830 Thursday night at the end of the Vienna Gala Evening, a $100-a-plate dinner held to raise money in their honor.
   The huge cheque, unveiled for choirmaster Sandra Meister, represents more than 15 per cent of the projected costs to send her and her 32 young singers to Vienna to compete against the world’s best children’s choirs.
The choir, founded in 1981, has continually won honors — provin-
Conductor
appointed
   John Unsworth of Edmonton has been named as the Prince George Symphony Orchestra’s new conductor and music director, succeeding William Janzen whose resignation was announced Thursday.
  Unsworth was one of several conductors who auditioned for the post a year ago, losing out to Janzen by a slim margin, PGSO manager Bill Woycik said today.
   Unsworth has a wide backgound of experience in his native England, Europe, the U.S. and in Canada.
   His experience includes choral, operatic and symphony music.
   A resident of Edmonton for the past 10 years, he is now a Canadian citizen. He has been a lecturer in music education at the University of Alberta.
 daily, nationally and internationally-
   It leaves Monday and is scheduled to return July 25.
   Almost 90 people attended the gala, jointly-sponsored by The Coast Inn of the North, CKPG and Canfor. The dinner was gourmet fare complete with several types of wine and champagne delivered by servers dressed in tuxedos for the occasion. The doorman for the evening wore a Beefeater uniform.
  Although several people delivered brief speeches, all simply restated that their reasons for taking part in the event were to sup-
 Kort the children whose excellence ad reached world status.
   One of the speakers gave the best advice: “Don’t sing to win. Sing for the joy you bring yourselves and others.”
   Meister, aglow with the praise her choir has been receiving as well as the cheque, said one of the highlights for her during the competition will be that her choir will sing a contemporary Canadian hymn in one ot Vienna’s famous churches.
   “It’s something that can happen only once in one’s life,” she said.
   The choir presented almost 30 minutes of entertainment that held the audience of diners almost spellbound.
   One that did hold the audience still and silent was a contemporary piece called Miniwanka. This was a mixture of words, mouth sounds and native Indian words all representing the sounds of water, starting with drops of a light shower, increasing to heavy rain and running water until it flowed into the surging surf of the ocean.
PIPER ALPHA TRAGEDY
Oil riches had high price
By JAMES FERRABEE Southam News
  ABERDEEN — The grim realization that this east coast Scottish city had paid for its oil-fed prosperity with thp worst oil-field disaster in history was beginning to sink in Thursday night.
   At twilight, 24 hours after Piper Alpha platform exploded in flames killing 167 persons, the thud-thud of helicopters ferrying the injured and the dead had died away.
   But in thousands of homes tears flowed as the horror of the tragedy took hold.
  Some of those tears were shed outside the Royal Abderdeen Infirmary as relatives and friends stared at the faces of 67 survivors brought to the hospital during the day, hoping against hope they would recognize their loved ones.
   “This is a close-knit community,” said Alex Adams who has lived here all his 50-plus years.
   “This disaster will hit us hard. But it won’t finally sink in until all the bodies are brought back,” he said in his soft, Scots accent as he showed a visitor the pretty, gran ite-stone port city.
  Adams and his family were among the thousands hit by the disaster on the Piper Alpha. One of his daughter’s boyfriends works on a nearby oil platform and two of
Helideck
 Living quarters: explosion occurred here
Drilling Derrick
Lifeboats (6)
 All that remains of the platform
 his friends working on the Piper Alpha were still missing Thursday night.
   Only nine of the 167 missing and presumed dead were not British, including two Canadians. Most of the dead and injured lived here.
   “Yes, oil has transformed this city in the last 15 years. You wouldn’t believe what it has done,” the husky, self-employed Adams said.
   The economic figures make believers of anyone. So do the bright faces of the 215,000 Aberdonians, the rows of spruced-up Victorian houses in the older part of the city and fact that Britain’s up-market stores, including Laura Ashley, line the main shopping areas.
   Oil provides close to 50,000 jobs here, between 20 and 25 per cent of the employment in Aberdeen.
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