December 28, 1990

Nursing school enrollment rose sharply this year, according to a new study, raising hopes that the four-year-old nursing shortage may be easing. Preliminary results from the study, by the National League for Nursing, found that about 230,000 students were enrolled in registered nurse programs this fall, a 14 percent increase over last year's enrollment of 201,458. The highest enrollment in the past 20 years was 250,000 students in 1983.

California's worst winter cold in more than half a century has devastated the state's $8 billion fruit and vegetable industry, and agriculture officials said today that fruit prices around the country would rise as a result. Farmers called on officials to declare parts of the state a disaster area after a prolonged and widespread freeze that brought record low temperatures to many places. More freezing temperatures are forecast for this weekend and are expected to kill some of the surviving crops.

In yet another ominous economic pulse-taking, the Government reported today that orders to factories making all sorts of long-lived goods from watches to locomotives tumbled 10.5 percent in November, equaling a 32-year record drop established in January of this year. The drop in orders for durable goods was particularly sharp for transportation equipment, but weakness was shown by most major industries. The decline pulled order levels back to where they were in early 1988.

Eight times a day, an empty mile-long coal train eases into this desolate railroad junction. Each train leaves with some 11,500 tons of coal from the Black Thunder Mine, the nation's largest coal mine. A bonanza of easily mined, clean-burning, low-sulfur coal has transformed Wyoming in the last 15 years from a bit player into the largest coal-producing state in the nation. And changes in the Federal Clean Air Act enacted earlier this year to reduce acid rain are expected to keep mines operating at top speeds in the Powder River Basin, a 9,700-square-mile region between South Dakota's Black Hills and Wyoming's Big Horn Mountains. The region is home to the country's seven largest coal mines, including Black Thunder.

Bush Administration officials contend that if war erupted in the Persian Gulf, it would pose few disruptions to energy supplies, even though the region holds two-thirds of the world's oil. Government and industry planners say the risk of damage to oilfields there is only minimal. They say that even some loss of output from Saudi Arabia could be sustained with little effect on consumers or the world economy. By drawing upon strategic and commercial stockpiles and buying oil already aboard tankers and awaiting customers, these analysts say, it should be possible to avoid any oil shortage, as well as to keep prices from rising, as they did after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August.