February 6, 1991

Moving swiftly after a fatal crash in Los Angeles, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration said today that his agency was proposing systemwide changes in the measures airports, airlines and air traffic controllers take to avoid runway collisions. The agency's Administrator, James B. Busey, said in an interview that the changes would affect the signs and lights at airports, the equipment installed in air traffic control towers and airliner cockpits and procedures for airplane taxiing.

The United States Justice Department is negotiating to sell commercial garbage-collection routes in New York City to some of the nation's biggest waste-disposal companies, a move that could open the way to more competition in a business widely viewed as controlled by organized crime. To encourage entrants into the market, the city would consider buying back the routes if the original purchasers wished to sell because of intimidation, the city's Consumer Affairs Commissioner said yesterday. The Justice Department confiscated the routes from private haulers who did not pay criminal fines for illegal dumping.

After nearly three weeks of heavy bombing, the United States and allied military forces in the Persian Gulf have not substantially weakened the combat effectiveness of Iraq's elite ground forces in a well-entrenched "strategic reserve" in northern Kuwait and southern Iraq, Pentagon officials said today. Despite projections by the Air Force that it could reduce the fighting capability of Iraqi forces by 50 percent in the opening weeks of the war, military officials said the strategic reserve force, about 10 divisions of formidable Republican Guard and Army tank units, is substantially intact with well-dispersed underground depots and supply lines despite the daily pounding from allied air forces. Among the Iraqi military forces, the 140,000 members of the force are the best trained and equipped and are considered the most loyal. Supplies for Six Months Tank and artillery losses are in the "low hundreds," the officials said, and up to six months' worth of supplies have been salted away in thousands of small depots that cannot be targeted by allied bombers.

A Federal detention center that will hold 1,000 inmates is scheduled to open in the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn later this year despite opposition from neighbors and elected officials. The proposed jail is to be known as the Metropolitan Detention Center, and will hold prisoners awaiting arraignments or trials in Federal courts in Brooklyn and Manhattan. It is in the Justice Department's request in the 1992 Federal budget submitted to Congress on Monday, and is part of a plan to ease prison overcrowding by opening 10 closed Federal prisons and building five new ones. The plan was announced on Monday by J. Michael Quinlan, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

The New York City Board of Education spends $68 million a year on dropout prevention, even paying neighborhood groups to dispatch their workers to the homes of truants and coax the children back to school. A year ago, an outside study found that such programs had minimal impact and that participating students dropped out at twice the citywide rate.