August 17, 1995

Two United States Army reservists yesterday were acquitted of sexually assaulting a female soldier, who testified she was too drunk to remember what happened. The officers, Patrick Fry of Moorestown and Theodore Wynder of Randallstown, Md., were charged with violating a Federal law against having sex with someone who is too impaired to give consent.

The State Board of Public Utilities said yesterday that it had cited 90 excavating companies for violating a law that requires them to give notice before digging near pipelines or utility lines, The Associated Press reported.

Fossil discoveries in Kenya have revealed a new species of human ancestors that lived four million years ago, were hardly any bigger than chimpanzees, bore striking resemblances to both apes and evolving man and, perhaps most significantly, were already standing erect and walking on two legs much like modern humans. Leg and arm bones found near Lake Turkana, paleontologists said, provide the earliest direct and unambiguous evidence for upright walking, or bipedalism, by any members of the human family tree. Until now, the oldest evidence has been the 3.6-million-year-old footprints at Laetoli in Tanzania, together with tiny foot bones from South Africa first reported last month that are about the same age.

Sam Zell, the Chicago real estate magnate, and a group of investors that includes the Walt Disney Company agreed yesterday to invest $250 million in Rockefeller Center Properties Inc., the troubled real estate investment trust that holds the $1.3 billion mortgage on Rockefeller Center. In exchange, Mr. Zell and his investor group would get a 50 percent stake in a new company that would jointly own the mortgage along with the trust's current shareholders -- and a shot at owning the trophy property itself.

Contending that the four companies that provide electricity to New Jersey residents charge higher rates than any other utilities in the Northeast, a consumer group called on the state Board of Public Utilities yesterday to reduce electrical rates by 25 percent. Stacey Peterson, a spokeswoman for the consumer group, New Jersey Citizen Action, said that a rate decrease of that size would still enable the utilities to show a profit.