April 13, 1996

Talks on Price-Fixing Inquiry

An investigator from the National Transportation Safety Board said this evening that the single-engine plane that crashed on Thursday, killing 7-year-old Jessica Dubroff, her father, Lloyd, and her flight instructor, was overweight when it left the airport at Cheyenne, Wyo., in a thunderstorm. And the pattern of injuries to the hands and wrists of the 52-year-old flight instructor, Joe Reid, suggested that he was flying the plane, according to the investigator, Steven McCreary, who spoke at a news conference at the Weld County Airport in Greeley, Colo., where the wreckage of the Cessna 177B was taken on Thursday night. Mr. McCreary gave the briefing in the hangar, standing in front of the wreckage, the plane's 180-horsepower engine dangling from a tow-truck hook.

In a landmark move to scale back the intrusiveness of the American military presence in Japan, the United States agreed tonight to return a major American air base to Japan in five to seven years. The United States has also pledged to return "substantial" land from other bases on the southern island of Okinawa, possibly as much as one-third of the land used by the American military on the island, a senior Pentagon official said in Washington.

Moving swiftly to fill a Cabinet vacancy created by the death of Ronald H. Brown, President Clinton today appointed one of his most loyal political strategists, Mickey Kantor, the United States trade representative, to fill out Mr. Brown's term as Commerce Secretary. "We need to send a clear signal to the rest of America and to the world that we don't intend to miss a beat," Mr. Clinton said this afternoon in the East Room, where he turned what would normally be a little-noted review of American automobile sales in Japan into an election-year promotion of his trade policies. "We've got a strategy. We've got a team. It's working, and we're going forward with it."

Mickey Kantor moves from his Trade Representative post while Franklin Raines returns to White House duty from a lucrative career on Wall Street. Articles, page 8.