The Prince George Citizen Last of the Seven gone 10 Canucks struggle to win 13 Lots of jails needed 20 Where are all the cod? 27 THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 20,1992 51 CENTS (Plus GST) Low tonight: *18 High tomorrow: -9 Phone:562-2441 Classified: 562-6666 Circulation: 562-3301 GAMES AT A GLANCE MERIBEL, France (AP) — Petra Kronberger of Austria became a double gold medalist today by winning the women’s slalom at the Winter Olympics. Annelisc Coeberger gave New Zealand its first winter sports medal by rallying from eighth place to second, and Blanca Fernandez Ochoa of Spain was third. In other Olympic events today the Unified team and the Netherlands both earned gold medals. Evgeni Redkinc of the Unified Team won the men’s 20-kilometre biathlon race. Bart Veldkamp of the Netherlands upstaged world record-holder Johann Olav Koss today to win the Olympic 10,000 metres long- track speedskating event and end a 16-year gold medal drought for the Dutch. Olympic coverage, pages 13,16 and 17 Boyfriend convicted of murder Jerry Smaaslet, 30, of Fort Ware was convicted Wednesday of second-degree murder in the death of Donna Charlie, 22, in September 1990 in Prince George. The B.C. Supreme Court jury of eight men and four women deliberated from about 11 a.m. until just after 5 p.m. Charlie was Smaaslet’s girlfriend. They were both from Fort ware, an isolated Indian reserve about 450 kilometres north of Prince George. The jurors were asked by Mr. Justice Victor Curtis if they wished to recommend how long Smaaslet should serve before parole. After deliberating for about three hours, the jury recommended he should serve 15 years before the possibility of parole. Both the Crown and defence lawyers spoke to the judge today about the sentence they each felt Smaaslet should receive. Judge Curtis was expected to reserve his decision for several days before pronouncing sentence. A life sentence is the maximum for second-degree murder with no chance of parole for at least 10 years. The conviction comes after a complex trial which covered more than a week in court. The charge was first-degree murder, which Judge Curtis explained to the jury included the lesser charges of second-degree murder and manslaughter. To qualify as first-degree murder, a killing must be planned and deliberate, or occur while a sexual assault is being committed. Second-degree murder is any murder, when someone intends to kill someone and does so — that isn’t planned and deliberate. Manslaughter is the unlawful killing of someone unintentionally. Charlie’s body was found April 17, 1991 in a shallow grave in an empty downtown lot, more than seven months after her death. Her head has still not been found. In September, Smaaslet was charged with murder. No cause of death was proved during the trial. Two witnesses said Smaaslet had said he had killed her, but on the stand Smaaslet had a different version of the events. He told the court he and Charlie had been drinking, after using drugs, behind the Sportsmen’s Motel on Queensway. He left to go to a nearby convenience store and when he returned, Charlie was lying on her side, blue in the face with foam coming out of her mouth. When he realized she wasn’t breathing, he said he panicked. He told the court he feared he would be blamed for something he hadn’t done and was concerned about an impending court hearing on another matter, so he returned later and buried her. Undecided: 4 7 per cent TORONTO (CP) — While the Tories have reached a new low in voter support, more Canadians indicate they don’t know who to vote for, a Gallup poll released today suggests. The Tories had the support of only 11 per cent of those polled between Feb. 5 and 8, a record low for any national party, says Gallup. However, 41 per cent of respondents were undecided about which federal party to support, up from 38 per cent last month. The results marie a one-percent-age-point drop for Tories since last month’s Gallup poll. On only one occasion in the last two years — August 1990 — have as many as 20 per cent of respondents backed the Tories. The Liberals remained well ahead with 39 per cent support, unchanged from January’s poll. The NDP had the backing of 25 per cent of respondents, up one percentage point from last month. The Reform party had the support of 15 per cent of those polled. INDEX Ann Landers . . . . 30 Bridge..... Business .... . 22,23 City, B.C. . . . . . .2,3 Classified . . . . 34-40 Comics..... Commentary . . . . .5 Crossword . . . Editorial .... Entertainment . 28,29 Family..... . 30,31 Horoscope . . . International . . . 11 Lotteries .... Movies..... National .... . . 10 Sports..... 13-17 Television . . . . . 40 HERMAN" ifvj 58 00100' Our heritage Citizen photo by Dave Milne Paul MacDonald gets an idea of what it was like to be the class dunce in the days when schools had only one room and were lit with gas lamps. As if the dunce cap wasn’t enough, Leigh Erwin, Central Fort George Elementary School principal, drives the point home with a stern glare. The school celebrated Heritage Week by taking a step back in time. ENVIRONMENTAL MESSAGE Children’s book irks IWA 'Don't tell me this is hurting you more than it's hurting me." by SCOTT WHITE Canadian Press VANCOUVER — A popular children’s book that carries an environmental message has been labelled propaganda by a local branch of IWA-Canada. The powerful woodworkers’ union wants a B.C. school district to remove the title from its library shelves. The controversy is over Maxine’s Tree, written by Diane Leger and published in 1990 by Orca Book Publishers of Victoria. The book recounts a little girl’s attempt to save the old-growth forest of Vancouver Island’s Carmanah Valley. Recently, after a librarian in the coastal community of Sechelt read the book to some students, a six-year-old daughter of a foruth-gcneration logger went home and confronted her dad about his profession. ‘‘She said: ‘What you do for a living is bad daddy,”’ Murray Cantelon, president of IWA-Canada Local 1-71, said in an interview. ‘‘Here he is having to defend what he does and she’s got a roof over her head and food on the table, and all that. . .came from logging. For a kid that age to be put in that position because a school librarian reads a book to them.. .is a little bit unfair.” Cantelon has been involved in a campaign to have Maxine’s Tree removed from school libraries in B.C.’s Sunshine Coast communities, about 70 kilometres northwest of Vancouver. Schools have so far decided not to remove the book, but the union has another meeting March 3 with the district’s educational committee. Cantelon said the union wants the school district to develop further guidelines on what kind of books should be allowed. “It’s not really just a fictional book,” he said. “It’s more like an emotional point of view, maybe akin to propaganda. And there’s no criteria to really gauge that kind of a book.” A spokeswoman for Orca Book Publisher’s said the union’s actions are dangerous and smack of censorship. “They see it here on the Coast especially as a black-and-white issue,” said Ann Featherson, children’s book editor for Orca. “When someone writes the story that attacks the idea of clearcut logging, they see it as something that attacks loggers. We haven’t had a lot of trouble with this story before because we felt the author was very careful to downplay the loggers’ role in all of this.” Cantelon stressed the union isn’t trying to ban the book outright, but only to keep it out of the schools. “The issue is should it be read out in class for little kids. If a parent wants to buy it for their kids and read it to them at night, that’s certainly their business.” Maxine’s Tree has sold almost 5,000 copies across Canada. Author Diane Leger is married to Syd Haskell, president of the Carmanah Forestry Society, an environmental group that has carried out many anti-logging protests. Featherstone said the book “tried to downplay the role of the loggers ... so we felt it was really sad, funny, ironic when we heard” about the union’s actions. SEX WASN’T THE ANSWER ST. LOUIS (Reuter) — Sex-therapy pioneers William Masters and Virginia Johnson, who revolutionized the discipline and developed new treatments for sexual dysfunction, are filing for divorce after 21 years of marriage. A spokesman for the couple said Wednesday the decision was based on a differences in goals. Masters, 76, and Johnson, 67, will continue a 35-year association in the Masters and Johnson Institute in St. Louis, the spokesman said. Their most famous books are Human Sexual Response, published in 1966, and Human Sexual Inadequacy, published in 1970. Their current research work is in sexual trauma. Their pioneering work made the couple the “first family” of sexology. “If you can’t communicate in bed, you proabably can’t communicate in marriage,” Masters once said. The couple developed new clinical prescriptions for treating such sexual hang-ups as frigidity and impotence. Israel steps up attacks by PETER BAKOGEORGE Southam News NICOSIA, Cyprus — Israeli forces led by tanks and supported by helicopters crashed through United Nations’ peacekeeper blockades today to attack Muslim villages in south Lebanon. The UN says Israelis manhandled peacekeeping soldiers, and used bulldozers to push away UN armored vehicles placed across the path of their attack. In an ensuing exchange of fire between Israeli forces and local Arabs, two Fijian peacekeepers were injured, one seriously. A spokesman says the Israelis then refused to allow a UN medical evacuation helicopter to pick up the wounded, delaying their treatment Latest reports indicate two Israeli soldiers have been killed and three wounded. Four guerrillas and three civilians were also reported injured in the villages of Yatar and Kafra, which Israeli forces entered on a search for Shi’ite guerrillas. Both villages are outside the self-declared “security zone” Israel occupies in south Lebanon, but well within the area patrolled by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Israel says it is searching for Katyusha rocket launching sites in the villages. For years, rockets have been fired into the security zone, and sometimes into northern Israel. But the intensity of the attacks has increased since Sunday, when Israel killed Abbas Musawi, head of the pro-Iranian, Shi’ite group, Hezbollah. Thousands of residents of several villages in the area, southeast of Tyre and about 10 kilometre north of the Israel-Le-banon border, had fled in anticipation of an Israeli attack. A statement by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) said its soldiers would leave the area after their search is complete. UNIFIL spokesman Timur Gok-sel said it isn’t known whose gunfire injured the two peacekeeping soldiers. Today’s attack, which by some accounts involved more than a dozen tanks and personnel carriers, marks a major escalation in the long battle between the anti-Israel Hezbollah and the Jewish state. After a Katyusha rocket landed in a northern Israel town Wednesday, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir vowed to clean out the launching sites. A report from Beirut today said Lebanon’s defence minister has told the Lebanese Army to defend the country against attacking Israelis. However, the army is small, and not fully deployed in the south of the country. Crisis seen in mining industry VANCOUVER (CP) — The B.C. mining industry will be decimated by the end of the decade under current government policies, the Mining Association of B.C. said Wednesday. “If the status quo is allowed to continue, by the end of this decade the mining industry could well be reduced to 25 per cent of its present size,” said Tom Waterland, Mining Association president and chief executive officer. “Over the last 20 years, successive B.C. governments have, through the imposition of higher and higher costs, gradually reduced the competitiveness of the B.C. mining industry until, at this point in time, a crisis exists.” Earlier this week, Waterland and a delegation of mining industry executives met with Premier Mike Harcourt, Mines Minister Anne Edwards and Environment Minister John Cashore to outline their concerns over the future of the mining industry in B.C. 058307001008