From: cockburn@majors.enet.dec.com (Craig Cockburn)
Subject: The Vogon News Service: 07-Apr-92
Organization: Digital Equipment Co. Ltd., Newbury, England
Date: Tue, 7 Apr 1992 11:38:50 GMT


 ------- Forwarded mail received on 7-Apr-1992 at 09:58:05 -------

From:	DEMO2::52391::CASEE::VNS "The VOGON News Service  07-Apr-1992 1009" 
To:	VNS-Distribution
Subj:	VNS #2551  Tue  7-Apr-1992

<><><><><><><><>  T h e   V O G O N   N e w s   S e r v i c e  <><><><><><><><>

 Edition : 2551              Tuesday  7-Apr-1992            Circulation :  8157 

        VNS MAIN NEWS .....................................  183 Lines
        VNS UK SPORTS REPORT ..............................   56   "


VNS MAIN NEWS:                                     [Tom Povey, VNS UK News Desk]
==============                                     [Reading, England           ]

    Here is the News at 08:00 BST on Tuesday 7-April-1992
    -----------------------------------------------------

    UK News
    -------
    FT-SE = 2408.3
    Exchange Rate for UK pound = $ 1.7450  = Dm 2.8376

    Both Conservative and Labour leders have declared they will not do any
    deals with the Liberal Democrats in the event of a hung parliament.
    Current opinion polls give Lab a 3% lead over Cons, both having lost
    percentages to the LibDems, which would not give Labour a majority.

    Mr Kinnock has unvailed a new slogan: "Vote NHS. Vote Labour".

    A survey by Dun & Bradstreet has found signs of a real recovery from the
    recession. They do a survey every 3 months and the latest survey found
    signs of economic recovery in the areas that were first hit by the
    recession some 3 years ago.

    A rock fall trapped a number of miners 800m underground in a coal mine
    in Yorkshire. After a rescue operation lasting throuugh the night, the
    men are due to be rescued this morning.

    A policeman was injured during disturbances at a British National party
    meeting in north London.

    European News
    -------------

    It was a quiet night in Sarajevo after yesterdays fighting.

    In the elections in Italy, after 97% of the votes have been counted, the
    governing coalition have some 48% while the opposition have 51%.

    The row between Russia and the Ukraine intensifies after the Ukraine say
    that are to form their own navy using ships from the former Soviet
    Union's Black Sea fleet, which Russia says is now under its control.

    World News
    ----------

    Two armed robbers escaped with over $1M from a casino in Las Vegas.

    Isaac Asimov, science and science fiction writer, has died in New York
    aged 72. {AP obituary attached}

    {News courtesy of the BBC}


    Local Weather
    -------------

    Some sun, some showers, high 9C/48F.

    { Obituary for Isaac Asimov with acknowledgement to the many people
    within Digital who forwarded it around. tfp}

    By RAYNER PIKE Associated Press Writer

    NEW YORK (AP) - Isaac Asimov, the prolific writer of science fact and
    fiction who laid down the literary laws of how robots must behave, died
    today, his brother said. He was 72. Stanley Asimov, a vice president of
    Newsday, said his brother died at 2:20 a.m. at New York University
    Hospital of heart and kidney failure.

    Earlier this year, Asimov announced that a prostate operation had slowed
    him down and he was cutting back on his writing. He also suspended his
    monthly column in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, to which he had
    contributed some 400 columns and articles over 33 years. Publishing 10
    or more titles in a year was no big deal for Asimov, and his production
    had continued after a heart attack in 1977 and triple bypass surgery in
    1983.

    Among the nearly 500 books Asimov wrote, three early novels known as the
    ``Foundation'' trilogy were honored in 1966 with a special Hugo Award as
    the best science-fiction series ever. Asimov promulgated the three
    ``Laws of Robotics'' in his second book, ``I, Robot,'' a 1950 collection
    of connected stories about the introduction of sentient machines into
    human society. He required that each robot brain be programmed with
    these immutable commandments: Robots may not injure a human or, by
    inaction, allow a human to be harmed; robots must obey humans' orders
    unless that conflicts with the first law; robots must protect their own
    existence unless that conflicts with the first two laws. Robots as
    conscienceless marauders and implacable killing machines were a cliche
    of pre-Asimov pulp sci-fi. But the logic of Asimov's laws have been
    largely acknowledged by other writers and, ``Terminator'' movies
    notwithstanding, they changed the image of fictional robots from the
    malign to the solicitous. The Foundation books, set in a future galactic
    empire, featured another engine of the imagination that Asimov called
    ``psychohistory,'' a wedding of mathematics, history, psychology and
    sociology that almost unerringly reveals what the future holds. Robot
    and galactic empire themes eventually expanded and intertwined in 14
    novels. Taken together, they formed a picture of humanity in millennia
    to come - spread through the stars, with earth itself all but forgotten,
    but the people still in the thrall of human nature.

    Asimov was a biochemist by training and a hallmark of his fiction was
    that the science, sometimes mindboggling - like faster-than-light travel
    - was nonetheless convincing. One book in which Asimov conceded his
    science was not so hot was the popular ``Fantastic Voyage'' in 1966,
    about a medical team being miniaturized and injected into the
    bloodstream of a dying man. The microscopic-sized characters were so
    small that a molecule of oxygen would be too big to breathe, Asimov
    said.

    In hundreds of books of science fact, Asimov was a master explainer of
    the abstruse and complicated, a plain-English guide for the young or the
    scientifically semiliterate. He could put an intelligent but ignorant
    reader at ease with everything from the mysteries of mathematics to the
    keys to the genetic code. His work also ranged through history, the arts
    and humor, as indicated in such titles as ``The Sensuous Dirty Old Man''
    in 1971 and ``The Shaping of France'' and ``Asimov's Annotated Don
    Juan'' in 1972.

    His most recent entry in ``Who's Who'' said he was the author of 467
    books and actually lists 249 titles. A not untypical year for Asimov,
    1977, included such books as ``Familiar Poems Annotated,'' ``The
    Collapsing Universe,'' ``Asimov on Numbers,'' ``How Did We Find Out
    About Outer Space?'' ``Still More Lecherous Limericks,'' ``The Hugo
    Winners, Vol. II,'' ``The Beginning and the End,'' ``Mars, the Red
    Planet,'' ``The Golden Door,'' ``The Key Word and Other Mysteries'' and
    ``Asimov's Sherlockian Limericks.''

    Asimov once told an interviewer about a time he was saddened at the
    prospect of dying and having his brain decay. But then he cheered
    himself with the thought, ``I don't have to worry about that, because
    there isn't an idea I've ever had that I haven't put down on paper.''
    Contemplating his output and popularity, Asimov called himself ``the
    beneficiary of a lucky break in the genetic sweepstakes.''

    He was born in Petrovichi in the Soviet Union Jan. 2, 1920, and brought
    to the United States when he was 3. His parents ran a candy store in
    Brooklyn and at age 9 Asimov, helping out in the store, began reading
    the stock of science-fiction pulps. He majored in chemistry at Columbia
    University, but also put his hand to storytelling. His first short
    story, ``Marooned Off Vesta,'' after a dozen rejections, ran in the
    October 1938 issue of Amazing Stories. One of the rejecting editors,
    John Campbell of Astounding Science Fiction, said years later that the
    18-year-old Asimov was ``lean and hungry and very enthusiastic. He
    couldn't write, but he could tell a story. You can teach a guy how to
    write, but not how to tell a story.''

    Asimov said a watershed of his writing career came at age 21, when
    Campbell paid him $150 for his 12,000-word story ``Nightfall.'' That was
    a cent-and-a-quarter per word rather than the then-standard one cent a
    word and Asimov exulted over the bonus, saying later, ``I had never,
    till then, received so huge a payment for any story.'' Asimov earned
    advanced degrees in chemistry at Columbia, sandwiched around Army
    service in World War II. He became a biochemistry teacher at Boston
    University Medical School in 1949 and there co-wrote a textbook on human
    metabolism. That set him off to writing science books for laymen and led
    to his quitting his academic post in 1958 to be a writer full time.
    ``All I did was abandon the retail field for wholesale teaching,'' he
    quipped. What was involved, he said, was ``to read what other scientists
    write and translate it into English.''

    During his decade of teaching, his first novel, ``Pebble in the Sky,''
    came out in 1950, followed by the first robot and Foundation books. Also
    notable among the novels were ``The Caves of Steel'' in 1954 and ``The
    Naked Sun'' in 1957, in which a human cop is teamed with a robot
    detective. The two characters reappear in later books. Asimov said
    writing was a pleasure for him, not the tortured exercise many authors
    describe. He said he rarely could ``stop writing for as much as three or
    four days at a time without feeling either guilty or restless.'' ``I
    actually love the mechanics of sitting at the typewriter or the word
    processor and doing it,'' he told USA Today in 1987. He said he was too
    self-assured to have doubts about his outpourings, ``so I'm not forever
    patching and repatching and worrying and losing sleep.''

    Interviewer Barbara Walters once asked what he'd do if a doctor said he
    had six months to live. ``I'd type faster,'' Asimov responded. His
    keyboard speed was a fast-enough 90 words per minute and a typical
    workday might yield 2,000 to 4,000 words.

    He worked from a 33rd floor apartment on Central Park West, where he
    lived with his second wife, Janet Jeppson, a retired psychiatrist. His
    first marriage, to Gertrude Blugerman in 1942, produced two children,
    David and Robyn. He also is survived by a sister, Marcia Rapanes.
    Stanley Asimov said a memorial service for his brother will be held at a
    date to be announced.

	AP-NY-04-06-92 0830EDT


VNS UK SPORTS REPORT:                             [Ken Merrick, VNS Sports Desk]
=====================                             [Valbonne, France            ]

::: AMERICAN FOOTBALL
    WLAF Results - 
    Barcelona Dragons 13, London Monarchs 7
    Sacramento 14, Montreal  7
    San Antonio 9, New York-New Jersey 3

::: FOOTBALL

    Barclays League Div 1 and Div 2 tables as at 6 April:

     Division 1				    Division 2
                            P   Pts                                    P  Pts
     1. Manchester United  35    70         1. Ipswich Town           39   73
     2. Leeds United       37    69         2. Cambridge United       41   69
     3. Sheffield Wed.     36    63         =================================
     4. Arsenal            36    58         3. Blackburn Rovers       39   66
     5. Liverpool          35    58         4. Charlton Athletic      40   63
     6. Manchester City    36    57         5. Derby County           40   62
     7. Crystal Palace     37    52         6. Leicester City         39   62
     8. Aston Villa        37    51         ---------------------------------
     9. Chelsea            37    49         7. Middlesbrough          37   61
    10. Nottingham Forest  35    48         8. Swindon Town           39   59
    11. Q.P.R.             37    47         9. Portsmouth             38   58
    12. Sheffield United   36    47        10. Southend United        41   57
    13. Everton            37    46        11. Wolves                 39   55
    14. Wimbledon          37    46        12. Bristol Rovers         41   54
    15. Oldham Athletic    37    44        13. Watford                40   53
    16. Norwich City       36    44        14. Millwall               40   53
    17. Southampton        35    43        15. Tranmere Rovers        38   52
    18. Tottenham Hotspur  35    42        16. Barsnley               40   51
    19. Coventry City      36    40        17. Bristol City           40   47
    ===============================        18. Grimsby Town           39   46
    20. Luton Town         36    35        19. Newcastle United       41   46
    21. Notts County       36    31        20. Oxford United          40   44
    22. West Ham United    35    29        21. Sunderland             36   43
                                           ==================================
                                           22. Brighton               40   43
                                           23. Plymouth Argyle        40   42
                                           24. Port Vale              41   40

    B&Q Scottish League Tables:

    Premier Division 			   First Divison (top)
    1. Rangers             38     61        1. Dundee                 39   54
    2. Celtic              39     56        2. Partick Thistle        40   53
    3. Hearts              38     56        3. Hamilton Academical    39   49
    4. Dundee United       40     45
    5. Aberdeen            39     43       Second Division (top)
    6. Hibernian           39     43        1. Cowdenbeath            35   46
    7. Motherwell          39     34        2. Dumbarton              35   45
    8. St Johnstone        39     33        3. Alloa                  35   45
    9. Falkirk             39     32
   10. Airdrieonians       38     28
   =================================
   11. St Mirren           38     19
   12. Dunfermline         40     16


<><><><><><><><>   VNS Edition : 2551     Tuesday  7-Apr-1992   <><><><><><><><>
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Craig Cockburn, Digital Equipment Co. Ltd, Newbury, England.  
  ARPAnet: cockburn@majors.enet.dec.com                            Saor
  UUCP:..!decwrl!majors.enet.dec.com!cockburn                      Alba!

  Views here are my own, and are not necessarily those of Digital
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british