ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, December 17, 1996 TAG: 9612170063
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-3 EDITION: METRO
Sergeant innocent of harassment
FORT LEONARD WOOD, Mo. - An Army instructor was found innocent on Monday of sexually harassing a female trainee after testifying he had never even met the private who accused him of abuse.
A judge also cleared Sgt. George W. Blackley Jr., 34, of other charges, including making an ``indecent tongue gesture'' to a female sergeant. Blackley said he could not recall making the gesture.
Blackley's acquittal follows the recent guilty pleas of two other instructors at courts-martial at Fort Leonard Wood.
Blackley declined to speak to reporters, and the judge, Col. Gregory O. Varo, did not comment.
The charges against Blackley listed eight alleged victims in incidents in 1995, and prosecutors had a list of 40 witnesses. But only two of them were called, and both sides rested their cases after only a few hours.
Blackley still may face charges from complaints filed by six other soldiers. The judge dismissed those complaints when his defense argued that too much time had elapsed, but the prosecution could refile the charges.
- Associated Press
Intel supercomputer wins accolades
PORTLAND, Ore. - Intel Corp. announced Monday that it has broken the supercomputer speed record with a machine that performs more than 1 trillion calculations per second, giving scientists a tool to simulate everything from nuclear explosions to an entire strand of human DNA.
The $53 million machine, which crunches numbers with a technique called massively parallel computing, was built by connecting thousands of the same kind of Intel Pentium Pro microchips found in standard computers.
- Associated Press
LENGTH: Short : 41 linesby CNB