Safety Seats

When Diane Turner heard that four out of five child safety seats statewide are improperly used, the 40-year-old mother worried that hers was one.So she brought her Mazda, the seat and her 2-year-old daughter, Paris McKinney, to a drive-through safety program yesterday and watched experts install her seat correctly."

Surrounded by a group of cheering supporters, Sen. Clarence W. Blount, a West Baltimore Democrat, filed for re-election at the state election board in Annapolis yesterday, ending months of speculation about whether he would seek an eighth four-year term.Blount, 77, the Senate majority leader from the 41st Legislative District, has weighed leaving the General Assembly's upper chamber, but local community and political leaders have encouraged him to run again.He faces a challenge in the September primary from Del. Frank D. Boston Jr., 59, a three-term member of the House of Delegates who announced last month that he was making a run for the Senate seat.

Noelle Newman's first-class ticket was no protection against the other well-heeled passengers' ire. In no uncertain terms, the California financial consultant was asked to find a seat in the back of the plane.Already flying coach, Peg Rosen was forced to endure icy stares from her fellow passengers for the duration of her hours-long flight from the Dominican Republic."It made me weep," admitted the New York magazine editor.What could these two polite, professional women possibly have done to provoke such anger?

AMONG LAWS passed by the state legislature last spring that took effect this week, two will have an immediate impact on Maryland drivers: All people in the front seat of a car must wear seat belts and drivers must use their headlights when their windshield wipers are on.Maryland has had a seat-belt law for a decade, but it was ''secondary enforcement.'' That meant police had to cite a driver for another violation before adding a fine for failure to use a seat belt. Now, seat belts are ''primary enforcement,'' so people can be fined $25 for failure to use them.

THE WHITE HOUSE flack played it for laughs before the White House press corps, a calculated soft sell for an increasingly hard customer."You never know how to get the little thingy in through the back and get it stuck into the little dealy that goes in the side," press secretary Mike McCurry explained about the trouble with installing child safety seats. He started the audience laughing."You never know whether it's plugged in or not, and then your child goes flying over when you are turning too fast to the right," he continued.

Ah. Five minutes of peace. The kids had fallen asleep, exhausted from too much vacation. The flight attendant poured me a surprisingly fresh cup of coffee. I'd just gotten into my new mystery when we hit the bumpy air.Before the pilot could offer his customary apologies, hot coffee splattered all over my book and me. The kids' markers rolled off the tray tables and disappeared. They woke up with a start. You can guess what the rest of that flight was like."We're not going to crash, are we?"

WASHINGTON -- Child-safety seats will be made simpler to install in cars under a new federal rule President Clinton will announce today.In his weekly radio address, Clinton plans to say that all new passenger cars, vans and trucks will be required to have a new "universal system" for installing child-safety seats by 1999.The seats are proven life-savers. Studies show they cut the risk of death or serious injury to infants in car crashes by 70 percent and cut in half the fatality and injury rates of children ages 1 to 4.Some 350 preschool children were killed in 1995 traffic accidents.

Nuclear power is needed for space explorationYour 1950s horror films headline aside, the true risks from the use of nuclear-fueled power sources in space are negligible ("Nuclear menace in outer space," Dec. 8).We have no choice but to use nuclear power sources.The sun's energy is just too weak out beyond Mars and would require the use of football field sized solar panels which would be too heavy to launch, or chemical batteries which are too short-lived.The current technology for safely containing the plutonium power source has been vastly over-tested through simulated launch pad explosions and unintended re-entry to assure that the plutonium will never be released to the environment.

Five-year-old Max Kushner doesn't even want to ride in the front seat of a car anymore."If you explain to kids, logically, that they're a lot safer buckled in the back, they understand," says his mom, Pam Kushner, a Long Beach, Calif., family physician and a professor at the University of California, Irvine. Kushner is a spokeswoman for the Academy of Family Physicians on the subject of children and auto safety.By now every parent in America should have gotten the message from news reports that air bags, while effective in saving adult lives -- 500 just last year -- can prove lethal to children in the front seat during even a minor accident.

IN YOUR SEPT. 8 editorial, you attributed the cause of recent Maryland highway fatalities to the increased speed limit.Your choice of causes was inaccurate and misleading. The truth is that highway deaths are down in those areas where the speed limit was increased to 65 miles per hour.The causes of the deaths of the more than 50 people killed in the last month on Maryland roads are quite clear -- aggressive driving, driver error, failure to wear seat belts and to use child safety seats.Of those fatalities, more than half were either not wearing seat belts or in child safety seats.