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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Oct. 19, 2000)
THURSDAY October 19, 2000 Volume 107 ~ Issue 40 14 pages Section A: 8 pages Section B: 6 pages i VtM i ft I IIJN k’l 4 1M Students look to private housing as alternative -LANUEVA/Thk BaTTaLK* 'assersby in front ledina Program. sh trail ilment r tour, ^es 34 (AP) — Ahigh-speJ carrying moreiti rs derailed nortlil uesday, killing fel tiring 34. :hed a criminal inv* led out the possiii tmb. w satisfied there#! said Chief Consta:! lertl'ordshire Policil id been heading fit! g's Cross station I lern England, vvheil ills near Hatfield,| London. >omb threats had tel y to patil of the raillil i. and bomb squads? rorist officers wr ne in the hours be® '/as ruled out. Eastern Ra/Zinyte- . said the causi^f immedi;itelykno4 reports of the trij (g. ■railed at 12:24pi about 115 mph.Si! ; nine passengerc! id at least three (f : injured passeif 1 n ‘ Aggies weigh differences in dorms, off-campus housing ByArai i Bhattacharya The Battalion Parita Sampat had to repaint her room and cover her cracked walls and missing floor tiles to make her Keathley Hall room look decent for living conditions. She is not the only student who has had to make her old dorm room into a home. “There are electrical wires hanging from the ceiling and loose ceiling tiles right above our heads,” said Sampat, a freshman business major. “We had to work really hard to repaint our room and use contact paper to cover the holes and the cracks in the walls, along with the peeling door paint and rotting wood.” The greater number of students turning away from on- campus housing opportunities is allowing private dorm liv ing to become a popular alternative for college students. The past two years have been the first time Texas A&M has been able to accommodate all incoming freshmen with housing fa cilities, said Mack Thomas, assistant director of residence life. A decline of on-campus housing applications for the 1999 and 2000 school years has led to less than maximum- capacity occupancy in residence halls. “The decline in housing is not a source of concern yet, but the boom of private dorm living is probably a source of com petition,” said Tom Murray, manager for custodial and main tenance services for Residence Life. See Housing on Page 7A. Off-campus dorm to he erected on Mud Lot site By Richard Bray The Battalion The Blinn College board of trustees is consid ering an agreement with the developers of Jeffer son at Northgate, a private, student-housing devel opment on the site of Northgate’s Mud Lot. Gena Parsons, public information officer at Blinn, said the agreement would allow JPI, an Irving-based developer building the Jefferson housing complex, to secure a lower rate on bonds issued to finance con struction. In return, Blinn would market the housing to its students and earn profits from the operation. “If JPI can link to Blinn College, it can get a lower bond rating, which means it can get financ ing for less because it is linked with a tax-exempt entity,” Parsons said. “What Blinn gets out of it is some of the profits from that development, if there are any. All we have to do is some marketing, like if they want to put their [advertisements] in our course catalogs.” The Blinn board of trustees and the legal de partment are examining the proposal to make a de cision, Parsons said. “Right now our legal department is reviewing the proposal,” she said. “The board of trustees took it up Tuesday night and decided they just needed more information and wanted to make sure every thing was in its proper place and that we had all the CHAD ADAMS/The Battalion The Mud Lot behind Northgate will become the new site of private student housing. information we needed before we decide whether or not to go with this.” JPI has submitted its plans to the city of College Station to convert the Mud Lot, at the corner of Church Avenue and Nagle Street, from a parking lot into a 225-unit upscale housing project. According to the initial building plans, the struc ture will contain 34 one-bedroom units, 152 two-bed room units and 39 four-bedroom units. Neither the room sizes nor the rent prices have been finalized. JPI originally offered to team with Texas A&M, • but the University declined the offer. “If we're going to use our marketing and our debt capacity at the University, we’re going to build additional on-campus housing,” said William Krumm, A&M's vice president for finance and controller. Krumm said the University would turn its at tention to on-campus housing before it invested in off-campus projects. “We tore down Law and Puryear [Halls],” he said. “We might choose to replace that before we would spend time and effort worrying about an off-" campus facility.” JPI owns student housing projects across the country, including developments in Lubbock, Austin, San Marcos and Denton. Program raises driving awareness Reptilian exhibit By Rolando Garcia condition, accord' izabeth II Hospital Garden City. ESPRESSO Breakfast Items -Sail® - Gourmet Blender On 1 unging Furniture JNCH COM* this ad Coupons at )onslocal.com Briarcrest Wells Fargo Building, l‘W 4-5928 Comimmi* MFM Ml PM 6:15 PM MOPM K Z EL» feOOPM t:00PM iiM'Security'Pull Tab iidtod 1 #' I Awarded Weekly The consequences of sleep depriva tion are nothing to yawn at, say organiz ers of Drowsy Driving Awareness Week. “People need to understand that get ting behind the wheel when you're sleepy can be just as dangerous as dri ving drunk,” said Laura Pack, chair of the Lupe Medina Program (LMP) and a senior biomedical science major. In addition to raising awareness of the dangers of drowsy driving, LMP promotes a hotel discount program for students. LMP started in 1998 and now includes 57 hotels in nine states. The hotels offer discount rates to students during late hours on weekends and dur ing heavy traffic times such as winter and spring break. Baylor University, the University of Texas-Austiri and Texas Tech Univer sity have joined A&M in LMP, and oth er schools have expressed interest in participating. Pack said. In its first year as a separate orga nization in the Student Government See Medina on Page 7A. STUART VILLANUEVA/The Battalion Elder Hardy, a volunteer at the Brazos Valley Museum of Natural History, treats Carey, an iguana, to a meal and a walk on the museum grounds on Wednesday. Carey, who lives at the museum, is part of an exhibit that allows visitors to get up close and personal with various wild animals. Clinton hails fallen, vows retribution NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — Alternating between words of grief and retribution. Presi dent Clinton sought Wednes day to comfort the sailors and families of the USS Cole. He praised the fallen as patriots and sternly warned the “hate- filled terrorists” whose attack killed 17 aboard the Navy de stroyer: “We will find you and justice will prevail.” Under a gray sheet of sky, Clinton addressed a memorial ceremony at a Norfolk Naval Station pier crowded with destroyers and aircraft carriers. Sailors in white dress uniforms lined every deck of every ship, listening to Clinton praise the colleagues lost in Thursday’s explosion at a Yemeni harbor as “our finest young people, fallen soldiers who rose to free dom’s challenge.” “They all had their own stories and their own dreams,” Clinton said. “In the names and faces of those we lost and mourn, the world sees our nation’s greatest strength: People in uniform, rooted in every race, creed and region on the face of the Earth.” Clinton described the at tackers — still unknown — as “hate-filled terrorists” who “envy our strength” while holding warped religious, po litical, racial or ethnic views of the world. “For them, it is their way or no way,” he said. Ad dressing those attackers di rectly, the president warned: “You will not find a safe har bor. We will find you and justice will prevail.” One by one, Clinton called out full names and ranks of the 17 dead, in cluding those whose bodies have yet to be recovered. In the end, a lone Navy trumpeter played “Taps” from the deck of the de stroyer USS McFaul, one of two Cole sister ships docked nearby. A wounded sailor saluted from his front-row stretcher, his wife at his side. The military’s top civil ian and uniformed leaders also took part. “Death snatched them away in one violent, unsus pecting moment while they CLINTON were making sure America and its friends slept easily in a dangerous world,” said Defense Secretary William Cohen. He warned those re sponsible for the bombing, “Our search for you will be relentless.” Army Gen. Hugh Shel ton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was more blunt: “Those who perpetrated this act of ter ror should also never forget that America’s memory is long, and our reach, longer.” Wounded sailors, 36 in all, came to him on gurneys, on crutches, in wheelchairs, with legs in casts or faces pocked with injury. Two sailors injured in the attack remain in Germany undergoing treatment, and another was recovering from surgery performed Tuesday night. The president spent more than an hour visiting with the wounded and making his way slowly around adjoining rooms, talking with new widows, childless parents and par entless children, many of whom wore blue-and-gold lapel ribbons and clutched photographs of their loved ones. “There were, obviously, some tears and sobbing,” said White House spokesman El liot Diringer. The president then went to the ceremony at Pier 12, which was surrounded by the McFaul, the destroyer USS Ross and aircraft car riers USS Enterprise and Eisenhower. In the stories told by the families, Clinton said, he could hear the pride of the first time they saw their loved one in uniform, or “the last time you said goodbye.” Clinton pointed out that the dead included Electron ics Technician 1st Class Richard Costelow of Mor- risville, Pa., who had worked with the White House Com munications Agency, helping to update its communica tions systems. Nader plants roots in Austin e UR World! RAVEL AUSTIN (AP) — Across the railroad tracks from George W. Bush’s sleek campaign headquar ters, an old house sits be hind tangles of trees where young people plot a differ ent kind of campaign. In this part of east Austin, Spanish is frequent ly spoken and roosters crow in the afternoon hum of barking dogs and crying ba bies. It is also where the Green Party lives and where presidential candi date Ralph Nader's grass roots are being planted. “It’s a totally different world here,” said Adrienne Boer, chairwoman for the Green Party in Travis. County. “We moved here because we wanted to be part of the community.” Many issues in east Austin, such as poverty and education, have not been ad dressed by most politicians, she said. Elsewhere in Austin, the city where Bush has presided as Texas gover nor for nearly six years. Green Party advocates have flung themselves be hind Nader, who arrives for a rally Wednesday. Nader’s supporters real ize his bid for the presidency is destined to fail. But that is not the point, say students campaigning for Nader- at the University of Texas. A&M professor named as Nobel Prize winner By Richard Bray The Battalion Donald L. Parker, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, will remember Jack Kilby as a quiet, intelligent man who enjoyed photogra phy and won awards for his freelance work. The world will remember Kilby as a Nobel Prize winner. Kilby, a distinguished professor at Texas A&M from 1978 to 1985, is one of three scientists who received the Nobel Prize in physics for their contri butions to the devel opment of the inte grated circuit. The other two scientists who worked with Kilby are Russian scientist Zhores I. Alferov and German- born researcher Her bert Kroemer, from the University of California-Santa Barbara. Since Kilby developed integrated circuits in 1958, microchips have be- KILBY come smaller, cheaper and faster. They are used in many electrical devices, in cluding cellular phones, satellite com munications and computers. “My goal was simply to make things more efficient,” Kilby said in a press conference after the Nobel Prize winners were announced on Oct. 10. “While the original idea was mine, what’s happened since is the result of hard work by tens of thousands of the world’s best engi neers. It’s been gratifying to see what other people have done with this idea.” Dr. Chanan Singh, head of the A&M electrical engineering department, said Kilby’s contributions to the information age make him worthy of the award. “The contributions that he made have had such an enormous impact on the in formation technology that we felt that the Nobel Prize committee has done the right thing,” he said. Kilby’s associates said he was a man who spent much of his time reading. “He was quiet,” Parker said of Kilby. See Kilby on Page 6A. TAMUG asset to A8dVI main campus By Courtney Stelzel The Battalion Many students and faculty do not realize that Texas A&M-Galveston (TAMUG) is not a branch of the Texas A&M University System, but a department site of A&M's main campus. Students can transfer from one school to the other without skipping a beat or reapplying for admission. “The relationship between the College Station campus and Galveston can be defined as an organic extension of Texas A&M-College Station, just on the gulf,” said Dr. Walter M. Kemp, vice president and CEO of TAMUG. Kemp said TAMUG is subject to the same ailes, regulations and admission processes set for the Col lege Station campus. Russ Graves, an academic adviser in the General Academic Programs Office, said there are programs ANDY hancock/tkebat^llon that involve students taking courses at both campuses. a ca mpus removed from the main campus, Texas See Galveston on Page6A. A&M-Galveston is tucked away on Pelican Island.