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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (April 23, 2003)
STA1 THE BATTALII hreat fall OPINION: Tuition rebate is useless • Page 5B * Aggies overcome Sam Houston • Page 1 B THF R ATT AT TON 1 nJC £>/\i 1/ll-ilwlN )rld’s largest cair^ ■ ■ ■ Ay avoided bantof Volume 109 • Issue 138 • 14 pages r23[< \perts in labor laws :ould have valid Cs, cting a new e company did ses and payments jst for top exew egotiated with m 1 benefit cuts, noses were rescini rmpany won’t In undisclosed amoui id the pensions fot ves. ing Monday om k Stock Exctei American’s pat;: fell $1.15 or ;e at $3.85. res jumped 52 as American the brink of bank ite Friday, the fe union announce 1 a new election ot; mi share of$1.8bI oncessions. on at first rejectee; s but reversed its g was extended h the union blamed] :al glitches in then i. In the end, 52.7|e ight attendants «i oved the concessi® it bankruptcy m en deeper waget A&M to pursue engineering branch in Qatar Texas A&M University www.thebatt.com Wednesday, April 23, 2003 Staff &Wire THE BATTALION DALLAS — Howdy, Doha. Qataris soon might get the chance :o become Aggies if Texas A&M gets tate approval this week to open a iranch campus in the Middle Eastern :ountry. A&M wants to join an unusual venture known as Education City in oha, the capital of Qatar. The oil- ich nation has been home to the U.S. ilitary's Central Command during he war with Iraq. Qatar's rulers recruited A&M to pro- ide the engineering school for ducation City, a high-profile project n a Muslim country that some say is ietermined to become more democrat- cand modem. T u Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board members will vote Thursday on A&M's proposal, which won't cost the state or the University a cent. The private, nonprofit Qatar Foundation will foot the bill with a 10- year, multimillion-dollar contract that covers faculty pay, housing and a man agement fee for the university. The final amount is being negotiated. State officials say the proposal prob ably will pass, but predict some inter esting discussion about the concept of plunking down a branch of A&M - home to the Bush Presidential Library - in the Middle East. Other American universities have set up campuses overseas, particularly in Japan because that nation sought American colleges in the 1980s. A&M ran a two-year program in Japan from 1989-1995. It shutdown the program when the Japanese economy crashed and the mayor who supported the idea lost re-election. The Japanese city paid for the branch. The Qatar program is rare, partly because of its location and because the universities are offering full degree pro grams. “The real difference is where it is,” said Marshall Hill, an assistant com missioner of universities at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. “The world has not paid much attention to Qatar until recently. We see daily briefings from Armed Forces delivered from Qatar. “The idea that a Texas public uni versity would establish a branch cam pus in such a place grabs your atten tion.” State officials are concerned about the timing because the hostilities in Iraq Education City, Qatar A&M would provide tor Education City pr ring school The nonprofit Qatar Foundation will foot the bill for the 10-year contract Travis Swenson • THE BATTALION are not over, said Don Brown, the Texas faculty there,” Brown said. Higher Education Commissioner. But A&M officials have done a lot to “Everybody expects that one of the challenges will be to get the necessary See Qatar on page 8A Source: KRT Campus Deregulation faces scrunity less than an horn se statements I) nd conveying fi ! eged attempt toi age property, on he had inteicr irists plotting a r ceremonies onfe dly detailed plait siles launched i By Rolando Garcia THE BATTALION ig up the it stress led him tots rated the e-mafe 04 stories, or this form hem. Bldg). tour resume Sei^Slse Bill 1542 - Raises tutrion J$12 per credit hour - Students won It pay $480 more each year 'Ill - 15-20% of tuition hn(| set aside for financial aid or position? like to see )ecially in the applying? you have in oles? o the staff? you have i you are April 24 ir office. Tuition deregulation suffered a serious setback last week in the State Senate, but the issue is still alive in the Texas House as legislators debate how to grap ple with budget cuts in higher education. State Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano and chair of the Senate’s education committee, introduced a bill that would have allowed universities to raise tuition by up to three times what is currently charged without leg islative approval. The bill was supported by leaders of the state’s public universities, including Texas A&M System Chancellor Howard Graves. However, the proposal found little support in the Senate and in the version approved by the committee, senators gutted the deregulation measure in the bill, opting instead for a modest tuition increase. “The Senate is not ready to give universities carte blanche to let them charge whatever they want,” said Jennifer Rice, spokeswoman for Shapiro. The revised Senate Bill 1542 would allow state universities to increase tuition by up to $12 per credit hour, effective next January. Coupled with a previ ously approved $4 hike, students taking 15 hours a semester could see their tuition bills go up by $480 a year. The committee will conduct a study on tuition deregulation and will revisit the issue in two years during the next legislative session, Rice said. The House higher education committee is still considering deregulation. A bill introduced by the panel’s chair, Rep. Geanie Morrison, R-Victoria, would allow universities to set their own tuition as long as they invest more in scholarships and grants. The goal is for families not to spend more than 5 percent of their gross income on college See Tuition on page 2A Travis Swenson • THE BATTALION Source: OFFICE OF STATE SEN FLORENCE SHAPIRO To mom with love George Balias, a senior environmental design major, drills screw holes in the side of a frame for a king size poster bed in the JP BEATO III • THE BATTALION Architecture Woodshop on Tuesday. Balias hopes to finish in time to give the bed to his mother for Mother's Day. Bush greets landmark visitor By Melissa Sullivan THE BATTALION At 9:33 a.m. Tuesday, Barbara Maxwell and her hus band walked through the doors of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum ready for a day of touring the 5-year-old library. As soon as the couple, visiting from Florida, walked through the metal detectors, museum staff told Maxwell she was the one millionth visitor to the Bush Library. Former President George Bush and first lady Barbara greeted the couple in the library’s rotunda, where Maxwell was presented with a bust of the former president and a basket of goodies that included Texas A&M memorabilia. “Both the president and first lady chatted about Florida with (the couple) for 15 minutes and even autographed a few pho tos,” said Brian Blake, spokesman for the Bush Library. “It was a great day, they had no clue because they had not listened to all the hoopla.” Blake said one million visi tors in five years is an “admirable accomplishment,” and the museum always has something new and exciting for the visitors to see. The John F. Kennedy Library See Library on page 2A Shiite pilgrims worship at Iraq’s holy shrines By Bassem Mroue THE ASSOCIATED PRESS KARBALA, Iraq— Swaying and chanting, some bleeding from self-inflicted wounds of ritual mourning, an estimated 1 million Shiite Muslims marched to this city’s holy shrine Tuesday, celebrating their free dom from years of repression by Saddam Hussein’s regime. The large turnout for the pil grimage, which ends Thursday, highlighted the power and potential of Iraq’s majority Shiite community. Despite bit ter internal differences the Shiites, who represent 60 per cent of Iraq’s 24 million people, were able to pull off the event on short notice and thus far without violence. It showed how once again, upheaval in a Middle East coun try has brought followers of the Shiite branch of Islam to the forefront. It happened in 1979 when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini founded a Shiite theocracy in neighboring Iran, and three years later when Israel invaded Lebanon, drove out Yasser Arafat and ended up fac ing the Shiite fighters of Hezbollah. Pilgrims, many with heads bleeding and limping from long journeys in 90-degree heat, pressed up against each other on roads. U.S. troops were largely out of sight, with a few members of the U.S.-backed Iraqi National Congress at checkpoints. The collapse of Saddam’s rule left a political vacuum, “So we moved in a specialized and organized way to face this prob lem,” said a Shiite official, Sheik Sadeq Jaafar al-Tarfi. “All the religious leaders, Sistani and Sadr, united to make it successful and had it not been for this unity it would have failed,” he said, referring to Karbala pilgrimage Hundreds of thousands of Shiite pilgrims marched to this city’s holy shrine Tuesday to mark the death of one of their most revered saints. They chanted, swayed and even cut their bodies in an emotional ritual that had been banned for decades under Saddam Hussein. Editors nominated for 2003-2004 Mosul > # Tikrit IRAQ Baghdad © Karbala + 0 100 mi BIE!!F 111 0 100 km ❖ fft. Destination of Shiite piigrims Najaf ’73 Basra * Kuwait City© SOURCE: Associated Press AP Grand Ayatollah Ali Hussein al- Sistani, Iraq’s top Shiite cleric, and Muqtada al-Sadr, the son of al-Sistani’s slain predecessor. He said the Hawza al-Ilmiya, a center of Shiite learning head ed by Sistani in the holy city of See Shiites on page 2A By Lauren Smith THE BATTALION Summer and fall Battalion editors in chief and the 2003 Aggieland editor have been nominated by the Student Media Board. Sommer Bunce (fall) and True Brown (summer) were tapped as The Battalion’s new editors and Heath Taylor Crawford as the Aggieland edi tor for. 2003. Applicants for editor are con sidered by members of the Student Media Board, who vote and collectively nominate a can didate for each position. Before officially being offered the posi tion, the board’s nominees must be approved by the executive vice president and provost. The application process for candidates include essays describing their qualifications and their intentions if presented with the offer to hold the posi tion, a requirement of previous experience, samples of their work and an interview with the Student Media Board. Bunce’s .days of working at The Battalion began even before she attended freshman orienta tion as she covered a secret off- campus Bonfire planning meet ing equipped with a hidden recording device. That assignment was the first of many in her three year career at The Battalion, in which she was assistant news editor, news editor and is currently serving as managing editor. “My plans for next year are very big. I want to make this paper as accountable to this community as possible,” said Bunce, a junior journalism major from Aransas Pass, Texas. See Editors on page 6A JP BEATO III • THE BATTALION From left: Heath Taylor Crawford, True Brown and Sommer Bunce.