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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 4, 2004)
H 'IT—I—^ Wednesday, August 4, 2004 u he Battalion )lumc 110 • Issue IK1 • 6 pages A l exas A&M I nulition Since 1893 OPINION: Admiring Armstrong Page 5 Yvww. thebatt.com PAGE DESIGN BY: RACHEL SMITH &M to close Commons dining facility By Natalie Younts THE BATTALION The Commons Dining Center, the cafeteria the Commons basement serving residents of T^xas A&M’s Southside donnitories, will per- .nently close at the end of August. A temporary establishment, the Commons Ftjod Court, will open on the first floor of the Cpmons building Aug. 22. A committee of five students and three facul- members will brainstorm ideas for long-term pljins for Southside dining in September, said Sjident Body President Jack Hildebrand. “We can have a very impressive facility that have all Southside students dining there,” ty Hildebrand said. Rick Floyd, executive associate vice presi dent for finance, said an acceptable long-term solution for Southside dining has not been de veloped yet. “We’ve tried to come up with a good in terim solution that will allow us to reduce our losses and that will give us an opportunity to see how the students accept the new con cepts,” Floyd said. Hildebrand said the temporary food court is not a good long-term solution because it cannot accommodate enough students. The Commons Food Court, which cost $50,000 to create, will be on the first floor of the Commons building. Commons Xpress will offer the food formerly served in Commons Dining Center, including hot entrees, side dishes, salads and cookies. A coffee bar, Common Grounds, will be open 7 a.m. to midnight. “(Common Grounds is) a really super cof fee kiosk-type operation, kind of a miniature of what you might see at Poor Yorick’s (Coffee House),” said Ron Beard, executive director of food services. Mexican food will be served from Olla Roja, which also operates at the MSC 12th Man Inter national cafeteria. The current establishments on the first floor, See Commons on page 2 COMMONS CLOSING! The Commons Dining Center will permanently close at the end of August. The new Commons Food Court will replace the Center Dining Center rennovations would have cost $ 16 million 1 Students'eating at the Dining Center has declined in recent years The new food court wi offer "grab-and-go"food rather than a full-service Will Lloyd •THE Photo by: DAVE MORRIS Source: RON BEARD, EXEC. DIRECTOR OF FOOD SERVICES Try these genes on for size thatl' iren Harris, a third-year graduate student in biochemistry, resuspends the RNA enhance crops. Harris uses sorghum, because of its high drought resistance, to test im a sorghum plant she previously isolated for use in research that can be used to the changes in gene expression due to abiotic, or non-living, stress. H ord to be in engineering symposium ding!® spac«; By Chelsea Sledge THE BATTALION David Ford, associate professor, holder of Kenneth R. Hall Professorship in Chemical gineering at Texas A&M and recipient of the .C.A.S.E. (President’s Early Career Award for ience and Engineering) award, has been select- to attend the National Academy of Engineer- |g’s(NAE) 10th annual Frontiers of Engineering posium on Sept. 9-11,2004, along with 85 of brightest young engineers in the nation. “It’s an honor to be chosen and a recognition which I’m grateful for,” Ford said. “I’m really hoping to bring back some motivating examples that I could use in the classroom.” The three-day symposium will be held in Irvine, Cali fornia. Chosen out of more than 170 applicants, the 86 engineers come from varying backgrounds including government, industry and academia. They are pioneers in their field, performing cutting-edge engineering research FORD and technical work, and are between ages 30 and 45. The engineers will meet together at the sym posium to explore topics in multiscale modeling, designer materials, engineering for extreme en vironments and engineering for entertainment. “Today’s engineers and their work are very di verse,” said William A. Wulf, president of NAE. “At the same time, many of our most signifi cant recent advances involve contributions from more than one field. (The symposium) exposes engineers to ideas outside of their specialties to See Ford on page 2 'emocrats knocked off balance by terror alerts By Ron Fournier THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON — The politics of terrorism has Democrats tied in knots. Each time President Bush raises fears of a possible attack, the po- ical debate shifts from his most troublesome issue (Iraq) to one of his jrongest (the war on terrorism) while Democrats fight their impulse to liestion the president’s motives. I The advantages of incumbency were in full display Sunday, when lomeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge warned of possible al-Qaida Irrorist attacks to financial institutions in New York City, Washington lid Newark, N.J. I The information was obtained in the past 36 to 72 hours, officials said 1 inday, increasing anxieties about a potential strike. The Bush adminis tration let a 24-hour news cycle pass before acknowledging that most of the intelligence, while recently obtained, was three or four years old. “I am concerned that every time something happens that’s not good for President Bush, he plays this trump card, which is terrorism,” former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean said Sunday. Similar doubts were raised privately by John Kerry’s senior advisers, top Democrats in Congress and even some senior Republicans who pri vately questioned Ridge’s timing. The announcement came three days after the close of the Democratic National Convention, which helped increase Kerry’s terrorism-fighting poll ratings and less than two weeks after a scathing report by the Sept. 11 Commission. The administration on Tuesday issued a blanket condemnation of anybody See Democrats on page 2 A&M-Galveston hosts academy training ship By Shawn C. Millender THE BATTALION Texas A&M at Galveston is hosting the Texas Maritime Academy’s training ship, the Texas Clipper II, Tuesday through Thursday as part of a recruiting effort by the Academy. The visit will culminate Wednesday from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. as the ship will be open to the public for tours and presentations by the academy and several marine/maritime entities like Texas A&M-Galveston, Sea World San Anto nio and the U.S. Navy. A&M-Galveston Director of Institutional Advancement Teri Fowle said recruiting students to the school and acad emy is traditionally a challenge. “When people think of Texas, they usually think of cow boys and cattle,” Fowle said. “We want to get the word out that there is a maritime academy here.” Fowle said the event is targeted mostly toward area high school students. She said the 40-year-old maritime program sends a lot of graduates to places like Sea World. The Texas Maritime Academy is one of six state mari time academies in the country and the only one on the Gulf Coast. Much like the Corps of Cadets at Texas A&M, mili tary service is optional for cadets, who can go into either the Coast Guard or the Navy. According to its Web site, the Academy’s mission is to provide its cadets “with an exceptional education along with hands-on training resulting in the cadets being recognized as the future leaders of the United States Merchant Marine.” Jeremy Sinclair, a third-year cadet from New Orleans, Louisiana, said he would like to work with the Military Sealift Command upon graduation from the Academy, though he does not count himself as one of the roughly 10 percent of the 200 cadets with military aspirations. Sinclair said the Academy is not looking for normal col lege-bound high school seniors. “Life in the Academy is different. It’s not going to be normal college life in a normal college environment,” Sinclair said. “It will place hardships on them they wouldn’t get normally.” Sinclair said while there are similarities to the Corps, life in the Academy is very different. “It’s a lot more laid-back. These are some of the greatest guys I’ve ever met in my life. We have a lot of fun here,” Sinclair said. Career opportunities in the maritime industry are the big gest draw for potential cadets, Sinclair said. “People are usually pretty shocked when we tell them we can make $60,000-$70,000 a year out of the Academy,” Sinclair said. “It’s a very unconventional lifestyle. Not your normal 9 to 5 desk job.” Photo Courtesy of: TERI FOWLE The Texas Clipper II is used for training future merchant ship officers and engineers. l.M OK LA. ARK. Small plane crash, killing six TEXAS Lakeway LA. ★Austin MEXICO 0 200 mi 0 200 km Gulf of Mexico Four adults, two children dead in crash near Austin XJRCE: ESR1 AP By Jim Vertuno THE ASSOCIATED PRESS LAKEWAY — A small plane crashed Tuesday into a luxury home bordering a golf course just out side Austin, causing an explosion and killing the six people aboard. Four adults and two children were killed; their identities were not immediately known, Texas De partment of Public Safety spokeswoman Tela Mange said. Three adults inside the two-story home escaped unharmed, she said. The house, which backs up to the Hills of Lake way golf course, is less than two miles away from Lakeway Airpark, a privately owned airport created by residents of the Austin suburb. There were conflicting reports on whether the plane crashed while trying to land at the airport or af ter having trouble gaining altitude following takeoff. Mange said she understood the plane refueled about 15 minutes before the noon crash and was headed to Oklahoma City. Federal Aviation Administration spokesman John Clabes said the TF60 Smith Aero- star, a twin-engine prop plane, crashed as it made its second approach to land at the airport. Bert Brown, a pilot with American Airlines for 34 years, was playing golf with a friend about 300 yards from the house when he saw the plane go down. He said the plane didn’t make an unusual noise before crash ing, but appeared to be struggling to stay airborne. “We just looked up and saw the aircraft and it was going slow, wings level,” said Brown, who retired in 1993. “I saw him try to either make a left hand turn or stalling out. ... With that, he lost lift and crashed right into the ground.” He said he’d seen crashes in training films, but never personally. See Crash on page 2