Tuesday, September 11, 2007

The Brown Daily Herald T uesday, S eptember 11, 2007

Volume CXLII, No. 65

Since 1866, Daily Since 1891

EMS calls down for Orientation

BY Scott Lowenstein Senior Staff Writer

Amid mixed reviews from students and praise from University officials, this year’s revamped Orientation schedule has yielded at least one noticeable success — fewer alcoholrelated calls to Emergency Medical Services. Administrators attributed this decline, primarily, to a different Orientation schedule from last year.

Ten alcohol-related calls and two emergency room ambulance transports were made between Saturday, Sept. 8 and Sunday, Sept. 9 this academic year, compared to 18 calls and seven transports over last year’s first weekend, said Margaret Klawunn, associate vice president for campus life and dean of student life.

“The weekends are structured differently this year, so it is not completely comparable,” Klawunn said. Last year, freshmen moved into dorms starting on a Wednesday, while they moved in this year on Saturday, Sept. 1.

Overall, Klawunn characterized this year’s Orientation as a success, adding that in terms of alcohol consumption, this year “seems to be better than last year,” she wrote in an e-mail to The Herald. Klawunn attributed the drop in EMS calls to the shortened, concentrated Orientation schedule and the change in move-in days.

The weekend freshmen and early-arriving upperclassman moved in began Saturday, Sept. 1, and saw seven calls and two Emergency Room transports, while no calls were made during the first academic weekday nights, Klawunn added.

“There were a lot of activities,” Klawunn explained, noting freshmen meetings with advisers, class meetings and academic seminars based continued on page 4

Rahul Keerthi / Herald

Students from the Middle East debate the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and American foreign policy, among other issues, with the College Republicans and Brown Dems.

State Dept. brings Middle East students to campus

By Franklin Kanin Senior Staff Writer

Fourteen youth delegates from the Middle East visited Brown yesterday as part of a U.S. State Departmentsponsored cultural exchange intended to expose students to American society and political culture.

Their visit included a tour of campus, an information session about American journalism at The Herald and a conversation with both the College Republicans and Brown Democrats.

The State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program,

S i x Y ears L ater

which coordinated the visit, brings leaders from around the world to the United States to experience “civic life,” including “pluralism, tolerance, and volunteerism” according to its Web site.

The group that visited Brown also went to Washington, D.C., Seattle, Austin and Dallas, and included students and young professionals from 10 countries ­— Syria, Jordan and Yemen among them.

The Middle Eastern participants are all youth leaders in their home communities, said Kate Green, outgoing director of the Rhode Island International Visitor Program.

A new Brown-Rhode Island School of Design joint degree program, which will award students a bachelor’s degree from Brown and a bachelor of fine arts degree from RISD, is now accepting applications for the fall of 2008.

The five-year program has been approved by the governing boards, trustees and faculties of both schools and will officially come into existence later this month when both schools’ presidents sign a legal document.

Previous efforts to create such a program could not reconcile the schools’ different schedules ­— the universities’ terms start and end at different times, and RISD has a short winter term in between its fall and spring terms. To solve this problem, students will alternate se-

Rahul Keerthi/Herald American flags on the Main Green commemorate the six-year anniversary of the Sept.

11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

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media in their home countries.

Rawan Sweis, a senior studying chemical engineering at Al Balqa’ Applied University in Jordan, was surprised that in the United State “everything is organized.”

She noted the “Walk” and “Don’t Walk” signs she found in each American town she visited. “We have them only in the capital, not everywhere,” she said.

Iyad Yacoub and Aya Malas from Damascus, Syria, said they came to the United States to learn about American non-governmental orgacontinued on page 8

Brown-RISD dual degree to begin fall 2008

By Isabel Gottlieb Senior Staff Writer

LIl’ rhody ain’t big Rhode Island is the sixthleast obese state in the union, according to a nationwide study.

Alaedeen Atiga, a student of business and information technology at Informatics College at the University of Libya, said came to the United States to give a more accurate portrayal of Libya and the Middle East to Americans. Many Americans he met during the trip did not even know Libya exists, he said.

“One American asked me if we had an airport. A lot of them think we live in the desert and ride camels,” Atiga said.

Other students in the delegation said they were somewhat surprised by how the United States differed from the image the portrayed by the

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CAMPUS NEWS

the moldy blues A Brown professor discovered a link between household mold and depression.

mesters between the two schools, living and taking classes at only one school at a time to avoid having to juggle the two universities’ different schedules.

Dual-degree candidates will spend their first year at RISD to complete the freshman foundation requirements. Students may then spend any semester on either campus, as long as their five years are ultimately split evenly between both schools.

For the next five years ­— the pilot phase of the degree program — a maximum of 20 students will enroll in each class. At the end of that period, administrators will re-evaluate and decide whether to expand the program. Currently, the program only accepts first-year students, not transfers.

Each dual-degree candidate will have two advisers, one from each university. While they can select con-

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OPINIONS

195 Angell Street, Providence, Rhode Island

‘Law and order’ man Adam Cambier ‘09 gives the “Law and Order” lover’s take on the presidential hopes of Fred Thompson.

centrations in any area, Brown-RISD students must complete at least one concentration at each school. Students will declare concentrations after their third year — as opposed to Brown students, who must declare after their second years — and will receive concentration advisers then.

“Someone could major in, for example, industrial design with an emphasis on sciences from Brown.

Some students may be preparing themselves to be doctors and could study design elements of the human body and use visual training to become really extraordinary doctors,” said RISD President Roger Mandle. “I could imagine someone developing a whole new approach to space exploration. ... To me, (these possibilities) are one of the most interesting aspects of this.” continued on page 5

12 SPORTS

VAULTING TO FAME Record-holding gymnast Alicia Sacramone ’10 has decided to become professional.

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T oday Page 2

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Aibohphobia | Roxanne Palmer and Jonathan Cannon

We a t h e r

cloudy / showers 76 / 60

sunny 74 / 52

Menu Sharpe Refectory

Verney-Woolley Dining Hall

Lunch — Mufeletta Calzone, Tuna Noodle Casserole, Vegan Tofu Pups, Italian Meatballs, Grilled Sausage Patties, Fudge Bars

Lunch — Peanut Butter and Jelly Bar, Grilled Rotisserie Chicken, Beef Tacos, Vegan Burritos, Vegan Refried Beans, Fudge Bars

Dinner — Curry Chicken and Coconut, Vegan Chana Masala, Basmati Rice Pilaf, Lasagna, Indian Green Beans, New York Style Cheesecake

Dinner — Roast Beef au Jus, Italian Vegetable Saute, Vegan Vegetable Couscous, Onion and Dill Rolls, Rotini, New York Style Cheesecake

But Seriously | Charlie Custer and Stephen Barlow

Sudoku Nightmarishly Elastic | Adam Robbins

Fill in the grid so that every row, every column and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 through 9.

Disambiguation | Daniel Byers

RELEASE DATE– Tuesday, September 11,Pappocom 2007 © Puzzles by

Los Angeles Times Crossword Puzzle C r o sDaily sword Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis ACROSS 1 Spherical hairdo 5 Saudi, usually 9 Kitchen cover-up 14 Diva’s moment 15 “Hercules” character who got her own show 16 Saloon instrument 17 Duo that debuted in “The Talking Magpies” 20 Cabinet department 21 Menagerie enclosure 22 16-Across parts 23 Score marking 25 Draws away from shore 27 Suspected spy of the 1930s-’40s 31 Grating sounds 35 Buck or tom 36 Caveman on an old postage stamp 37 “The Colbert Report” specialty 38 Hubbub 39 Duet for Tony and Maria in “West Side Story” 41 Use the sofa 42 Gung-ho type 44 Irish actor Stephen 45 Rhythmic foot 46 Type in 47 “To Kill a Mockingbird” recluse 49 Tusked animal 51 Everything-else category: Abbr.

52 Priest of the East 55 Repetitive system 57 Shore weather phenomena 61 Not actively participating 64 Delicate trinket 65 Remedy 66 Wrapped up 67 Covered with pebbles 68 Slangy greetings 69 Ginger cookie

DOWN 1 Sighs of contentment 2 Agonize 3 Costa __ 4 Yellow ribbon site of song 5 Cleaving tool 6 Knee jerk, e.g.

7 Author Quindlen 8 Symbols of authority 9 Goon 10 Eats unenthusiastically 11 Leaf gatherer 12 No more than 13 Turndowns 18 Lewd look 19 George’s brother 24 Euphemistic expletive 26 Unmanageable tyke 27 Flabbergast 28 Weighed down 29 Winner’s poor sportsmanship 30 Hubert’s successor 32 Twine fiber 33 __ minister

34 Save for the future 37 Puppeteer Lewis 39 Corrida charger 40 Euclid’s study 43 Beirut’s country 45 Checkpoint requests 47 Decorative pin 48 1965 NCAA tennis champ 50 Cartoon bark

52 Science classes 53 Hit the ground 54 Magic amulet 56 Steadfast 58 Jerusalem temple site 59 “Giant” author Ferber 60 Permeate 62 Bandleader Lombardo 63 “For __ a jolly ...”

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Shanghai owner to open new sushi restaurant in December Need more sushi? The owner of Shanghai is opening a new sushi joint across the street from the Asian restaurant on Thayer Street in December. Featuring an 1,800 gallon shark tank, Shark will seat up to 130 diners hungry for sushi and hibachi — Japanese food cooked on grills in front of the diners. Ray Hugh, who also opened Xtreme Pizza and Wings at 272 Thayer St. in July, said he doesn’t yet know how much Shark’s fare will cost.

Haruki Kibe, owner of three Japanese restaurants in Rhode Island — including Haruki Express, a take-out sushi restaurant which opened on Waterman Street in June — said Shark would “definitely” affect his business. Though Haruki Express’s prices are lower than the prices at Haruki restaurants in Cranston and the Wayland Square neighborhood of Providence, Kibe said, he didn’t know how Shark’s prices will compare.

“How they mark up the price — that’s their business,” Kibe said.

— Simmi Aujla

New greenery greets students on Thayer

By Evan Boggs Staff Writer

Thayer Street gained a new, leafy canopy over the summer as part of an improvement program that has already lead to new crosswalks and refurbished sidewalks along the College Hill thoroughfare.

The Thayer Street Improvement District, a local district management authority the University participates in, funded the planting of 30 trees along the street — from the intersection of Thayer and Bowen streets south to Waterman Street — this summer, said Michael Chapman, vice president for public affairs and University relations.

The trees are one aspect of the Thayer Street Improvement District’s ongoing capital improvement program, which has so far included the replacement of sidewalks along the street and new, patterned crosswalks.

The University, the city of Providence and the 10 largest property owners on Thayer Street banded together nearly four years ago to create the district management authority, which has special powers typically reserved for government, such as the power to tax, maintain public utilities, construct public infrastructure and perform landscaping.

The Providence City Council approved the DMA in 2006, allowing commercial property owners on the street to levy a voluntary tax of up to 5 percent on themselves to renovate and maintain Thayer.

The DMA board is responsible for setting the exact level of the extra tax, allocating funds and managing individual projects in addition to creating an overall plan for revitalizing Thayer Street.

The city and the University split the $800,000 cost of the redevelopment project, Chapman said. The DMA’s tax revenue will fund maintenance of the improvements, which costs about $80,000 annually.

For Ryan Wittlinger ’10, the ar-

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boreal additions offer a new reason to use Thayer to get to classes.

“It takes away the sort of city feel, gives it more of a comfortable, suburban mentality,” Wittlinger said. “I like trees. More trees is always a plus, I think,” he added.

The new trees, which Chapman said were planted during June and July, seem to have been noticed by few students so far.

“I was here for the summer, so I saw a lot of the work going on, but no trees,” said Shane Reil ’09.

Alexandra Katich ’09 said she noticed a number of new stores on Thayer Street this semester, but no new trees.

Buddy Farnham ’10 agreed, noting that the other improvements have been more eye-catching. “All I’ve really noticed are the sidewalks and the painted things on the crosswalks,” he said.

According to Chapman, DMA activities in the future will include hanging planter baskets along storefronts and meeting to address the annual budget.

“One of the priorities of the Thayer Street management authority will be a consolidated marketing plan and events on the street. The marketing plan will draw shoppers and restaurant-goers to the street,” Chapman said.

“I think every college has a responsibility to the community to improve the area, and I think Brown especially does because we pride ourselves on being handson, and not just a closed campus,” Katich said.

For now, however, many Brown students don’t see themselves shopping or eating on Thayer more frequently than in the past.

“I go to Thayer pretty often, but I don’t think (the trees) would really have that drastic an impact. I mean, I would be more likely to walk down that particular street, but I don’t think it would have much of an impact,” Wittlinger said.

“I think I just shop on Thayer because it’s convenient for stores and stuff for (Brown students),” Katich said.

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Report: Rhode Island is sixth leanest state

By Nandini Jayakrishna Senior Staf f Writer

Rhode Island has the sixth-lowest adult obesity rate and the 10th lowest youth obesity rate in the country, according to a report released Aug. 27 by the Trust for America’s Health, a nonprofit health advocacy and research group.

According to the group’s annual report, 20.5 percent of adults in Rhode Island are obese. That number is up one percentage point from last year’s 19.5 percent. The current youth obesity rate, defined as obesity in 10-17 year olds, is 11.9 percent in Rhode Island.

The report, “F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies are Failing in America,” found Colorado and Utah to have the lowest adult and youth obesity rates, respectively.

Mississippi and Washington, D.C., have the highest adult and youth obesity rates. Obesity rates have not dropped in any states, and 22 states, including Rhode Island, reported increases from last year’s report.

State rankings are based on three years of data gathered from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Behavioral Risk Surveillance System.

But the Ocean State’s low ranking doesn’t mean Rhode Islanders can “relax and stop exercising,” said Ilyse Veron, a senior communications manager for Trust for America’s Health.

In a public opinion survey conducted for the report by the Trust for America’s Health, 25 percent of adults in Rhode Island reported that they don’t engage in any physical activity. Nationally, the average is 22 percent.

Though people must help themselves in monitoring their weight, state and federal governments must facilitate access to a healthier lifestyle, Veron said. Rhode Island is one of 17 states that requires school meals to have higher nutritional standards than those required by the U.S. Department for Agriculture.

According to the report, as of January, Rhode Island statute requires elementary and junior high schools to offer drinks such as 2-percent-fat milk and soy beverages.

Chris Bennett / Herald

A vending machine in the Sciences Library.

Starting next Januar y, Rhode Island law will require schools to offer healthier snacks, such as lowfat yogurt, fruit and nuts.

Currently, Rhode Island has no legislation requiring schools to assess students’ body mass index levels during health examinations or physical education. The state has a snack tax and received a CDC grant for a state-based nutrition and physical activity program in 2006.

Rhode Island’s Medicaid program

has offered reimbursement for gastric bypass surgery and weight-loss drugs since 2004, according to the report.

The report calls for the federal government to launch a “national strategy to combat obesity” by providing grants for obesity research, working with employers to implement a “workplace wellness program” and helping Americans choose healthier foods and be more active.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

New Orientation reduces EMS calls continued from page 1 on the assigned summer reading.

“They have been quite full days.”

Klawunn also pointed out that the University has taken concrete steps to minimize underage drinking during Orientation by providing information to freshmen via class meetings, an online orientation that dealt partially with alcohol and even an EMS truck that was parked on the Main Green during Orientation.

The new Orientation schedule had other benefits for freshmen, said Russell Carey ’91 MA’06, interim vice president for campus life and student services.

“Moving in students on the weekend was very positive,” Carey said. “It was more relaxed and less chaotic than move-ins during the week.” He also said the weekend move-in made it easier for families to help students settle in and characterized this year’s Orientation “very positive.”

The many University-sponsored events “reduced a significant risk of harm for students, especially firstyear students, around alcohol,”

Chris Bennett / Herald

This year’s shorter Orientation led to fewer EMS calls over the first weekend of the semester.

Carey said.

Though the shortened Orientation may have cut down on alcoholrelated incidents, several freshmen expressed criticisms of their first week on campus.

“I wish (Orientation) was longer, with more structured activities and

time to just hang out,” said Caroline Sedano ’11. Sedano, who attended University-sponsored events and student-held parties during Orientation, said she was satisfied with the range of activities presented over the week and said Orientation was an overall positive experience — even though she felt it was short.

Nigar Akhmedova ’11 agreed that Orientation was enjoyable, but she felt it was too long.

“We had class meeting and other activities in the evenings. There was enough (time) all morning and afternoon to just hang out,” Akhmedova said. “There were long periods of time where there was nothing to do.”

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Moldy homes cause depression, prof.’s study finds You may want to think twice the next time you neglect that mold festering on your shower curtain — eventually, it could very well land you a bottle of Zoloft.

While the mold encountered in a Brown residence hall is likely not enough to cause depression, excessive amounts of mold in a home are directly connected to depression in its inhabitants, according to a recent study led by Assistant Professor of Community Health Edmond Shenassa.

Courtesy of Joshua Harlis Shenassa’s team initially set Assistant Professor of Community out to disprove a connection beHealth Edmond Shenassa tween mold and depression, he said, after he encountered press in the UK that suggested a connection between the two. Shenassa said he was initially skeptical of a direct relationship between the two, believing instead that mold coincided with environmental and social conditions that cause depression.

“I didn’t understand at the time that mold is a toxin,” Shenassa said.

“Mold can theoretically affect your brain functioning.”

Shenassa’s team included Allison Liebhaber ’05, as well as researchers from other universities and the World Health Organization. The team used WHO survey data from 5,882 adults, collected from eight European cities. Using the data collected by WHO, the team performed a statistical analysis and “controlled for the illnesses related to mold,” said Liebhaber, a community health concentrator, who had used the same data for her senior thesis. Expecting the controls to prove their hypothesis that factors independent of but related to mold caused depression, the team found that “independently of physical illness there’s a connection (between mold and depression),” Shenassa said.

Shenassa admitted the need for further research on the connection between mold and depression. “It’s possible there’s another factor here we’re not measuring,” he said. “We’re going to do some ... laboratory studies to examine that link.”

Still, the implications of the study are profound, Liebhaber said. “It shows that the quality of (a person’s) housing and the environment that someone’s living in has an even greater impact on quality of life than we thought.”

One’s perception of control over their home is also a factor, Liebhaber noted. “Having mold in your home can cause you to feel like you don’t have control over your home, which can make you feel depressed,” she said.

Hannah Twomey ’08.5 said, based on her experience, Shenassa’s findings make sense. “Coming from Ireland where it’s very damp, if you’re in a damp home, even if there’s no direct health correlations, comfortability alone can affect your mental health,” she said.

Shenassa said University residence halls are at no risk for moldinduced depression. “We’re talking about a lot of mold,” Shenassa said. “A tremendous amount of mold.”

— Cameron Lee

Brown-RISD degree launches fall 2008 continued from page 1 Applicants must be accepted by both schools’ admission offices, as well as into the program itself.

Admission officers from Brown and RISD have been speaking to students around the country about the program. “They’re going to find us,” Mandle said of the dual-degree applicants. “When the word gets out, when we promote this in the way we hope to, we will attract the kind of students we seek.”

For now, students will not be allowed to transfer into the program.

“The most controversial thing is that we did not want to allow transfers into the program until we know how the whole thing works. … We wanted to see how it would work from ‘go’ on,” said Roger Mayer, who recently retired as a professor of visual arts and modern culture and media at Brown and is a member of the working group.

Mayer added that he personally wanted to admit transfers into the program. “Many students have said they wished they had known about (the program),” Mayer added.

“In the future, I’m pretty sure that an accommodation will be made for students to transfer into the program.”

Shelley Stephenson, an assistant provost at Brown who has been involved with the program’s development, said she expected transfers to be admitted at some point. “We want to know that the program will run well and efficiently before we open it to a broader population,” she said.

Though the program was unanimously approved by the faculties of both universities, Mayer said some RISD faculty members initially expressed concern.

“There was a feeling among the liberal arts division of the faculty at RISD that the students there will be drawn away to Brown,” Mayer said, adding that faculty teaching freshman foundation courses worried that the joint degree students might strain

Chris Bennett / Herald

The long-awaited joint degree program between Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design will enroll its first students in Fall 2008.

resources.

Mandle said this faculty hesitation was “just preliminary jitters,” but added, “I don’t discount them.”

Mandle said he is not worried about extra students in freshman foundation studies, noting that RISD faced an enrollment surplus this year and, in response, added another section to the course.

“The practical problems will come up, and we’ll just solve them one at a time,” Mandle said.

Stephenson said the universities’ faculties are looking forward to increased contact with each other.

“I think that any strengthening of ties between Brown and its neighbor RISD is good,” she said.

Mayer, who said he has tried for years to help create a Brown-RISD joint degree, said his dreams have finally come to fruition. “This group of administrators was finally all interested, so everything came together,” Mayer said.

Mandle agreed. “President Simmons and I have a very warm and collegial relationship. Ruth has proven herself to be a real ‘do-er,’ and the stars have aligned with the faculty members involved,” he said.

“Brown and RISD have reached this historic moment when we are actually weaving together our academic programs for some great students,” Mandle said. “There is nothing else like it anywhere.”

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Tuesday, September 11, 2007

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Officials deem U.S. unprepared to thwart terrorist attack

By Josh Meyer Los Angeles Times

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WASHINGTON — Six years after the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil, the United States in many ways is unprepared to stop another major strike against the homeland, which al-Qaida appears intent on carrying out in the near future, four of the nation’s top counterterrorism officials told Congress on Monday.

Al-Qaida’s intentions have been underscored in recent days by the disruption of suspected terrorist plots in Germany and Denmark, the first videotaped propaganda tape

by Osama bin Laden in three years and persistent intelligence showing that the terrorist organization has regrouped in a safe haven in Pakistan and actively trains operatives there to launch attacks worldwide.

Al-Qaida’s media arm said Monday it was preparing to release a second bin Laden tape, in which he is expected to again taunt President Bush and his other pursuers, and praise the people responsible for the attacks on New York and Washing-

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ton, D.C. “Our counterterrorism efforts have disrupted some of the enemy’s plans and diminished certain capabilities,” John Scott Redd, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“But the events of the last days and the last weeks clearly demonstrate the clear and present danger which continues to exist.”

During more than three hours of prepared testimony and questioning, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and Redd said significant progress has been made in deterring another attack on the scale of Sept. 11, which killed nearly 3,000 people.

U.S. intelligence-gathering efforts against terrorist targets have improved dramatically, in part because of expanded post-Sept. 11 electronic surveillance powers, including those overseen by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, according to McConnell.

Confirming a Los Angeles Times report, McConnell told the committee that U.S. electronic intercepts were instrumental in helping thwart the terrorist plot last week in Germany, which allegedly involved militants trained in Pakistani camps run by an al-Qaida affiliate group known as the Islamic Jihad Union.

The surveillance “allowed us to see and understand all the connections ... to al-Qaida,” McConnell said.

“Because we could understand it, we could help our partners through a long process of monitoring and observation, realizing that the perpetrators had actually obtained explosive liquids...”

After the hearing, Redd confirmed that such U.S. intercepts also played a central role in disrupting the suspected terror plot in Denmark, in which eight men with alleged al-Qaida links were arrested on suspicion of plotting a “major” attack.

McConnell said some of those capabilities were the result of a “temporary fix” in the FISA law passed

by Congress in August in an attempt to maintain the surveillance system while addressing some of its legal problems. He said he believes that FISA itself is in jeopardy because of concerns that intelligence officials are “spying on Americans, doing datamining and so on,” which he said was “simply not true.”

“If we lose FISA, we will lose, in my estimate, 50 percent of our ability to track, understand and know about these terrorists, what they’re doing to train, what they’re doing to recruit and what they’re doing to try to get into this country,” he said.

Redd testified to other successes over the past six years, saying authorities have taken thousands of terrorists off city streets and fields of battle and disrupted dozens of plots.

He also said Washington is working more closely with many allies overseas and that authorities are clamping down on ways in which terrorists travel and raise money.

Reed and the other officials described in almost urgent terms their fears about how al-Qaida, its affiliates and homegrown terrorists in Europe and perhaps the United States are exploiting gaps in the safety net. They cited the recent National Intelligence Estimate on threats to the homeland, which said al-Qaida continues to focus on “prominent political, economic and infrastructure targets with the goal of producing mass casualties, visually dramatic destruction, significant economic aftershocks, and/or fear in the U.S. population.”

All four of the witnesses conceded under questioning that gaps remain in America’s safety net despite the billions of dollars spent on counterterrorism and homeland security improvement efforts.

“There are still significant cultural issues,” McConnell said, that hinder the sharing of information needed to thwart an attack. And, he said, the various intelligence agencies “still have some distance to go” in hiring and training analysts and case officers who speak key languages such as Arabic and Urdu.

Some of the senators were far more critical than their witnesses.

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., said the failure to track individuals who overstay their visas “is particularly shocking and troubling to me.” He also said there are “huge gaps” in the security of the nation’s food supply system.

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said the nation urgently needs a national ID card program so potential terrorists cannot use forged or fake identification. All four of the counterterrorism officials agreed.

World & Nation tuesday, September 11, 2007

the brown daily herald

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The general’s long view could cut withdrawal debate short

Vitamin D might improve longevity, research suggests

By Karen DeYoung and Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post

WASHINGTON — If Gen. David H. Petraeus has his way, tens of thousands of U.S. troops will be in Iraq for years to come.

Iraq’s armed forces are improving, Petraeus told Congress Monday. Overall violence is down. Sunnis are turning against al-Qaida in Iraq, and many Baghdad neighborhoods are more peaceful. Political reconciliation, said Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, who testified alongside the general, is a now-visible light at the end of the tunnel. But the two men offered no clear pathway or timeline to reach the end.

Petraeus and Crocker have long complained that the Washington clock — with congressional demands that the time has come for Iraqis take over their security and reconcile their political differences — is running far faster than the one in Baghdad. Monday, they tried to slow Washington down.

“The process will not be quick,” Crocker emphasized. “It will be uneven, punctuated by setbacks as well as achievements, and it will require substantial U.S. resolve and commitment. There will be no single moment at which we can claim victory; any turning point will likely only be recognized in retrospect.”

Judging by the relatively mild congressional reaction in a joint hearing of the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees, Petraeus and Crocker may well succeed this week in deflecting Democratic demands to bring the troops home sooner rather than later. They are likely to face tougher questioning — and stiffer challenges to the emerging trends

they described — from two Senate committees Tuesday. But by the time President Bush speaks to the nation later this week, September’s much-anticipated battle over Iraq policy may be all but over.

Some Democrats sought to challenge the general. “The administration has sent you here today to convince (Congress) ... that victory is at hand,” Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Lantos (Calif.) said in an opening statement. “With all due respect,” Lantos told Petraeus, “I don’t buy it.”

Others invoked the Vietnam War, a historical analogy that Bush has recently used to make his case in favor of the Iraq war. “Twenty years from now, when we build the Iraq war memorial on the National Mall, how many more men and women will have been sacrificed to protect our so-called credibility?” asked Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla. “How many more names will be added to the wall before we admit it is time to leave? How many more names, General?”

Republicans countered by citing the threats from al-Qaida and Iran, and defended Petraeus’ honor against criticism from antiwar activists.

“The enemy ... did not count on the United States regaining the initiative and going on the offensive throughout this strategy behind the surge,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla. “This strategy has driven a wedge between al-Qaida and the Sunni population, and that will help drive a similar wedge between the Shia extremists.”

Petraeus refused to take the partisan bait from either side, taking a classic soldier’s stance of just giving the facts as he sees them. He did not seek to defend the much-

After 29 years, human pin cushion will get relief

By Ching-Ching Ni Los Angeles T imes

BEIJING — Her relatives always had described her as a colicky baby.

When Luo Cuifen was 26, she found out a likely reason why.

Doctors discovered more than two dozen sewing needles embedded in her body, some floating close to her vital organs, others having pierced them.

X-rays of her head and torso look like a dartboard stacked with pins.

Doctors believe the needles were driven into her body when Luo was days old. One in the top of her skull could only have been stuck there when the bones in her head were still soft.

“They wanted her dead,” said Qu Rei, a spokesman at the Richland International Hospital in Yunnan Province that has agreed to remove the first six of the 26 in her body Tuesday. “The fact she is still alive is a medical miracle.”

Luo does not remember being stabbed. Relatives suspect her grandparents. They wanted a grandson instead of a second granddaughter.

“I was horrified,” said Luo, now 29, in an interview by phone Monday from her hospital room. “How could they do such a thing to me when I was so young?”

Luo, an impoverished farmer, has had to wait three years for her operation because she had been unable to

find a hospital willing to perform the difficult and expensive procedure for free.

Female infanticide is common practice in cultures that prize boys.

China’s strict one-child policy has exacerbated the age-old prejudice by making the male heir an even more precious commodity. Lopsided sex selection through such means as abortions has skewed the gender ratio; it now stands at about 119 boys to 100 girls. In industrialized countries the balance is closer to 107 to 100.

China’s family planning restrictions also have led to a surge in child trafficking. On Friday, Chinese police rescued 40 kidnapped infants purchased from relatively impoverished southwestern China bound for potential buyers in the country’s more prosperous east coast.

Thousands of baby girls are abandoned every year. Some are left on the street or even in the trash.

Despite the severity of Luo’s case, it is not the first in which tiny children were pierced with metal objects. Early this year, state media reported the case of a 40-year-old woman with a lifetime of headaches.

It turned out she had a four-inch needle stuck in her head. Relatives said she had been born out of wedlock and passed from friend to friend as an infant. By the time she came continued on page 8

debated reasons for invading Iraq or the conduct of the war before he took command of U.S. forces in February.

Nor did he cast the war in terms the White House is fond of using — a global fight against terrorism, where failure would threaten the U.S. homeland. Both Iran and al-Qaida in Iraq, Petraeus said, are problems. But “the fundamental source of the conflict in Iraq is competition among ethnic and sectarian communities for power and resources.”

In his opening testimony, Petraeus offered something for those seeking troop reductions. He said he has recommended to Bush that one Marine unit in Iraq leave soon, and that one of 20 Army brigades depart around Christmas and not be replaced. Next, Petraeus said, he will endorse sending home another five brigades by next summer — a move that would return U.S. forces to the pre-“surge” level of about 130,000 and one that has long been expected because no replacement troops will be available.

He said it is too early to recommend longer-term reductions, telling lawmakers he will not be ready to propose any further cutbacks until sometime next year, probably in March. Beyond that, he offered a drawdown chart that had more question marks than dates.

Petraeus showed members of Congress a slide — the last of 13 he presented — that projected U.S. forces staying in Iraq for an indeterminate time. It did not attach any dates indicating any set timetable for withdrawal. Rather, Petraeus’ spokesman said, the envisioned drawdown to 35,000 to 50,000 troops would be “conditions based.” continued on page 8

By Stephanie Desmon Baltimore Sun

Vitamin D is good for your bones, doctors have said for years, but new research suggests taking a vitamin pill a day might extend your life.

The findings, published Monday in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, add to the growing medical literature about the benefits of what is sometimes called the “sunshine vitamin” because it is produced by the skin in response to sunlight.

Recent studies have linked vitamin D deficiencies to higher risk of cancer, diabetes and multiple sclerosis. It could play a role in reducing heart disease and preventing pre-eclampsia in pregnant women.

“It’s very new to see (the effects of) vitamin D on organs different than the bones,” said Dr. Philippe Autier, who co-authored the study. “These are very ordinary doses. You don’t need four or five pills a day.

“You should probably get rid of all the other (vitamins in the medicine cabinet),” Autier said by phone from Lyon, France, where he is a researcher the International Agency for Research on Cancer. “At this point, that’s where we are. This is quite real.”

A team led by Johns Hopkins scientists reported Monday that vitamin C inhibits the growth of some tumors in mice. In recent years, vitamin E, beta-carotene and other antioxidants were praised as having miracle properties; but when more research was done, they lost some of their luster.

One trial last year showed that patients with neck cancer who received large doses of vitamins C, E and beta carotene experienced fewer side ef-

fects of cancer treatments, but in the end they died at twice the rate of those who didn’t get vitamins.

Past experience means there “is some need to be cautious (about vitamins),” said Edgar Miller, associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins and an antioxidant researcher: “I think there is enough evidence to recommend vitamin D supplements in most women, certainly who are older and have dietary deficiencies. How high a dose? We don’t know. Is there a threshold of benefit beyond which there’s harm?

That’s something that needs to be studied.”

Still, he said, “Everything seems to be lining up very well with vitamin D.” Autier’s analysis looked at 18 trials involving vitamin D supplements that included more than 57,000 patients and evaluated doses ranging from 300 international units to 2,000 international units. Most commercially available supplements contain 400 to 600 IU. Over an average of nearly six years, people who took vitamin D had a 7 percent lower risk of death from all causes than those who did not.

Some scientists say more years of study would give better clues as to how large a role vitamin D plays in decreasing mortality. Others point out that while there was a statistically significant 7 percent drop in mortality in Autier’s analysis, because of the size of the study that only accounted for a difference of 117 people who died in the control groups as compared with those who took vitamin D supplements.

Some vitamin D researchers becontinued on page 8

Clinton campaign to return $850,000 to jailed fundraiser

By John Solomon and Anne E. Kornblut Washington Post

WASHINGTON — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton announced Monday night that she will return $850,000 in campaign donations solicited by Norman Hsu, severing ties with a top fundraiser who was jailed last week after attempting to flee from criminal charges in California.

The refund, one of the largest in political history, came after weeks of reports about Hsu’s controversial history and murky business practices. Clinton officials said that the senator, acting out of “an abundance of caution,” had directed the campaign to return donations from about 260 contributors tied to Hsu because of his apparent involvement in an illegal investment scheme.

Clinton declined to identify the donors involved.

Clinton’s finance chairman, Terry McAuliffe, declined requests to explain how Hsu had become so prominent in her fundraising.

Hsu is wanted on a 15-year-old warrant issued in California; after turning himself in to authorities last week, he failed to appear at a hearing and later fell ill on a train ride to Colorado, where he was taken into custody.

The Hsu scandal has brought unwelcome reminders for Clinton of her husband’s fundraising controversies in the 1990s, including

an episode involving a Little Rock businessman named Charles Trie.

The Clinton legal fund returned or refused to accept at least $640,000 from Trie after allegations that he funneled phony donations from contributors who could not afford to make large gifts.

Clinton’s campaign decided more than a week ago to return about $23,000 Hsu personally donated to her various campaigns.

Clinton on Monday ordered her campaign to return all the money he has raised for her White House bid, a senior aide said.

“Mr. Hsu donated to numerous charities and more than two dozen candidates and committees,” Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson said. “Despite conducting a thorough review of public records, our campaign, like others, was unaware of Mr. Hsu’s decade-plus-old warrant.

“To help ensure against this type of situation in the future, our campaign will also institute vigorous additional vetting procedures on our bundlers, including criminal background checks,” Wolfson added. “In any instances where a source of a bundler’s income is in question, the campaign will take affirmative steps to verify its origin.”

Clinton “simply didn’t want to have to keep answering questions about a bundler whose background is now clearly in question,” a senior adviser said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Kent Cooper, a former Federal Election Commission chief of public disclosure, said Clinton’s move was “a stunning development” certain to affect other campaigns in what is shaping up to be the most expensive election in history. The presidential candidates in both parties raised about a quarterbillion dollars in the first half of this year.

“The financial controls of these campaigns — as they get bigger and bigger and raise more money — need more resources,” Cooper said. “It is a smart move by the Clinton campaign ... to try to get ahead of the issue and claim some leadership on double-checking fundraisers and activities.

“To seek permission to do criminal backgrounds indicates a willingness to take more responsibility for the personal actions of these big fundraisers out in the field and will bring extreme pressure on other candidates to more carefully monitor and control their fundraisers.”

Hsu, who grew up in Hong Kong and moved to the United States in 1969 to attend the University of California at Berkeley, came onto the scene as a fundraiser in 2003 when he began raising money for the presidential bid of Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass. He now runs an apparel manufacturer company in New York, though much of his business career is shrouded in mystery.

Page 8

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2007

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Middle Eastern delegation visits Brown continued from page 1 nizations.

Yacoub said he was surprised by the sheer number of NGOs in the United States and the level of participation in them.

“I have another perspective to life,” he said, “that civic responsibility is what you have to do — it’s not like a hobby or an interest. You have to feel it. People here have a sense of citizenship and want to be part of the development of the country.”

Malas said she was interested in understanding what motivates Americans to volunteer for and donate to NGOs. At The Herald office, editors answered delegates’ questions about censorship and the freedom of the American press.

Later that evening, the group met with the College Republicans and Brown Dems, who illuminated key differences between the two American political parties, including disagreement over the United States’ policy toward Iran and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

After the discussion, Dems President Gabriel Kussin ’09 told The Herald he didn’t think political differences between the two parties were stated clearly enough.

“I would have really liked to go into more detail about how the two parties differ,” Kussin said.

When the conversation turned to Iran, discussion between the

Brown students and visitors became particularly heated. Some IVLP participants questioned why the United States does not accept Iran’s government as democratic.

One IVLP participant, Falastin Dawoud, a junior at An-Najah University in the West Bank city of Nablus, spoke in Arabic through an interpreter about the United States government’s characterization of Hamas as a terrorist organization.

She argued that Hamas is not a terrorist organization — rather, Palestinians are simply trying to defend themselves, she said.

After the formal discussion concluded, the IVLP participants and the Brown students mingled, continuing the discussion and exchanging e-mail addresses.

“I think it was a really good discussion,” Marc Frank ’09, president of the College Republicans, told The Herald.

“It was heated — there was a lot of disagreement. At times it got to be a little bit of bickering without substance, but overall I think there was an understanding between the people, and there was a genuine interest in hearing from both sides about their views on the world,” he said.

The participants’ reactions to Brown — and America in general — were enthusiastic. “I want to live and study here,” Malas said.

“The most strange thing I felt here is that I didn’t feel like I was a stranger,” Yacoub said.

www.browndailyherald.com

Gen. Petraeus calls for more time continued from page 7 No one engaged him on this point, trying to get him to flesh out the slide and explain its assumptions. The bottom-line question — how long until the last U.S. troops will return from Iraq — was never asked. “Overall, I haven’t seen such impressive charts since I worked in the Pentagon when McNamara ran the place,” commented retired Army Col. Charles Krohn, referring to Robert McNamara’s tenure in the 1960s. Krohn served in the Vietnam War and as a civilian in Iraq.

Rather than stopping the clock, U.S. troops have turned it back, Petraeus said, showing charts indicating that violence has fallen to roughly the level it was when sectarian battles erupted in Iraq in mid-2006. Neither Petraeus nor Crocker mentioned the nearly four years of U.S. military involvement that began with the March

2003 invasion; both seemed to date U.S. involvement in Iraq as beginning anew with the troop escalation that started early this year.

Crocker, whose voice seemed at times tinged with sadness, said the only valid way of judging Iraq now is to understand what Saddam Hussein had done to the country. He then jumped ahead, describing 2006 as “a bad year” in which Iraq nearly unraveled.

Ignoring the years after the invasion and before the troop increase in which the United States unsuccessfully tried to fashion a representative government, Crocker said that “the sectarian violence of 2006 and 2007 had its seeds in Saddam’s social deconstruction, and it had dire consequences for the people of Iraq as well as its politics.”

The country, he said, “is experiencing a revolution — not just regime change. It is only by understanding

this that we can appreciate what is happening in Iraq and what Iraqis have achieved, as well as maintain a sense of realism about the challenges that remain.”

Realism, Crocker suggested, means suspending demands that Iraq reach 18 political and security benchmarks that Congress has set for it — few of which the Iraqis have achieved — and accepting instead more modest forms of progress.

“Some of the more promising political developments at the national level,” Crocker said, “are neither measured in benchmarks nor visible to those far from Baghdad.”

The legislation that imposed the benchmarks remains in place, and Bush still owes Congress a report at the end of this week on whether they have been met. But Petraeus and Crocker succeeded to a large extent Monday in making them irrelevant.

Supplement may increase lifespan continued from page 7 lieve that as people have spent more and more time indoors, as opposed to the long stretches spent outdoors and uncovered in agrarian times, they have developed serious vitamin D deficiencies. They say levels that are considered normal in the United States are one-fifth of the levels of 10,000 years ago.

Dr. Cedric F. Garland, a cancer prevention specialist at the University of California, San Diego, said some cancers -- rare in agrarian times -- can be blamed on vitamin D deficiencies, something researchers have just begun to understand in the past few years.

Garland said the link between the sunshine vitamin and cancers can be seen in new data released by the United Nations, which show cancer incidence rates in 177 countries. As you move farther from the Equator, cancer levels rise, he said.

The most severe vitamin D defi-

ciencies are associated with rickets, a disease that weakens the bones, al though it is not common as it was before scientific advances were made in the early 20th century.

About 10 minutes in the sun during peak hours -- hold the sunscreen -- should be more than enough to produce the currently recommended level. But many fear the sun’s harmful rays or are stuck behind desks during the heat of the day. Blacks might need even more exposure, as the pigmentation in their skin makes it harder to process sunlight into vitamin D and leaves them more vulnerable to deficiencies.

Fish, liver and egg yolk are the only foods that naturally contain vitamin D, al though some other foods are fortified with it. Still, to get 800 IU of vitamin D from fortified milk you would have to drink two quarts a day.

“It’s impossible to get enough in your diet,” said Dr. Elizabeth Streeten, an assistant professor at

the University of Maryland School of Medicine who runs the metabolic bone disease program there.

She has long been telling her patients to take 1,000 IU or more daily.

And her relatives, too.

There is little evidence of vitamin D toxicity at levels under 10,000 IU a day, several authorities said. The upper limit recommended by the National Academy of Sciences is 2,000 IU, and Garland said there might be a push to extend that to 4,000 IU. Dr. Joan Lappe, an osteoporosis researcher at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., is studying the effects in 1,200 rural post-menopausal women of calcium and calcium plus vitamin D supplements on osteoporosis-related fractures. In a study published this summer, she and her colleagues found that after four years, people who took calcium and vitamin D had a 60 percent lower risk of developing cancer, compared with the placebo group. The calcium-only group had a 47 percent reduced risk.

Woman to have dozens of needles removed continued from page 7 home to stay with her mother she had developed a habit for hysterical sobs that no one could explain.

A 47-year-old woman late last year had a seizure while doing house work and was rushed to the hospital with a diagnosis of an embedded needle.

Despite the progress many of China’s urban women have made, the situation in the countryside is often vastly different.

Luo is the daughter of peasants in a remote village in southwestern China whose mother gave birth to two girls. Her father beat his wife and daughters all the time, even denying them meals and a right to sit at the family table, family members said.

Luo’s earliest memories were of huddling in tears with her sister and mother.

When she was three, her parents divorced and her mother remarried and gave birth to a baby boy. When the boy was two, he wandered off while his mother was working in the field. The toddler drowned in a pond.

“Villagers who came to fetch water saw his clothes floating on the surface and when they went to fish it up they found his body,” Yang Yunfen, Luo’s older sister, said from

her sister’s hospital bedside.

Their mother, who later had another baby son, had little energy to devote to Luo’s constant crying and pins that began emerging from her body when she was six months old.

Luo’s troubles started when she was an infant as an infected wound in her lower back. Her mother poked at it and to her surprise pulled out a sewing needle.

It’s the kind of thing that would result in most parents making a mad dash for the emergency room. But there was no hospital near by and no money to seek treatment, relatives and doctors said.

At three, another sewing needle jabbed out from under her left rib.

It took another two decades before the family learned how many needles remained in her body.

“My mother cried and cried after she found out,” said Luo Jiaxing, 20, Luo Cuifen’s younger brother. “She kept saying no wonder my daughter cried all the time as a baby. She must have been hurting from all the needles but she did not know how to speak.”

Luo says as an adult she never felt any unusual pain. She married and gave birth to a healthy son who is 6 . Since she found out what was lodged inside her body, after blood showed up in her urine, she found

it difficult to fall asleep or do heavy farm work for fear of shifting the daggers to a more lethal position.

Her husband supports the family of three on just $400 a year.

The reason relatives suspect her grandfather is because whenever the family brought up the needles, he would fall silent.

“After we found out about the needles he stopped seeing us or even talking to us,” said Luo’s sister.

Villagers told relatives after the grandfather died earlier this year that he had hired a fortune teller who told him that before Luo was born, she would be a curse on the family. He also vowed to get rid of her, they said.

Tuesday’s surgery is aimed at removing the most life-threatening needles in her abdomen, including her bladder, intestines and uterus.

Dozens of doctors, including some in the United States and Canada, have been consulted. Another five or six operations would be needed to remove the rest of the needles.

“When I first heard about his case I couldn’t believe it was real,” said Xu Mei, the hospital director.

“In the X-ray you can see the needles very clearly. They are thick and long, used for knitting bedding covers.

It had to have hurt a lot when she was a baby.”

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

page 9

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Help pours in for nuns evicted by Los Angeles archdiocese

By Rebecca Trounson Los Angeles T imes

Three nuns who recently learned that their Santa Barbara, Calif., convent would be sold to help cover the costs of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles’ multimillion-dollar priest sexual abuse settlement say they have been overwhelmed with offers of help — and media attention.

“The support has been just unbelievable,” said Sister Angela Escalera, the local superior of the Sisters of Bethany house. “It’s come from all parts of Santa Barbara and outside, too. And from all denominations. It’s just astounding.”

She and two other nuns at the small convent received word in late August that the dwelling, which is owned by the Roman Catholic archdiocese, would be sold to help pay for the church’s $660-million settlement with the victims of hundreds

of clergy abuse cases. At least $250 million of that amount will be paid directly by the archdiocese.

Escalera, a retired notary public and social worker, has lived at the convent since 1964. She is a community volunteer, working with the area’s many poor and undocumented residents.

Another of the nuns, Sister Consuelo Cardenas, has lived in the building about 25 years and works as a religious- education coordinator at a nearby Catholic parish. The third, Sister Margarita Antonia Gonzalez, is a relative newcomer to the community, having lived there about four years.

The nuns have until Dec. 31 to move out, according to a letter sent by the archdiocese.

Since news of the likely sale broke last week, the phone at the convent has been “ringing and ringing and ringing,” Escalera said Monday.

Among other media appearances in the past week, the nuns have been interviewed twice by Spanish-language television network Telemundo and, on Friday, by the hosts of the “John & Ken Show” on Los Angeles talk radio KFI-AM. “We feel real bad for her, getting tossed out of her home like that,” John Kobylt, the show’s co-host, said Monday of Escalera.

Many others to want to help, too.

Several community members, headed by Anthony Dal Bello, a Santa Barbara businessman who has known the local Sisters of Bethany since his childhood, are forming a committee to set up a fund for donations.

“We’d like to find some way for them to stay where they are,” said Dal Bello, who recalls assisting with Mass at the convent as a boy. “If the archdiocese has to sell it, we’ll have

Six years later, 9/11 conspiracy theories persist

By Matt Eagan Hartford Courant

The sun is expected to shine Tuesday in New York and Washington and out in Shanksville, Pa., just as it was that morning six years ago when the U.S. was shaken as it had not been since the attack on Pearl Harbor.

As with most historical events, the rough outline of the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001, the outline that took shape in the days after the attack, remains fixed.

There were four planes hijacked by 19 men. The hijackers flew two planes into the World Trade Center buildings in New York and a third into the Pentagon in Washington.

Thousands were killed.

The fourth plane was brought to the ground in Pennsylvania by the courageous passengers aboard Flight 93 before it could strike its intended target.

This is the story most of us know, and it is supported by a mountain of evidence from the public record as well as what we watched with our own eyes on television.

This is the story that will be told in history books to children in some fuzzy future when the pain and anguish have diminished.

But a growing number of Americans do not believe this story.

Type “9/11 conspiracy” into Google, and you will get 2.9 million hits.

Type “9/11,” and four links on the first page will lead you into the world of conspiracy.

The movie “Loose Change,” which attempts to shatter what the producers call the official story or the government’s story, is a YouTube phenomenon that has spilled into the popular culture.

Rosie O’Donnell expressed her doubts about the collapse of WTC Tower 7 on “The View,” the most mainstream of morning talk shows, and actor Charlie Sheen raised similar concerns on a talk show with Alex Jones, one of the conspiracy movement’s most ardent supporters.

The belief in conspiracy is not limited to the United States. French author Thierry Meyssan wrote an international best-seller called, in its English version, “9/11: The Big Lie.” Those selling conspiracy are not the only ones with interested readers.

“Popular Mechanics” published an article in its March 2005 issue

debunking many of the claims made by conspiracy theorists.

The article became the mostread story in the magazine’s history and was eventually expanded into a book called “Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can’t Stand Up To the Facts.”

This led to books and articles supposedly debunking the debunkers and still more articles debunking the debunkers of the debunkers.

To be certain, not all conspiracy theories are equal. Some have attempted to apply scientific inquiry to discrepancies and anomalies in the official record, but the most popular theories operate by standing the scientific method on its head.

Both “Loose Change” and Messyan’s work dismiss all evidence that does not help them reach their inevitable conclusion that 9/11 was not the work of Islamic terrorists but a calculated plan to inspire terror engineered by the U.S. government.

“The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: Decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history but as the consequences of someone’s will,” Richard Hofstadter wrote in the 1960s. “Unlike the rest of us, the enemy . . . wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.”

Consider the dramatically different rhetoric used in the televised debate between the editors of “Popular Mechanics” and the makers of “Loose Change” on the “Democracy Now!” news program.

“We fully support asking questions and being skeptical,” Popular Mechanics editor James Meigs said in his first remarks of the discussion. “But if you ask questions, you also have to look for the answers, and if you get answers, you just can’t ignore them.”

The “Loose Change” response came from researcher Jason Bermas.

“I’d like to thank you for the chance to take on the government’s lies,” Bermas said. “And Popular Mechanics, which is a Hearst yellow-journalism publication, lies as well.”

The debate continued for another 50 minutes, but its tone was set in

those opening remarks. Meigs and David Dunbar attempted to win the debate through logic but Bermas had already labeled them liars and co-conspirators.

The paranoid style is not limited to the makers of “Loose Change.”

Consider the case of Mike Walter, a broadcaster in Washington who was interviewed in the aftermath of the disaster and told CNN that he saw an American Airlines jet crash into the Pentagon.

“I looked out my window and saw this plane, this jet, an American Airlines jet, coming,” Walter said. “And I thought, ‘This doesn’t add up. It’s really low.’ And I saw it. I mean, it was like a cruise missile with wings. It went right there and slammed right into the Pentagon.”

Messyan used only the “it was like a cruise missile” portion of the quote, and Walter soon became a cause celebre among many conspiracy theorists.

He became so frustrated, he posted a response on YouTube to correct the record, including footage of the original CNN interview, to debunk the claims that he saw a cruise missile hit the Pentagon.

Walter’s video was met with an immediate barrage of vitriolic responses calling him a liar and a player in the vast conspiracy. And so it goes.

The problem for those engaged in stamping out such arguments is that drawing attention to these theories (as this story does), even to dismiss them, may actually assist in their spread.

A recent study done by English researchers at the University of Kent suggests that conspiracy theories spread unconsciously.

Researchers had people read conspiracy theories about the death of Princess Diana.

They then asked a series of questions and found that people were far more likely to believe in a Diana conspiracy after reading about such theories.

More importantly, the people did not believe their own attitudes about Diana had changed.

Put another way, not only did people believe in the conspiracy; they believed they had always believed in the conspiracy.

George Orwell once said, “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 men hijacked four planes.

to try to find the finances to buy it.

And otherwise, we’ll have to come up with something else.”

At the convent Monday, an erroneous television report that the building already had been sold set off a flurry of concern from the nuns and their supporters. But Tod M. Tamberg, spokesman for the archdiocese, said later that the report was false.

The Santa Barbara County assessor’s office lists the value of the property at about $98,000, although it is unclear what it might bring in a sale. Even the relatively small, older homes nearby sell for at least $700,000, according to local real estate Web sites.

Tamberg also said that as many as 50 non-parish properties, including the archdiocese’s Los Angeles administrative headquarters, would be sold to cover the legal bill and said the choice of which to sell had

been difficult for all concerned.

Apart from the central offices, the convent is the first property to be publicly identified.

“What we are trying to do is to preserve our essential ministries and at the same time trying to come up with a heck of a lot of money to pay our share of this settlement,” Tamberg said.

An element of mystery continued to surround the timing of the letter from the archdiocese, dated June 28, that was sent to the nuns’ regional superior in Los Angeles to notify them that they must move by year’s end.

Escalera said her superior, Sister Reyna Leticia Gomez, has told her she did not receive the letter until Aug. 27, the day she called Escalera to break the news. Gomez could not be reached for comment Monday.

Tamberg said the letter was sent June 28.

Romney adviser linked to anti-Thompson Web site

By Michael D. Shear Washington Post

WASHINGTON — A top adviser to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney appears to be behind the launch of a new Web site attacking GOP presidential rival Fred Thompson during his first week on the trail.

The site, PhoneyFred.org, painted an unflattering picture of Thompson, dubbing the former TV star and senator: Fancy Fred, Five O’clock Fred, Flip-Flop Fred, McCain Fred, Moron Fred, Playboy Fred, Pro-Choice Fred, Son-of-a-Fred and Trial Lawyer Fred. Shortly after a Washington Post reporter made inquiries about the site to the Romney campaign, it was taken down.

Before it vanished, the front page of the Web site featured a picture of Thompson depicted in a frilly outfit more befitting a Gilbert and Sullivan production than a presidential candidate.

Under the heading, “Playboy Fred,” the site asked the provocative question: “Once a Pro-Choice Skirt Chaser, Now Standard Bearer of the Religious Right?”

Nowhere on the site was any indication of who was responsible for it. But a series of inquiries led to “Under the Power Lines,” the Web site of the political consulting firm of J. Warren Tompkins, Romney’s lead consultant in South Carolina.

Tompkins did not return phone calls seeking comment.

Late Monday after noon, a spokesman for Thompson called on Romney to fire Tompkins.

“There is no room in our party for this kind of smut. As the top executive of his own campaign, Gov. Romney should take full responsibility for this type of high-tech gutter

politics and issue an immediate apology,” said Thompson spokesman Todd Harris. “If this is true, Gov. Romney should exercise some of his much-touted executive acumen and immediately terminate anyone related to this outrage.”

A spokesman for Romney’s campaign said he would look into questions about the anti-Thompson site.

“Our campaign is focused on the issues and ideas that are of paramount concern to voters,” said spokesman Kevin Madden. “The Web site we are focused on is MittRomney. com.”

The Web site was hosted by a company called BlueHost, based in Orem, Utah. Until late Monday afternoon, a search at that Web site PhoneyFred.org returned the following message: “Domain phoneyfred. org is still attached to your politicalnetroots.com account as Addon.”

The address www.politicalnetroots. com brings up the home page for Under the Power Lines, which lists Tompkins as “partner, consultant,” along with Terry Sullivan and Wesley Donehue.

The “PhoneyFred” site, Tompkins’s own Web site, and many of his other clients’ sites are all hosted on the same BlueHost server.

In 2000, it was in South Carolina that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., ran into an organized effort to sully his character and spread rumors, including that he had once fathered a black child. At the time, candidate George W. Bush was desperate to stop a surging McCain, who was coming off a stunning upset in the New Hampshire primary. Tompkins was the chief strategist for Bush in South Carolina at the time, though Bush campaign officials have always denied that the campaign was responsible for the attacks.

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E ditorial & L etters Page 10

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Staf f Editorial

From here to there Yesterday, The Herald took part in a listening tour.

Fourteen students from Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Syria and other countries stopped by our office to tell us about the media in their home countries and hear about the culture of press freedom in the United States.

All student leaders in their home countries, the delegates were on campus as participants in the International Visitor Leadership Program, run by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs to bring citizens of foreign countries to the United States to visit and learn. As program organizers note, the tens of thousands of past participants include over 200 current and former heads of government and state.

Some of the program’s goals ­— introducing foreigners to “pluralism, tolerance and volunteerism as components of U.S. civic life” on a crosscountry ­tour — may seem trite and even uncomfortably patriotic. But dogma aside, we can think of few better uses for our tax dollars than this: funding direct, personal connections that cut through the propaganda, misunderstandings and prejudices that may distort the United States and the Arab world in each other’s eyes.

Respectful, straightforward debate about sensitive political issues is difficult to achieve, even among Brown students who share this community and have a stake in our University’s commitment to the free exchange of ideas. Those who remember the Arab pro-Israel activist Nonie Darwish’s speech on campus in February know that lectures in our ‘intellectually diverse’ climate have too often devolved into shouting matches and potshots from a microphone.

Yesterday evening, 14 foreign citizens with just a few days of first-hand exposure to the United States engaged in serious, straightforward discussions about the meaning of democracy in Iran, what motivates Hamas and the broad cultural differences between our lives on College Hill and the student delegates’ experience in universities halfway around the world.

Meeting with campus political groups, the visitors heatedly discussed U.S. policy in the Middle East before mingling and exchanging e-mail addresses, opening the possibility of continued conversations even after the students returned home. No one shouted.

Such opportunities to learn from each other in person are especially valuable in a time when flotsam crowds our airwaves as so-called pundits stir misunderstanding in exchange for a cable news gig or book deal.

Misinformation aside, being well-informed has never been so easy.

Americans aged 18-24 have come of age in the post-9/11 world, during which exhaustive (and often imperfect) coverage of the Middle East has dominated the news media. But three-quarters of these Americans aged 18-24 can’t find Israel or Iran on a map of the Middle East, and 63 percent can’t find Iraq, according to a 2006 survey by National Geographic and Roper Public Affairs. The same survey found that a terrifying 88 percent couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map of Asia, and 70 percent couldn’t find North Korea.

A campus listening tour and chit-chat between international college students has small-scale impact on such widespread political ignorance, to be sure, but opening the minds of even two dozen people is a start.

We thank the University for opening its doors (and ours) to these visiting students. We hope this won’t be the last time it happens.

T he B rown D aily H erald Editors-in-Chief Eric Beck Mary-Catherine Lader

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L e tt e r s Brown Policy Review gives outlet for policy debate To the Editor: Maha Atal ’08 calls on Brown students to actively and productively enter into political discourse by avoiding Bush-bashing and shedding the “wooliness of liberalism in America,” in her Sept. 4 column, “To the American Left: What can Brown do for you?”

Atal is right to lament the deterioration of political discourse on campus into partisan grumbling largely unaccompanied by actual policy proposals. Brown students cannot hope to influence policy without tolerating and engaging opposing ideas. Calling out President Bush or neoconservatives for all of their mistakes is a lot easier than proposing viable alternatives, after all.

We at the Brown Policy Review support Atal’s proposal to re-engage students in the political process by focusing on ideas and policy, and we aim to contribute to a more tolerant, progressive political discourse here at Brown.

To promote this discourse, BPR holds biweekly policy discussions, publishes student policy papers and facilitates policy events on campus. This semester, we are tentatively planning policy discussions and events on gay marriage and the atrocities being committed

in Burma.

We hope to act as a sounding board or outlet for students interested in reframing the political debate around real policy, allowing students to develop their ideas and give those ideas back to the community at large.

In fact, four Brown students were recently published in the 2007 Roosevelt Review, a national publication by the Roosevelt Institution, our parent organization. The Roosevelt Review is distributed to lawmakers, students and interested citizens, enabling undergraduate students to get their ideas directly on senators’ desks and into the minds of politically active people all over the country.

Unlike Atal’s proposed policy center, BPR maintains a non-partisan stance to foster open debate and encourage open-minded thinking on campus. However, BPR seeks to encourage the type of progressive (nonBush-bashing) debate that Atal calls for. By encouraging political discourse here on campus, BPR hopes to enable undergraduate students to influence national policy through their own ideas.

Adam Perry ‘08 Brown Policy Review Editor-in-Chief Sept. 5

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O pinions Tuesday, September 11, 2007

page 11

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

The 2008 Worst College Ranking Scheme JAMES SHAPIRO Opinions Columnist

Brown placed 14th in the most recent U.S. News & World Report rankings of the best colleges and universities, remaining securely below every other Ivy. Tragically, U.S. News has monopolized the college rankings market and will continue to do so in the near future.

But these rankings surely do not measure relative performance at the top schools.

U.S. News compiles its rankings by collecting, weighing and combining several statistics into one overall score for each school.

The overall score determines a school’s rank.

Virtually all of U.S. News’ criteria are uninformative, manipulable or both.

Perhaps the worst measure, selectivity, counts for 15 percent of the overall score.

Selectivity consists of the SAT scores and class rank of entering freshmen in addition to a school’s acceptance rate.

Colleges can manipulate the acceptance rate easily. For example, if University X wants 1,000 freshmen next year and expects a 25 percent yield rate for regular decision candidates, it would need to accept about 4,000 students in the regular decision cycle to fill its entering class. But binding early decision candidates have a yield rate approaching 100 percent. If University X accepts more students through an early decision program, it can accept fewer students overall and lower its acceptance rate.

Other schools game the system by waiving application fees and essay requirements and taking more drastic measures to expand the applicant pool.

The variability of academic standards at

diverse high schools renders the class rank criterion useless, at least at top schools. SAT scores present a subtler problem. While students often need to perform well on the SAT to have a realistic chance at many top schools, the highest scorers are not always the most desirable candidates. Schools can boost their ranking by prioritizing applicants’ SATs at the expense of other, less quantifiable factors.

Sloppy measures permeate other areas of the U.S. News rankings. Peer assessment, the largest single component of the rankings, counts for 25 percent of the overall score.

academic reputation. Unlike college administrators, these gatekeepers appraise large swathes of freshly minted alumni from top schools for a living. Perhaps more importantly, a gatekeeper’s impression of a school partly determines the opportunities available to graduates. In short, the peer assessment score — which purportedly measures academic reputation — surveys the wrong people and omits the most vital perspectives.

U.S. News also factors in alumni giving, defined as the percentage of alumni who have donated to their alma mater in the past two

When 85 percent of students choose the lower-ranked school, there is something wrong with the rankings.

A school’s peer assessment is the average academic quality rating, on a scale of one to five, as judged by college administrators (usually university presidents, provosts and admissions deans).

But college administrators do not determine, and probably cannot accurately assess, other schools’ reputations. Gatekeepers, such as graduate school admissions deans, choosy employers and student coordinators at selective public service programs are in a much better position to evaluate any given school’s

years. U.S. News claims that alumni donations track alumni satisfaction. But the definition presupposes that alumni donate solely based on the value of their college experience, as opposed to their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with, say, a school’s current administration.

Alumni giving, as calculated by U.S. News, also completely ignores the actual size of donations.

Instead of obsessing over U.S. News rankings, students should turn to other systems that describe top schools more accurately.

The revealed preference system designed by researchers at Harvard University, Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania provides an attractive alternative.

Revealed preference generates college rankings based on head-to-head results, somewhat like chess or tennis rankings. If, for example, a cross-admit to Brown and Cornell chooses Brown, Brown earns points and improves its standing relative to Cornell.

A recent revealed preference study polled 3,240 ambitious high school seniors and asked which colleges admitted them, and which college they chose to attend. Brown ranked seventh.

Revealed preference is valuable because schools cannot manipulate it. Colleges can move up only by attracting more students.

Furthermore, a school’s esteem among students is important in itself. Ambitious students typically make college decisions based on research, a school’s reputation and advice from peers, counselors, siblings and parents.

In the same way that aggregate reviews on rottentomatoes.com and Zagat’s dining guides provide valuable information to moviegoers and diners, thousands of high school seniors can give future applicants a better sense of which colleges deserve consideration.

U.S. News and revealed preference provide irreconcilable pictures of the top schools.

While U.S. News ranked Northwestern University two places above Brown in 2000, an estimated 85 percent of cross-admits who matriculated at either Brown or Northwestern chose Brown that same year. When 85 percent of students choose the lower-ranked school, there is something wrong with the rankings.

James Shapiro ’10 has an inferiority complex.

Bringing ‘Law & Order’ to law and order ADAM CAMBIER Opinions Columnist

I have a confession: I love “Law & Order.”

As any of my friends can tell you, I am a trueblue, dyed-in-the-wool fan of the longest-running primetime drama on TV today. From a murderous Chilean dictator of the 1970s to a 26-year-old fugitive from Florida pretending to be a crack orphan high school overachiever, I have borne witness to Lenny Briscoe and Jack McCoy throwing what feels like hundreds of people into the slammer. All it takes to set my heart atwitter are the dulcet tones of the theme song’s famed clarinet solo, and even stoic old me got a little misty-eyed when series star Jerry Orbach left us for the big station house in the sky.

Consequently, it’s no big surprise that I damn near had a seizure when “Law & Order’s” own Fred Dalton Thompson announced his candidacy for the presidency. In addition to his awesome acting resume and disproportionately hot trophy wife, he’s actually very qualified for the office. He was an important part of the Watergate hearings and had an illustrious enough career in the Senate before leaving the Beltway for the Walk of Fame.

Because I don’t care enough about politics to make a prognostication based on boring old crap like policy, Thompson’s entry into the race inspired me to approach the election the same way I watch “Law & Order.” For those of you unfamiliar with how the show works, I’ll share with you a nearly foolproof method that allows you to finger out the perp in every typical episode.

It’s simple. During the first half of each hour-long episode, the detectives search for the guilty party. Nine times out of 10, they speak to the murderer early on before moving on to other suspects, only to realize that they have already met the target of their investigation once new evidence has come to light. The question, then, is how to beat the show’s protagonists to the punch and pick the culpable individual before they do.

death and decided to kill young boys for committing sins while wearing the symbol of the cross — in fact, he had been the culprit in the original killings, and the aforementioned serial killer had been wrongly imprisoned in the first place. Bingo.

So, now that we’ve established our methodology, let’s apply it to the 2004 Democratic primaries in an effort to demonstrate its reliability. Back in late 2002, John Kerry became

Because I don’t care enough about politics to make a prognostication based on boring old crap like policy, Thompson’s entry into the race inspired me to approach the election the same way I watch “Law & Order.”

Our felon always has a few traits that make him or her a dead giveaway. They’re usually close to the deceased and always seem just the slightest bit “off.” For example, in a favorite episode of mine in which someone appears to be imitating a jailed serial killer, the detectives talk to a security guard who yelled at one of the victims before his untimely death. This security guard, however, spoke in a strange, lilting tone through a crack in his barely-open front door. It turns out that he was actually a psycho who went off his meds after his mom’s

one of the very first candidates to announce his candidacy for the presidency, meeting our criterion that the investigators become familiar with the perp early on. He was a big enough deal for a while, spawning cover stories in reputable publications like Time and Newsweek, which lauded him as the next president of the United States. He was certainly a bit off — his perfectly chiseled hairdo was a wee bit too orderly to be human, and he exuded all the warmth, wit and charm of RoboCop. By this point, any good “Law & Order” fan

could have told you that he would end up as the Democratic nominee. For this to happen, though, he had to fade from memory for a while. Only when the shocking new evidence of the Iowa caucuses broke out did we have our winner.

Now it’s time for us to play detective and pick our murderer — I mean, pick our presidential nominee. On the Democratic side, my pick is Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware. He’s an established member of the old boys’ club of Washington — like those close to the deceased in “Law & Order,” he seems like a logical enough place to start our investigation.

He was the first to openly state that he was seeking the nomination and has ample time to fade away before a surprise resurgence. He’s even got a political rap sheet from his 1988 run for the presidency, where he plagiarized hefty portions of a speech from the British Labour leader at the time. The icing on the cake is that he makes John Kerry’s stiff persona look downright inviting. My Republican selection is John McCain. In all fairness, he’s not particularly “off” — his only real major departure from normalcy is the fact that he makes Methuselah look like a spring chicken.

In his favor, however, he’s an early favorite who has pretty much fallen off the map, setting himself up for an ultimate rediscovery akin to those that frequently befall “Law & Order’s” defendants.

Of course, this is all purely speculative. In the end, it’s important to remember: in the American legal system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the Republicans, who commit crimes, and the Democrats, who whine about the offenders. It’s up to you to write their stories.

Adam Cambier ’09 knows drama.

S ports T uesday Page 12

THE BROWN DAILY HERALD

Sp

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Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Gymnast Sacramone ’10 turns professional

i e f

Cross country starts strong The men’s and women’s cross country teams began their seasons well, placing first and second, respectively, at the Boston University Invitational on Saturday.

The men’s team had four runners in the top 10. John Loeser ’10 led the Bears with a time of 26:33 in the eight-kilometer race. Sam Sheehan ’11 (26:34) finished sixth, John Haenle ’11 (26:41) finished seventh and Colin Brett ’10 (26:42) finished eighth. The men’s team defeated Boston University, Harvard University, Manhattan College and Marist College.

Led by its first-years, the women’s team finished second at the Invitational. In her first collegiate race, Abby Hinds ’11 placed second in the five-kilometer course with a time of 19:03. Kelsey Ramsey ’11 (19:30) finished sixth, Emily Bordeau ’10 (19:39) finished seventh and Lauren Pischel ’11 (19:41) came in eighth.

The women’s team lost to BU but beat Harvard, Manhattan and Marist.

Both teams compete next at the Quinnipiac Invitational in New York on Sept. 21.

M. golf falls short at Naval Fall The men’s golf team started in the rough this weekend, finishing 13th out of 17 at the Navy Fall Invitational at the Naval Academy Golf Course in Annapolis, Md. The Bears shot well on the first day of the two-day tournament, finishing Saturday in eighth place with a score of 310. But even though Brown improved on Sunday, shooting a 308, they couldn’t keep pace with the rest of the field. North Carolina State University won the invitational with their score of 566 besting the next finisher by 23 shots.

“As a whole, the team started off the season all right,” said Chris Hoffman ‘09, who led the Bears with a 153 and a 35th-place finish. “Everyone played decently — no one played to their peak.”

That was the case for Larry Haertel ’08, who became the first Brown golfer to win the New England Intercollegiate Championship last season.

Haertel played well enough to shoot a 154 and finish in 39th place.

Ryan Larson ‘08 finished with a score of 155, while John Giannuzzi ’10 came in at 156 and Michael Amato ’11 at 177.

— Stu Woo

A week after leading the U.S. team to a gold medal at the World Gymnastics Championships, Alicia Sacramone ’10 has decided to forfeit her NCAA eligibility to turn professional.

Sacramone announced yesterday that she has hired TrinityOne Marketing to represent her as she pursues endorsements and sponsorships, according to a Brown Athletics press release.

The move means that the reigning Eastern College Athletic Conference Rookie of the Year and 2008 Olympic hopeful will not be able to compete again for the Brown gymnastics team.

In her one season competing for Brown, Sacramone set school records in the vault, floor and all-around.

At the World Championships in Germany last week, Sacramone earned a silver medal on the floor exercise and a bronze medal on the vault en route to leading the U.S. team to a gold medal. The Associated Press called her floor exercise performance, which clinched the championship for the American team, “as clutch as any pass ever thrown by Peyton Manning or basket made by (Michael Jordan).”

— Stu Woo

M. water polo opens season with 4-1 record

By Whitney Clark Contributing Writer

With a new head coach and no home pool, it might be understandable if the men’s water polo team got off to a slow start this weekend. But the Bears overcame unfamiliar circumstances by opening their season with a 4-1 record at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Invitational.

On Saturday, the Bears came out strong, defeating Washington and Jefferson College, 13-3, in their first match of the day. Brown played great defense with 15 steals, five from Hank Weintraub ’09 alone.

Anchoring the defense, goalkeepers Kent Holland ’10 and Nico Fort ’09 came up with one save and two blocks, respectively.

Offensively, Grant LeBeau ’09 led the team with four goals. Close behind were co-captain Gerrit Adams ’08, who had three goals, and Mike Gartner ’09, who had two.

After only a two-hour rest, the Bears then faced Santa Rosa Junior College in an exhibition match. Taking an early lead, Brown was up 4-0 after the first quarter and led 6-2 at the half. With four goals from Gartner and two each from Weintraub and Corey Schwartz ’11, the Bears came out of their second game with a 10-8 win. Holland had six saves.

The final game of the day came a little too soon for the Bears, who fell behind early to the New York Athletic Club, a club team composed of mostly older players. Just two hours after the Santa Rosa game, Brown showed its fatigue, trailing 4-1 at the half. Despite rebounding in the second half with two goals each from Adams, Weintraub and LeBeau, the Bears couldn’t catch up and lost 12-7. Still, Head Coach Felix Mercado seemed impressed by the team and gave it credit for finishing strong.

On Sunday, the second and last

day of the invitational, the Bears took command once again, defeating the defending Division III champions, University of California at Santa Cruz, 13-6.

“This was a huge game for us,” Adams said. “We really got to see where we stand.”

Mercado echoed his words, adding that the team entered the game focused and with a good attitude. Adams and Mercado also complimented the team’s excellent defense.

“Hank Weintraub was a catalyst on the perimeter. He really set the tone for the team defensively,” Mercado said. On the offensive end, Gartner contributed six goals in the win.

Brown went into the next game with the same energy and defeated Yale’s club team, 8-0.

“We had a really good weekend,” Mercado said. Gartner had similar feelings: “We’re in this now. We need to work on some things offensively, but we weren’t sloppy and we played together, we played as a team.”

So far, Brown seems to be adapting well to its new situation. Adams said the transition to Mercado has been smooth, and so far, practicing daily at Wheaton College, 15 miles away, has not negatively affected the team.

“It’s not ideal, but we’re working with it,” Adams said. “We have a new coach, we have to travel a lot for practice and we don’t have a home pool, but we’re using it as motivation and we’re very optimistic. Teams are going to be surprised by us.”

The Bears’ next game will be Sept. 15 against Saint Francis College in New York City.

ReActionphotos.com

Alicia Sacramone ‘10 has left the Brown gymnastics team to turn professional.

Ashley Hess / Herald

The men’s water polo team opened their season with a 4-1 record at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Invitational, losing only to the New York City Athletic Club.