Tuesday, February 2, 2010
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COLLEGIATETIMES 107th year, issue 9
News, page 2
Features, page 4
Opinions, page 5
Sports, page 7
Classifieds, page 6
Sudoku, page 6
Closure
DANIEL LIN/SPPS
Morgan Harrington’s parents, Gil and Dan, along with her brother Alex hold a vigil ceremony for their daughter with supporters in Roanoke. State police confirmed discovering Morgan’s remains Jan. 26.
Family announces scholarship, funeral date T
he Harrington family announced Monday a scholarship in honor of their daughter Morgan, who was found dead Jan. 26. The Morgan Dana Harrington Memorial Scholarship is designated for the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine. Harrington, who was last seen Oct. 17, 2009, during a Metallica concert at the University of Virginia’s John Paul Jones Arena, was uncovered at Anchorage Farm approximately 10 miles away from the arena along Route 29 in southern Albemarle County. Police have not disclosed a time or cause of death for Harrington. A Mass service for Harrington will take place Friday, Feb. 5, at St. Andrews Catholic Church in Roanoke, Va. A reception at the Hotel Roanoke is scheduled for after the service. The service is open to the general public. The family requests that in lieu of flowers donations be made to either to the Morgan Dana Harrington Memorial Scholarship or to Orphan Medical Network International. Scholarship donations may be mailed to: Virginia Tech, Attn: Gift Accounting, University Development (0336), Blacksburg, VA 24061. OMNI donations can be mailed to 6930 Empire Lane, Roanoke, VA 24018. by gordon block, news reporter
Harringtons gather for vigil, mourn loss of daughter ZACH CRIZER & LIANA BAYNE news staff ROANOKE — Neighbors, family and newfound friends filled a Roanoke street corner with candlelight, prayers and music Friday night, trying to help fill the void left by the loss of Virginia Tech student Morgan Harrington. “She was a light in the world,” said friend Ashley Honig. Honig, a sophomore at Virginia Western Community College, knew Morgan Harrington during high school. They went to church together and were in the same youth group. “She will never stop being loved,” Honig said. Honig was just one of a multitude of people who have shown support to the Harrington family since Morgan disappeared on Oct. 17 from the John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville. The candlelight vigil was planned quickly, bringing supporters to the home of Dan and Gil Harrington just a day after Virginia State Police confirmed remains found on Anchorage Farm outside Charlottesville were indeed those of Harrington. The Harrington family expressed their gratitude to the crowd of more than 100 and to those worldwide for joining so passionately in the effort to locate Harrington. Other attendees offered comfort to the Harrington family as they seek closure after spending 101 days searching for their daughter. “This has been tragic from beginning to end,” said family friend Janet Crawford to the hushed crowd. Crawford commended those who stood by the Harrington family through the ordeal of searching for their daughter’s body, which was finally located on Jan. 26 in a remote area of an Albemarle County farm, about seven miles away from the arena. “Their loss has been great, their pain has been deep, their faith has been strong,” Crawford said. Friends of and those sympathetic to the Harringtons shared prayers and inspirational poems, reminding one another of the Harringtons’ faith that Morgan is now without suffering. Some have come to the Harringtons’ side after hearing of Morgan’s disappearance. see VIGIL / page two
Professor wins German grant GEOPHYSICS PROFESSOR AWARDED GRANT, TO TAKE RESEARCH TO GERMAN INSTITUTE NATHAN DENNY news staff writer A Virginia Tech professor of geophysics in the College of Science has been selected to continue his research over the next three years at the esteemed Bayerisches Geoinstitut in Germany. Scott King has been a professor at Tech since fall 2007. Before coming to Blacksburg, he taught geophysics at Purdue University for 15 KING years. Most of King’s research is on the interior of planets. Presently, he has a project that explores the India-Asia collision, the
incredible height of the Himalayas and its connection with the tectonics of the entire south China region. One of King’s students is studying the volcanoes of Mars and how they were formed from movement in the planet’s core. Changyeol Lee is one of King’s four graduate students studying geophysics whom he advises. Lee studied with King while he was at Purdue, and when King made the move to Tech, Lee came as well. “He is very patient,” Lee said. “He understands his students very well, and he wants them to be successful.” Lee, who is on track to graduate this May, said that King is a brilliant professor who has not only helped him through his graduate work, but who has also supported him in his application for postdoctoral education.
“He has introduced me to important faculty and written references, letters for my postdoctorate applications.” Based on his work and expertise in the field of geophysics, King has been selected by his colleagues at the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to collaborate with researchers at the Bayerisches Geoinstitut in Germany. King has visited the school several times before, and says he has made a natural connection with the researchers there. Over the next three years, King will be spending much of his summers in Germany, studying cooperatively the movement of the planet’s interior and the cause of deep-focus earthquakes. In addition to the time spent in Germany over the summers, King will also be traveling throughout Europe with his wife and children to visit other colleagues, to see the work they are doing and to discuss his
interactions at the Geoinstitut. According to Lee, this situation is a win-win. King has information and data that the German scholars can use, and the German scholars have lab data that King can use to expand his research. “One person can only do so much, but together they can do greater things,” Lee said. “This is important stuff — helping each other.” “The opportunity to go and do this is great,” said King, “but hopefully we can build on that as well.” His education began at the University of Chicago. He continued at the California Institute of Technology, where he received his doctorate. King then attended Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Hoya, Calif., for his postdoctorate. “I’ve always liked physics,” King said, “and I found in geophysics that with a lot of the classical physics and the classical mechanics. ... It’s easier to visualize what you’re working on.”
Obama’s budget sober on economy KEVIN G. HALL mcclatchy newspapers WASHINGTON — The Obama administration projects rosier economic-growth prospects than most mainstream economists do but foresees a sobering jobless recovery, according to documents released Monday about underlying assumptions in the government’s $3.83 trillion federal budget for 2011. Other documents outlining proposed tax cuts and increases reveal that the administration, concerned about growing income inequality, seeks to pay for a number of programs to help the middle class by taxing the wealthiest Americans and imposing new taxes on corporations, especially those with international operations. The administration created a public relations nightmare for itself last year when it came into power forecasting an optimistic 8 percent unemployment rate. Policymakers then watched in horror as the jobless rate climbed to 10.2 percent before dipping back to 10 percent in December. That mistake isn’t repeated in the budget that President Barack Obama proposed for fiscal 2011, which starts Oct. 1. His head of the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, said Monday that she thought the jobless rate would stand at 9.8 percent at the close of this year. It won’t feel much better next year. Romer expects an unemployment rate of 8.9 percent late in 2011 and 7.9 percent in late 2012, the final full year of Obama’s term. More than seven million Americans have lost their jobs since the recession began in December 2007. Romer’s assumptions suggest rough sledding for some time to come. “Our projections of the unemployment rate reflect the
particularly severe toll that this recession has taken on the labor market and on American workers,” she said. The administration’s growth projections, important to whether the government collects the revenue it anticipates, are more optimistic. Romer forecast 3 percent growth this year, about where most mainstream economists expect it to be. For the following two years, however, she expects growth of 4.3 percent. “I’m just glad Rosy Scenario has her old job back,” quipped David Wyss, the chief economist for the rating agency Standard & Poor’s in New York. His forecast calls for 3 percent growth in 2011. The good news, he said, is that the administration offered a realistic outlook for the current year and left itself room to backtrack from future projections if it looks as if they were too optimistic. It appears that it will be years before job creation approaches the levels of the previous decade. “Unfortunately, because of the lingering effects of the credit crisis and the accompanying loss of household wealth, the recovery from the current recession is also expected to begin more slowly than in some recoveries in the past,” the administration documents say. Specific proposals to generate revenue will be fought out in the weeks and months ahead. In the administration’s crosshairs for taxation are the finance sector and large multinational corporations. The administration already had signaled that it hoped to raise $90 billion over 10 years by imposing a “financial crisis responsibility fee” on banks to recoup the indirect benefits they reaped from the bailouts over the past two years. Buried deep in the administration’s revenue proposals are additional steps to raise nearly $25 billion over the next decade by closing another loophole that lets,
among others, managers of hedge funds for the ultrawealthy pay a 15 percent capital gains tax on the profits they receive as their compensation for managing the fund. Most Americans who are compensated for their work pay a much higher rate through the tax brackets on ordinary income. To help pay for an expanded child tax credit and other initiatives to aid the struggling middle class, the administration looks to impose new taxes on corporations or to close tax breaks. Excise taxes to pay for environmental cleanup at Superfund sites would be reimposed on corporations to raise about $18.9 billion over 10 years. These taxes were eliminated in 1996. A number of proposals to close corporate tax loopholes and make it harder to hide earnings abroad would raise $465.7 billion over a 10-year window. Many of these target multinational corporations that increasingly earn a greater portion of their profits abroad. A congressional official with jurisdiction on tax matters, speaking anonymously because he wasn’t authorized to talk to journalists, said it was unlikely that many of these business tax proposals would be adopted, however, because they didn’t accompany a broader restructuring of corporate taxation. Taxes now on the rich are likely, he said, because Democrats may not enjoy their comfortable congressional majorities after November’s elections. These measures would raise revenue by repealing tax breaks for families whose adjusted gross income exceeds $250,000. The level for single filers is $200,000. The tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 would be allowed to expire for these wealthier Americans, and they could pay a higher tax on stock market earnings and even be prohibited from the same mortgage-interest deductions that ordinary Americans take.