DAILY LOBO new mexico
December 7, 2009
Shop talk: Rope
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GPSA ballot won’t include Gonzales by Pat Lohmann Daily Lobo
Joey Trisolini / Daily Lobo Rawley Jackson is a competitive team roper seen, here on his ranch in Doña Ana County. Check out the Multimedia page at DailyLobo.com to watch ‘Rope,’ the fourth episode in the ‘Shop talk’ series by Joey Trisolini.
Graduate and professional students will have winter break to consider their level of confidence in Athletics Director Paul Krebs and whether they want their student fees to support the Athletics Department. After nearly four hours of deliberation Saturday, the GPSA decided to place four items on the ballot for a vote in a special election that will be held online next semester. Nick Geyer, a graduate student in the sports administration program and an athlete on UNM’s golf team, said GPSA will overstep its bounds in holding a special election. “You aren’t listening to a major section of your constituency,” he said to GPSA members. “If you had bothered to be democratic, you would know that your constituents, or a large portion of your constituents, think the things you’re voting on today are ridiculous.” Desi Brown, a GPSA council representative, said he sent e-mails to graduate students he represents asking for feedback on the proposed election and received nothing but encouragement. Several other council representatives said they posed similar questions to their constituents and got positive feedback. GPSA President Lissa Knudsen said that while much of the discussion thus far has centered around GPSA members and their opinions of the Athletics administration, the election is designed to let the graduate and professional student body have a voice in the situation. “Remember that the issue here is to let graduate students vote on this,” she said. “If, in fact, we know that the students will overwhelmingly not vote for this, that they support athletics and they want our money to go there, then that’s how they will vote.” The four items on the ballot are two questions about Krebs, one about student fee allocation to the Athletics Department and one about an independent investigation into the Sept. 20 altercation between head football coach Mike Locksley and assistant coach J.B. Gerald. GPSA Council Chair Danny Hernandez said the election will take
place Jan. 26, 2010 at the earliest. The no-confidence vote in Krebs is now split into two parts: one gauging confidence in Krebs’ handling of the Sept. 20 altercation and one gauging confidence in Krebs’ leadership throughout his career. The GPSA made the distinction to allow students to express no confidence in Krebs’ handling of the incident without discrediting the administrator’s overall performance as athletics director. The latter resolution passed by a narrow margin, with 10 representatives in favor, eight against and two abstaining. Graduate and professional students can also vote on whether $1.5 million of student fees should continue to be allocated to the Athletics Department. Lee Peifer, deputy University counsel, agreed that a discussion about student fees going to Athletics is appropriate, but he encouraged GPSA members to be careful about what he considered to be personal attacks against two UNM administrators, including Krebs and Vice President of Human Resources Helen Gonzales. “What I think is neither necessary nor appropriate nor helpful is that that (Athletics) conversation is embedded in the agenda with proposed votes of no-confidence in two career professionals at the University,” he said. “I suggest that you have the responsibility … to refrain from forwarding that agenda by attacking the reputations and careers of other people just because the current media climate makes that easy to do.” Graduate and professional students will also be able to vote to request an independent investigation of the matter involving Locksley. However, GPSA decided not to question graduate students’ confidence in Gonzales, because several council representatives said they weren’t convinced Gonzales was guilty of any wrongdoing in the subsequent investigation. Sid Solano, a GPSA council representative, said Peifer’s address before the meeting swayed his opinion of Gonzales and her role in the, as UNM President David Schmidly put
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Students join in worldwide protest of Italian prime minister “No B Day,” a protest against Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi, finds supporters at UNM by Andrew Beale Daily Lobo
An international protest against the Prime Minister of Italy came all the way to Albuquerque on Saturday. Vito Sparacello and Sergio
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Tassoni, who are both UNM students from Italy, organized the event in Albuquerque and got attention from passersby as they rallied outside the UNM Bookstore. They said protests happening at the same time in Rome were expected to attract more than a million people. Sparacello said he took part in the protest because Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, is corrupt. “The problem is that this is a mafia guy,” Sparacello said. “Nobody knows how he got (his) money. He
makes laws to avoid trials and he had (about) 16 trials. And now he has just two, because he changed the laws to basically make his crime not crime anymore.” Tassoni said the protests were organized worldwide using the Internet. A Facebook page promoting the event listed dozens of cities in Italy and around the world where protests were being held, he said. “This thing is huge,” he said. “Everywhere there are Italians in the world, they are trying to do something.”
One other aspect of the protest made creative use of the Internet, Tassoni and Sparacello said. They said people from around the world spent Saturday logging on to the Italian government’s Web site, in an attempt to overload the servers and shut down the site. Sparacello said the Internet was the only option for organizing the protests, because Berlusconi owns most of the major media outlets in Italy. According to fliers distributed by Sparacello and Tassoni, Berlusconi
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privately owns three of the national television networks in Italy and controls the other three because they are state-run. “Basically, the problem is that, in Italy, this guy owns all the media,” he said. “So basically, the problem in Italy is that this guy controls the mind of the people.” Berlusconi has remained in government since 1994 because he controls the media outlets and therefore is able to convince many people to
see Berlusconi page 3
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