Thursday September 20, 2012 year: 132 No. 102
the student voice of
The Ohio State University
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The 1,200 Park-Stradley residents evacuated after a main water break were unable to return to their residence hall after 3 days. Each student was refunded $30 for each day, totaling $90. With this money they could buy:
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The OSU field hockey team extended its win streak to three games after beating Kent State Wednesday.
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Michael Periatt Managing editor for content periatt.1@osu.edu The doors are open and the lights are on, but the Park-Stradley residents who spent the past three nights crashing on friends’ couches or sleeping in the RPAC still won’t have all of home’s amenities. Ohio State students living in Park-Stradley Hall returned to their rooms Wednesday, but will not have access to hot water, drinking water, heating or air conditioning in their rooms. The 1,200 students were able to return Wednesday afternoon after a water main break forced them to evacuate the building for three nights. Building inspectors determined that Park-Stradley passed the necessary safety inspections Wednesday, but “there’s still a lot of work to be done” before it’s back to its original form, said Molly Ranz Calhoun, associate vice president of Student Life. To compensate for the water issues, Calhoun said Wednesday afternoon the university has purchased about 3,300 bottles of water and 400 gallon jugs to be handed out to residents at the dorm’s front desk and will continue to restock as necessary. The non-functional heating and cooling systems could take weeks to repair.
CHRISTOPHER BRAUN / Design editor
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OSU Police, CPD agree on joint jurisdiction Michael burwell Lantern reporter burwell.37@osu.edu
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Singing for the president
Columbus-based singer-songwriter Heather Evans sang for President Barack Obama Monday.
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The Ohio State Police Department and the Columbus Division of Police took a step to improve student safety on and off OSU’s campus with the announcement of joint jurisdiction between the police forces. In a Wednesday Undergraduate Student Government meeting, USG President Taylor Stepp made the announcement that University Police will now be able to take action in the off-campus area if it sees a violent crime or believes one may occur. Equipment, personnel and resources between the two police forces can be shared in some instances, and if requested, University Police can assist the Columbus Police in the off-campus area, an area where they were previously not permitted to patrol. The agreement also allows University Police to act in the off-campus area in an emergency situation, or assist the Columbus Police. University Police and Columbus Police had a mutual aid agreement in place before the announcement, but the agreement did not allow each department to act independently on the others’ territory. The purpose of the agreement is “to provide mutual assistance and interchange and use of city (of Columbus) and OSU police resources, to include personnel, facilities and equipment … in order to address criminal activity and emergencies
This is the fifth story of an 11-article series leading up to the Nov. 6 presidential election that will break down the issues dominating political debates. Check back next Thursday for our segment on debt and spending.
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that occur across jurisdictional lines,” according to a document handed out at the meeting. “The joint jurisdiction is going to give law enforcement agencies flexibility in responding to crime on and off campus,” Stepp said to about 200 students, faculty and staff. “This agreement will help both agencies to better react to criminal activity.” Stepp said after the meeting this was something he wanted done as soon as possible when he took office in May. “When I ran for USG president, I made it very clear that I had a five-step safety plan to make sure that we could tackle campus crime,” Stepp said. “This was the No. 1 point, and now we got it done. Capabilities it will have, the resources available to us, the equipment we will have available to us is like nothing that we could have actually done outside of this agreement.” OSU Police Chief Paul Denton said a mutual aid agreement was on the forefront of some students’ minds even last year. “This was a student-driven initiative from last fall,” said Denton after the meeting. “Undergraduate Student Government felt it was important to enhance officer presence and responsiveness around the neighborhood and particularly crimes that happened on the borders, where sometimes there were some limits on where officers could and couldn’t go even if they witnessed a crime.” Members of the Columbus Police also commented on the importance of the agreement. “The significance is that instead of just being able to see what’s going on and then call it into
Daniel Chi / Asst. photo editor
USG President Taylor Stepp made a joint jurisdiction announcement Wednesday. us based on the crime that’s taking place out there, they’re able to take immediate action,” said Columbus Police Precinct 4 Commander Chris Bowling. Stepp was clear throughout the meeting that joint jurisdiction will benefit student safety. “The bottom line is that this is going to help students be safe,” Stepp said. “I don’t see anything really impacting campus safety more than this.”
Obama, Romney strive for cleaner energy ally marotti Editor-in-chief marotti.5@osu.edu
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America is a wealth of resources. That’s one thing President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney can agree on. So many resources, in fact, that both political juggernauts think America shouldn’t need to rely on other nations for any sort of energy. Romney set an energy independence goal of 2020. His website details the steps that his administration would take to accomplish this goal that “every president since Nixon has tried and failed to achieve.” Energy independence could be achieved through
a list of actions, including the empowerment of states to control onshore energy development, opening offshore areas for development, accurate assessment of energy resources, regulation transparency and the list continues. Romney’s website accuses Obama of sending “billions of taxpayer dollars to green energy projects run by political cronies.” The website also says Obama took a step backward in rejecting the Keystone XL Pipeline, which is an extension to an already existing pipeline that brings crude oil from Alberta, Canada, to different points in the U.S. But Obama has not fully rejected the pipeline. According to a Washington Post article, TransCanada, the company that owns the line, filed an extension application in September 2008. In January 2012, the State Department denied the application due to insufficient time to assess its impact, but TransCanada filed a new application with a modified route through Nebraska in May. Despite Romney’s naysaying, Obama is also trying to reduce dependence on foreign oil. “He’s really trying to build America’s crude oil
production while trying to reduce our foreign oil, and right now America’s dependence on (foreign) crude oil is at a 16-year low,” said Rachel DeNoewer, a fourth-year in natural resource management and an intern with the Obama campaign. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, America produced almost 660,000 more barrels of crude oil per day in 2011 than the 5 million it produced in 2008, just before Obama took office. This has been done, Obama’s website states, by opening up 75 percent of America’s oil and gas resources in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean and millions of acres of land for development. “The United States is blessed with a cornucopia of carbon-based energy resources,” according to Romney’s website, and he also wants to take advantage of those blessings. Romney plans to dig into and develop America’s energy reserves, support construction of pipelines that would bring Canadian oil to the U.S., and research.
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