Daily Toreador The
FRIDAY, APRIL 26, 2013 VOLUME 87 ■ ISSUE 135
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Obama consoles families, survivors of Texas blast WACO (AP) — President Barack Obama consoled a rural Texas community rocked by a deadly fertilizer plant explosion, telling mourners Thursday they are not alone in their grief and they will have the nation’s support to rebuild from the devastation. “This small town’s family is bigger now,” Obama said during a memorial service at Baylor University for victims of last week’s explosion in nearby West, Texas, that killed 14 and injured 200. Nearly 10,000 gathered to remember the first responders killed in the blast, a crowd more than triple the size of West’s entire population of 2,700. “To the families, the neighbors grappling with unbearable loss, we are here to say you are not alone. You are not forgotten,” Obama said to applause. “We may not all live here in Texas, but we’re neighbors too. We’re Americans too, and we stand with you.”
Suspect in poison letters case goes into hiding SALTILLO, Miss. (AP) — A Mississippi man whose home was searched in the investigation of poisoned letters sent to the president and others has apparently gone into hiding, but his attorney said he is cooperating and the FBI knows how to get in touch with him. Everett Dutschke, 45, had his home and former business in Tupelo searched in connection with the letters, which allegedly contained ricin. They were sent last week to President Barack Obama, Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi and earlier to an 80-year-old Mississippi judge named Sadie Holland. Charges were initially filed against a celebrity impersonator but then dropped. Attention then turned to Dutschke, who has ties to the former suspect and the judge and senator. On Thursday, investigators looked through a different home about 20 miles away and a plane circled above for much of the day.
OPINIONS, Pg. 4
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Educators consider social media evolution By KASSIDY KETRON MANAGING EDITOR
Twitter is no longer solely for social purposes, but a place where the world can give and receive news as it happens. After the Boston Marathon bombings and during the search for suspects, Lin Humphrey, a doctoral marketing student from Lubbock, and part-time instructor, said he noticed Twitter was releasing news up to 30 minutes faster than television news. “It takes (television news) awhile to steer the ship to cover something if, at least what we saw from Boston last week, if they did not have the coverage running, it typically took about 30 minutes for them to get the story up and running,” he said. “On Twitter, people were following the police scanners and real time saying, ‘OK, something is going down.’” Humphrey said the police scanner was mentioned on Twitter after the April 18 MIT carjacking in Cambridge, Mass., and during the shootout at Watertown, Mass., which attracted up to 21,000 listeners at one point. The problem with the demand for immediate news, he said, is people and media outlets sometimes must choose between speed and accuracy. “The news media gets criticized at two different points — for being too slow, but accurate or being fast, but inaccurate,” Humphrey said. “So it’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” CNN, he said, was criticized for its initial reports of an
arrest in the Boston Marathon bombing suspects, which, at the time, was untrue. It took the network about an hour to take back its initial report. “I think what we really saw last week was w i t h Twitter,” Humphrey said, “there were a lot of misstatements of the facts, a lot of misinterpretations, but I think that people found the news sources that they trusted. They were making a judgment, a valued judgment, about ‘OK, the Boston Globe, it was really good.’” Todd Chambers, an associate professor and journalism and electronic media department chairman in the College of Media and Communication, said he believes after the events in Boston, people will have a renewed interest in the principles and ethics of journalism. Graphic pictures were taken immediately after the bombings in Boston and were made readily available on social media for users to share and keep in circulation, which he said is one of the ethical decisions users must make.
GRAPHIC BY KATHRYN ROCHA/The Daily Toreador
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Student Senate hosts 1st meeting of new session By MATT DOTRAY STAFF WRITER
Senators were sworn in and heard reports from the executive branch during the first Senate meeting of the 49th session of Student Government Association at 6 p.m. Thursday. Jill Berger, a junior marketing major and Senate president, said she is excited about the next legislative session. “I expect the senators to be on their game and working for the students,” she said. “They were elected for a reason and I’m really going to hold them accountable to be active senators. Not just going to Senate meetings, but getting out there in the colleges.” One idea, Berger said, is to create mobile offices, which would require senators to be in their respected colleges and talk to students.
She said she expects senators to be active and involved with students. Berger appointed Senators Lauren Molina to journal clerk, Matt Pippen to parliamentarian and Stetson Whetstone to sergeant-at-arms. At the beginning of the meeting, Russell Thomasson, Texas Tech’s chief of staff and counsel to the chancellor, addressed the new senators. He said he was both a senator and president of SGA while a student at Tech. There are about 32,500 students at Tech, Thomasson said, and the senators represent all of them. “That’s significant,” he said to the senators. “That’s a significant constituency base. And there are a lot of folks that didn’t vote, I know, and there are some folks that didn’t vote for you. But you still represent them and I think it’s significant to step back and think
about how many your represent.” No matter what the reason was for each senator to run for the position, Thomasson said they each have a great opportunity to make a difference at Tech and a responsibility to be a leader. “What’s going to be your foundation that drives you each and every day to study,” he asked the senators, “to represent the students and to do what you do, personally and professionally? If you haven’t thought much about that, start thinking because it’s going to make a difference. Not just for you, but for the people who are going to benefit.” During the meeting, the senators passed resolutions that set the dates of next year’s meetings and congratulated the students who participated in the High Cotton Gala, an event that raised money to benefit Lubbock’s homeless community.
Senators also passed Senate Resolution 49.02, which formally congratulated the executive and presidential cabinets from last session and Tech’s spirit program for finishing third overall in the national cheerleading and Pom Squad competition, and Resolution 49.04, which congratulates Tech’s Relay For Life Committee for raising $56,000 in cancer research. During the reports from the executive branch, Luke Cotton, president of SGA, encouraged senators to write important pieces of legislation during the 49th session. “Try your best to benefit the people that elected you, your constituents,” he said to the senators. “Try to write that legislation that benefits them and really helps someone out that’s struggling here at Texas Tech because that is what you’re elected to do.” ➤➤mdotray@dailytoreador.com
Museum of Texas Tech continues celebration of Asian heritage month By MIKAEL GONZALES AND LIANA SOLIS
Frederick: Life as unappreciated employee
Tech student works as intern for university’s president -- LA VIDA Page 6
INDEX Classifieds................11 Crossword......................5 Opinions.....................4 L a Vi d a . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Sports.........................11 Sudoku.........................2 EDITORIAL: 806-742-3393
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Socheata Poeuv, a Cambodian refugee, shared her story of survival at 6 p.m. Thursday in the Helen DeVitt Jones Auditorium. The event, which was hosted by the Vietnam Center and Archive, was part of the center’s Asian Pacific American Heritage Film Festival. Mary Saffell, the associate director of the Vietnam Center and Archive, said this is the third year the center has hosted this series. “We do a guest lecture series and a film series every year to celebrate the Asian culture,” she said. “We wanted to start something that would help enlighten our community about the culture.” Poeuv, a Dallas native, presented her film, “New Year Baby,” to educate people about the genocide her family faced from the Khmer Rouge. The Khmer Rouge was a name given to supporters of a communist party, which according to the Khmer Legacies website, was the main force behind the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s. In her film, Poeuv describes how her family was able to flee Cambodia and start a new life in the U.S. “For the majority of my life, my parents never told me about what it was like when they were in Cambodia,” she said in the film. “I would ask them questions about it, but they would just shake them off and ignore them.” Poeuv said her parents and siblings were alive during the period and finally opened up ADVERTISING: 806-742-3384
to her about what it was like trying to survive during the genocide in her documentary. “My mother opened up to us kids shortly before the trip about something she had been keeping a secret for years,” she said. “She told me that my sisters weren’t my real sisters and that my brother wasn’t my full brother. Once she told me this information, I wanted to know more. That’s what really drove me to want to take a trip to Cambodia.” Riley Wilhelmi, a junior exercise and sport sciences major from Tyler, said she attended the lecture because she had taken a class about the Vietnam War and wanted to learn more about the Cambodian genocide. She said she thought it was interesting seeing the difficulties Poeuv’s family faced. “I thought it was interesting seeing the other side because in history class you just learn the facts,” Wilhelmi said. The film, she said, showed her more about Poeuv’s struggles to return to Cambodia and meet family members who were unable to flee to the U.S. Katie Plyler, a senior journalism major from Sherman, said she had taken a class about the genocide in Cambodia prior to attending the lecture. “I have previously taken a class about genocide and I had to write a big research paper about the Cambodian genocide,” she said. “It’s just interesting to talk to someone who has family who survived.” Plyler said she thought it was interesting to see how the families were affected by the genocide and how they were able to continue their lives afterward. MUSEUM continued on Page 10 ➤➤
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PHOTO BY EMILY MCCARTHY/The Daily Toreador
SOCHEATA POEUV, A Cambodian genocide refugee and director of the documentary “New Year Baby,” talks about what inspired her documentary and Carl Wilkens, a humanitarian aide worker in Ruanda, during the Guest Lecture Series on Thursday in the Museum of Texas Tech.
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