THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 20, 2012
PAGE 3
NEWS OF THE WORLD
Associated Press
MEXICO
Prison riot among inmates lasts two hours, kills 44
MONTERREY, Mexico - A fight among inmates led to a prison riot in northern Mexico that killed 44 people Sunday, a security official said.
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Nuevo Leon state public security spokesman Jorge Domenez Zambrano said the iron broke out at about 2 a.m. in a high-security section of a prison in the city of Apodaca outside the northern industrial city of Monterrey.
Several inmates attacked others, and the fighting then spread and blew up into a riot, Domene said. Forty-four people died before authorities regained control of the prison a couple of hours later, he said.
A child yells out for her father at the Apodaca correctional state facility in Apodaca, Mexico Sunday.
Families of the prisoners gathered outside the prison pushing at the fences and shouting at police to demand word of the victims.
Deadly fights happen periodically in Mexico's prisons as gangs and drug cartels stage jail breaks and battle for control of penitentiaries, often with the involvement of officials.
Some 31 prisoners died in January during a prison riot in the Gulf coast city of Altamira to Tamaulipas state, which borders Texas. Another fight in a prison in the Tamaulipas border city of Matamoros in October killed 20 inmates and injured 12.
Territorial tension between North and South Korea
KOREA
PYONGYANG, North Korea North Korea will launch "merciless" strikes if South Korea goes through with planned live-fire drills near their disputed sea border, a North Korean officer said Sunday, amid persistent tension on the divided peninsula.
North Korea doesn't want a war but its people are always ready to "dedicate their blood to defend their inviolable territory," officer Sin Chol Ung at the North's Korean People's Security Forces told The Associated Press.
"We are monitoring every movement by the South Korean warmers. If they
provoke us, there will be only merciless retaliatory strikes," Sin said.
South Korea will stage regular one day artillery drills Monday from frontline islands off the western coast, including one shelled by North Korea in 2010, according to Seoul's Joint Chiefs of Staff. It said South Korea informed North Korea of its training plan on Sunday.
Soon after, the North's military issued a statement warning of the strikes and urging all civilians living or working on the islands to evacuate before the drills start.
a premeditated military provocation to drive the overall situation on the Korean peninsula into the phase of war," a North Korean western military command said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
The North frequently issues similar rhetoric against South Korea, but the latest warnings comes as ties between the Koreas remain tense following the death of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il in December.
South Korea has barred all of its citizens, except for two private delegations, from visiting to pay respects to Kim, and North Korea has vowed to retaliate.
"Such move of the warlike forces is
AFRICA
DAKAR, Senegal — Protesters demanding the departure of Senegal's aging president on Sunday seized control of a three-block stretch in the heart of the capital, erecting barricades and lobbing rocks at police just days before a contentious presidential poll.
Senegalese protesters demand removal of president
It marks the fifth day of violent protests ahead of the country's crucial vote.
Hundreds had gathered outside a mosque as religious leaders met to discuss a Friday incident in which police used grenade launchers to throw tear gas down the wide boulevard, at one point hitting the wall of the mosque.
On Sunday morning as the crowd outside the mosque grew larger, a truck of riot police took a defensive position at
one end of Lamine Gueye Boulevard, and the dozens of youths erupted in jeers. They then grabbed cinderblocks from a nearby construction site, smashing them on the pavement in order to make smaller projectiles which they hurled at police. Security forces responded with waves of tear gas.
They sparred for more than one hour and by then, the protesters succeeded in seizing control of a three-block stretch of Lamine Gueye, one of two main commercial avenues traversing downtown Dakar.
"I'm worried — yes. What I'm seeing here could really degenerate into another kind of situation, a religious one," said Moustapha Faye, a young member
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Anti-government protesters hurl rocks toward police from behind a make-shift barricade, as police use tear gas to try to disperse them, on a central boulevard in Dakar, Senegal Sunday.
of the Mouride Muslim brotherhood, the second largest in Senegal, ing the confrontation. "We must absolutely avoid violence."
RUSSIA
Anti-Putin protesters drive with ribbons in Moscow
MOSCOW — Hundreds of cars circled central Moscow during an opposition demonstration on Sunday to demand that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin allow free elections in Russia.
As they traveled along the wide Garden Ring, which makes a 16-kilometer (nearly 10-mile) loop around the Kremlin, the cars flew the white ribbons and balloons that have become a symbol of the peaceful anti-Putin protest movement.
two weeks before the presidential election, which Putin is expected to win. Although none of his four challengers poses a serious threat, Putin does need to get a majority of the vote to avoid a runoff.
Sunday's demonstration took place
Tens of thousands of people are expected to attend a pro-Putin rally in Moscow on Thursday, a national holiday.
The largest protests the country has seen in two decades began in December.
People seen inside a car decorated with white ribbons on the Moscow's Garden Ring road during a protest in Moscow, Russia, Sunday.
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TENURE FROM PAGE 1
and said he was alarmed to hear that he would be losing a colleague because of the PI. rule, which he had never even heard of.
"When they rejected him because of the silly Pi. thing, I couldn't believe it, because he's at the heart of projects that vastly eclipse just about any center funding that we've got right now," Barrett-Gonzalez said.
During Romkes' two-week window of finding proof, Barrett-Gonzalez tried to look up the P.I. rule in the UCPT guidelines. Barrett-Gonzalez said he repeatedly asked the dean's office to provide the rules for UCPT for him to look over, but he eventually had to file a Kansas Open Records Act request to get them.
"It took seven weeks and $103 to blast the official rules out of the dean's hands," Barrett-Gonzalez said.
When he got the records, they indicated that the P.I. rule had never been approved by the necessary committee. Although Romkes brought the issue to the attention of the UCPT and chancellor's office, he was told the chancellor's decision was final.
One of the few positives of the sequence of events was the reaction of his former students, Romkes said. He estimates that 40 to 50 students wrote letters to the chancellor defending him. One of those students was Eric Bayerschen, who came to the University in August 2010 as an exchange student.
Bayerchen said Romkes helped set up the exchange program between his school and the University, aided him in the application process and picked up him up at the airport. Romkes also advised Bayerchen on what classes to take, helped him procure a tutoring job and oversaw his independent research project.
"I personally cannot understand that a teacher and researcher who is so devoted to his job, so devoted to support his students, so devoted to ensure the best possible education for them, and so devoted to guide and advise them on their way through the studies in a way that makes the studies unique for a lifetime, is denied tenure on formal reasons of money," said Bayerischen, who is now a doctoral student in Germany.
Alumni have organized a group, KU Alumni for Romkes, that has a website and Facebook group. Last week, the group started distributing pamphlets and hanging posters around campus.
Joe Lauth, a senior from St. Louis, hopes to help the group and get more students involved.
"He was a tough teacher and the class was a good deal of work, but I really enjoyed the class and certainly appreciated his teaching style as well as his personality." Lauth said.
Engineering, most of his colleagues have not made him feel welcome.
Others have been less supportive of Romkes. He said that although he has a few supporters in the School of
"They all pretend that nothing happened," Romkes said. "I'll be honest, I find that the worst, because I walk down that hallway every damn day as if nothing happened. 'How are you doing?' How do you think I'm doing? I made an effort for six years,
an honest effort to play by the rules and I got thrown out. And you don't call a foul here?"
Romkes and Barrett-Gonzalez both said they hoped the proceedings bring changes to the University's tenure process policies. Reforms they would like to see include providing candidates a copy of the criteria they
will be evaluated on, giving a larger window of time to appeal to the chancellor or Faculty Right's Board and giving candidates a chance to apply for tenure again, a rule which was removed from the University's guidelines several years ago.
Edited by Max Rothman