THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 16, 2012
PAGE 3
NEWS OF THE WORLD
Associated Press
ASIA
Police shooting during fuel price protest wounds three
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Sri Lankan police fired on fishermen protesting fuel price increases Wednesday, killing one person and wounding three, a witness and a doctor said.
Police spokesman Ajith Rohana said police used tear gas to disperse an "unlawful mob" but refused to comment on whether police fired guns at the protesters.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thousands of fishermen were walking in a protest march near the fishing town of Chilaw and clashed with police, who later opened fire at them, said local journalist Jude Samantha who was at the scene in the town 70 kilometers (43 miles) north of the capital, Colombo.
Police tried to block the protesters from entering the Chilaw town and in turn protesters started hurling stones at the police, Samantha said. Police used tear gas and then opened fire.
Members of Sri Lanka's People's Liberation Front brave police water cannons during a protest in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Wednesday, Feb. 15. A wave of protests have swept across the country after the government increased fuel prices from Saturday night.
Dr. Dinusha Jayasinghe said one dead person and three with gunshot wounds were brought to the town hospital. She said one person's condition is critical.
Protests have swept across Sri Lanka after the government increased fuel prices Saturday night.
Separately on Wednesday, police used tear gas and water cannons to stop hundreds of opposition Marxist party activists who tried to march to the center of Colombo to protest fuel prices.
Nuclear safety chief apologizes for outdated regulations
ASIA
TOKYO Japan's nuclear safety chief said Wednesday the country's regulations are flawed, outdated and below global standards, and he apologized for their failure when a tsunami crippled one plant last year.
Haruki Madarame admitted Japanese safety requirements such as for tsunami and power losses were too loose and many officials have looked the other way and tried to avoid changes.
"I must admit that the nuclear safety guidelines that we have issued now to now have various flaws," he said. "We've even said that we don't need to consider risks for massive tsunamis and lengthy power outages."
The March 11 earthquake and tsunami knocked out
power and cooling systems at the plant, sending its three reactors into meltdowns and causing massive radiation leaks. More than 100,000 people around the plant relocated due to fears of radiation impact on their health.
Madarame said officials have never taken seriously the power of outages, assuming that the likelihood of hours-long blackouts in high-tech Japan would be low. He said they thought keeping backup generators would be enough, and never thought of the risk of placing them in the basement — the area most prone to seawater damage from tsunami. The destruction of the generators at Fukushima Dai-ichi left no method available to cool the reactor cores.
EUROPE
BUCHAREST, Romania — More than 600 people have died during a record-breaking cold snap in Eastern Europe, authorities said Wednesday, as officials in the Czech Republic blamed two massive car crashes on blinding snow.
Authorities in Russia and Ukraine alone reported Wednesday that more than 300 people have died in the bitter cold.
Since the end of January, the region has been pummeled by the deep freeze, which has brought the heaviest blizzards in recent memory. Tens of thousands have been trapped in often-freezing homes and villages by walls of snow and unpassable roads, and officials have struggled to reach out to the vulnerable with emergency food airlifts.
Record-breaking cold snap kills 600 in Eastern Europe
About 100 damaged cars blocked a major highway in the Czech Republic connecting the capital, Prague, with the eastern part of the country and Slovakia. Seven people were injured in two separate accidents, authorities said, warning it could be hours before the mangled vehicles are cleared.
Authorities in Russia said 205 people have died this year in the frigid cold, while Ukraine has had 112 cold fatalities and Poland had 107. Seven people have died in Romania in the past 24 hours, bringing the total there to 86 deaths.
In hard-hit Romania, some 23,000 people remain isolated in 225 eastern communities where more than one week of heavy snow has blocked roads and wreaked havoc on the rail network.
Honduran prison inmate lights own bed on fire, kills 356
CENTRAL AMERICA
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — A fire started by an inmate tore through an aging and severely overcrowded Honduran prison, burning and suffocating inmates in their locked cells and killing as many as 356 people in one of the world's deadliest prison fires in a century, authorities said Wednesday.
The local governor, a former prison employee, told reporters that an inmate called her moments before the fire and said he was going to set the 1940s-era facility on fire and kill everyone inside.
Survivors told investigators that an unidentified inmate screamed "We will all die here!" as he lit fire to his bedding late Tuesday night in the prison in the central town of Comayagua.
The blaze spread within minutes, killing about 100 inmates in their cells as firefighters struggled to find officials who had keys. Comayagua fire department spokesman Josue Garcia said.
"We couldn't get them out because we didn't have the keys and couldn't find the guards who had them," Garcia said.
Six drowned after trying to seek refuge in a water tank
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Soldiers run during clashes with the relatives of inmates after a deadly prison fire in Comayagua, Honduras, 90 miles (140 kilometers) north of the capital, Tegucigala, Honduras, early Wednesday Feb. 15. At least 300 inmates were killed and 21 are injured, according to authorities.
inside the prison. Other prisoners were set free by guards but died from the flames or smoke as they tried to flee into the fields surrounding the facility, where prisoners grow corn and beans on a state-run farm for sale in the neighboring town.
Ron Paul video alters war views for veteran
Political Fiber.com
Army veteran David Conway first heard about Ron Paul in 2009, after an improvised explosive device abruptly ended his second tour in Iraq that July.
Conway spent the next six months recovering from a broken right leg, a severed tendon in his left ankle and shrapnel wounds across his body. Bedridden and disillusioned with the war, he spent most of his time browsing the Internet and watching YouTube videos.
"I felt like I had certain beliefs about the war but I never really expressed them," said Conway, who's now a freshman at the University of Kansas. "As a solider I was expected to support it."
That all changed when Conway came across a video clip of Paul. He was soon obsessed with the libertarian philosophies championed by the U.S representative from Texas, connecting most with his anti-war beliefs.
Conway estimates he has since watched more than 200 videos of Paul, one of the four remaining Republican presidential candidates.
"It became addicting," he said. "I realized there was this whole movement behind Ron Paul, and I wanted to become a part of it."
Paul's grassroots movement — led by an army of college-aged volunteers — has helped him sweep the GOP youth vote in the first four of five primaries and caucuses. Florida was the only state where 18- to 29-year-old voters didn't favored the 76-year-old Paul, according to entrance and exit polls. Polls weren't taken for the most recent contests in Missouri, Colorado, Minnesota and Maine.
Under Conway's leadership here in Kansas, the KU chapter of Youth for Ron Paul has recruited 1,649 supporters — more than any other school in the county.
ROCK CHALK, RON PAUL
In 2008, Paul was one of the most visible candidates on campus thanks to a small group of passionate student organizers. Though many of those students have since graduated, they planted the seed for today's campaign.
About a dozen students attend the chapter's weekly meeting in a small room in the Kansas Union.
Conway, the chapter's president,
has become one of Paul's most fervent supporters in Kansas. He and four of his friends drove to Iowa during winter break to volunteer for Paul's campaign leading up to the state's caucus. With help from hundreds of like-minded students, Paul won 21.4 percent of the vote and came in a close third.
Edward King, Paul's national youth director, said young people have since become a vital component of the campaign. Youth for Ron Paul has organized more than 525 chapters and registered nearly 29,000 people, 4,000 more than it did in 2008.
"And the campaign is just getting started," King said. "We expect it to grow even more as the momentum builds."
YOUTH SUPPORT
At a time when voter enthusiasm for Republican candidates remains lackluster, Paul's rivals could learn a lot from his success with young people, said Peter Levine, the director of Tufts University's Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. His ability to connect with college-aged voters is no small achievement for a candidate many pundits have written off as the GOP's eccentric uncle.
"If you can organize a small, coherent, passionate sub-culture, you can have a big impact," Levine said. "You can change the public discourse if you're skillful at asserting yourself in that kind of way."
Paul's popularity with young people may be most evident online. "Kansas for Ron Paul 2012," his Facebook page for the state, boasts nearly 900 likes. No other candidate has more than 350.
That so many young people are rallying around Paul's anti-establishment rhetoric says much about a generation jaded by a fractured political system and a dismal economy. A survey by Harvard University's Institute of Politics found that 52 percent
of millennials believe the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction.
But that doesn't mean candidates can afford to ignore them.
"It's the biggest generation we've ever seen in America and the biggest generation in the world," said Trey Grayson, director of the institute. "Those campaigns that don't adapt to what the millennial generation wants to see in candidates are going to have a hard time winning."
After Barack Obama won 66 percent of the youth vote in 2008, his popularity with millennials has steadily waned from 60 percent last February to 48 percent today, according to the Harvard survey.
Many of Paul's young backers are ex-Obama supporters. Others identify themselves as libertarians in the traditional sense: fiscally conservative and socially liberal. And some are single-issue voters who've attached themselves to one of Paul's radical platforms, such as legalizing drugs or abolishing the Federal Reserve.
Together they say they've found hope in Paul's ideological consistency and political authenticity.
"Even if Ron Paul doesn't win, he's going to make dramatic change in the political system," Conway said. "He's building a movement. He's not just running for president."
— By Michael Holtz michael@politicalfiber.com
RON PAUL'S IMPACT ON STUDENTS
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CHRIS BRONSON/KANSAN
David Conway, a freshman for Lawrence, speaks with and passes out fliers of information to students interested in presidential candidate Ron Paul Wednesday afternoon at the Kansas Union.
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