THURSDAY,APRIL17,2003
NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN = 7A
Research focuses on literacy in Kansas City
By Amy Potter apotter@kansan.com Kansan staff writer
She may be a Kansas City, Kan., native, but Kate Hays' research on literacy issues taught her about the city's literacy problems.
Kate Hays and five other students did research along the Kansas-Missouri state line for a course in the public service and community leadership minor.
Their study specifically dealt with workplace literacy in the Kansas City metropolitan area.
Hays said though she grew up
in Kansas City, she was unaware the city had literacy problems with English as a second language and special education. The students' work focused on groups that provided literacy services and how businesses used those services.
To conduct their research the students teamed up with Kansas City Consensus last semester. The Consensus works to identify and research critical issues in the city, said Ginger Bohachick, the organization's executive director.
This isn't the first time the Consensus has worked with students
The students interviewed 40 literacy service providers; two main ideas emerged from these interviews.
bohachick said the partnership with the KU students was successful.
They found literacy service providers needed to cooperate more, and they found businesses didn't understand the length of time need to become literate.
Nels Lindahl, Overland Park senior who worked in the study said a regional literacy center might be more effective in uniting literacy programs. This center
would address literacy issues ranging from learning disabilities to immigrants.
Lindahl said businesses came to literacy programs to help their employees, but they expected fast results. Lindahl said literacy was a difficult task that could take hundreds of hours to achieve.
"Currently there is not a very effective flow of money," Lindahl said. "There are so many organizations competing for the same revenue streams. None of them can get together."
In late May, the group's findings will be presented to the greater Kansas City community in
the form of a written report. Kansas City Consensus will also host community meetings with literacy groups and local businesses to come up with solutions, Bohachick said.
Ray Davis, public administration associate professor and project adviser said most people didn't realize one out of five Americans have some kind of literacy issue.
He said it was important to fix this problem because jobs required higher levels of literacy in today's economy.
- Edited by Amber Byarlay
U.S., North Korea attempt talks to end standoff
The Associated Press
SEOUL, South Korea — The United States and North Korea will try to resolve their six-month standoff over Pyongyang's suspected nuclear weapons program in talks arranged by China, the communist North's closest ally, U.S. and South Korean officials said yesterday.
The Beijing talks could happen as early as next week, officials said. Japanese media, citing unnamed sources, said they would start April 23.
In Washington, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the agreement to hold talks was good news but added that an early breakthrough was not in the offing.
"We believe this is the beginning of a long, intense process of discussion," Powell said in an interview with Associated Press Television News.
"We will lay out clearly our concerns about their nuclear weapons development programs and other weapons of mass
destruction, of their proliferation activities, missile programs," among other issues, he said.
China will participate in the discussions, the first between Washington and Pyongyang since U.S. officials said in October that North Korea admitted running a clandestine nuclear weapons program.
Washington has called for multilateral talks to resolve the issue, and renewed its promise yesterday to try to bring other nations especially South Korea and Japan into the talks.
Pyongyang earlier insisted on negotiations only with Washington, but agreed last week to allow China at the table.
The talks likely will cool tensions on the Korean Peninsula, roiled for months by sabre-rattling rhetoric from North Korea and massive, joint U.S.-South Korean military drills.
Powell said the mood on the peninsula is one of relative quiet, adding that this could auger well for the talks.
"We are hopeful that nothing will happen that would make the political environment difficult," he said.
As for the North's penchant for delivering inflammatory statements, Powell said, "They seem to be not more provocative than usual. By the standards of normal discourse between us and the DPRK, it is relatively calm."
Yet there is a sense of urgency about the situation because North Korea, already believed to have one or two nuclear weapons, could extract enough plutonium for several more bombs within months if it begins reprocessing existing stocks of spent nuclear fuel.
North Korea has accused the United States of planning to invade once the war in Iraq is over. President Bush — who once described North Korea as part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and Iraq — has said he wants to resolve the nuclear crisis peacefully, but he has not ruled out a military solution.
North Korea has a history of
engaging in tough bargaining in prolonged negotiations.
Powell has said the quick U.S. military success in Iraq may have influenced Pyongyang's thinking on opening diplomatic discussions.
"The one thing that is absolutely clear, is that at whatever level it starts, and with whatever attendance, it has to ultimately encompass the views and thoughts of all the neighbors in the region." Powell has said.
In Seoul, South Korean Foreign Minister Yoon Young-kwan welcomed the talks but demanded that the meetings be expanded in the future to include Japan, Russia and South Korea. Seoul and Tokyo are considered key donors for the aid package that likely would be part of any deal with the impoverished North.
"It is of paramount importance that talks begin to lay the foundation for a peaceful solution to this problem," Yoon said. "But we won't share the burden resulting from any talks that we do not participate in."
Japanese Prime Minister junichiro Koizumi welcomed multilateral talks.
"It's good for talks to begin; the countries involved will work with North Korea," he said. "This is something Japan desires, too."
China first proposed the three-way talks in March, and the United States accepted the offer after consulting with South Korea, Yoon said. North Korea agreed last week.
South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun said he believed North Korea "will take the road of reform and openness, if economic aid and its political system are guaranteed."
Chinese diplomats repeatedly have delayed a discussion of the crisis in the U.N. Security Council. Last week, after agreeing to discuss the topic in the council, China blocked a motion by Washington to condemn North Korea.
China's involvement in the talks is a victory for the Bush administration.
College president resigns
BOISE, Idaho - The president of the University of Idaho announced his resignation yesterday following the release of an audit critical of financial decisions concerning a $136 million building project.
Bob Hoover, the university's head for nearly seven years, said the resignation would take effect June 30. Hoover, 61, is on administrative leave while he recovers from prostate cancer surgery earlier this month.
University Place a planned complex of offices, classrooms, laboratories and retail space in downtown Boise has been dogged by questions over money loaned by the school to the University of Idaho Foundation, which has funded the project.
Critics contend that loaning public money to the foundation _ a quasi-private group
_ was improper because it mixed taxpayer dollars with private funds and provided no control or accountability.
"It is clear that I did not pursue my oversight of this project aggressively enough," Hoover said in a statement.
The independent audit also blamed a university vice president who controlled accounts for both the university and the foundation for shaky financial decisions.
"(Foundation) funding authorization was obtained after the fact, contracts were signed after the fact with retroactive dating," the report said.
Anti-terror tactics under fire by critics
The Associated Press
VIENNA, Austria - Antiterrorism measures introduced since the Sept. 11 attacks are severely curtailing human rights and civil liberties in much of the world, a prominent watchdog group said yesterday.
The measures often threaten freedoms because they are too broad, too vague and applied too arbitrarily, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights contended in its report.
"We are accomplishing the goal that (terrorists) are allegedly pursuing," said Aaron Rhodes, director of the Vienna-based federation.
Limited breaches of human rights would be expected in an emergency situation, such as the period immediately following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Rhodes said. But governments in the post-Sept. 11 era have failed to "minimize the erosion of rights," he added.
"Terrorist suspects have rights also," Rhodes said.
"We are accomplishing the goal that (terrorists) are allegedly pursuing."
Aaron Rhodes director of the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights
Since Sept. 11, the report says, countries have increased powers of law enforcement and intelligence institutions; introduced measures allowing authorities to intercept private communications and search homes without safeguards; tightened border controls; introduced firmer asylum and immigration laws; and authorized registration and profiling schemes that appear to target certain groups because of their race, ethnicity or religion.
Aging disorder linked to mutation in gene
The group studied measures in 55 countries that are members of the Organization of Security and Cooperation in Europe a security organization which also includes the United States.
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON - A rare disorder that turns children into old people and often causes them to die in their teens has been linked to a single genetic mutation, a finding that may help science learn more about normal aging as well.
The disorder, called Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, is caused by a single "misspelling" or misplaced DNA molecule within the human genome that contains some three billion DNA units, said Dr. Francis Collins, head of the National Human Genome Research Institute and the senior author of a report appearing this week in the journal Nature.
Victims of progeria appear normal at birth, but by 18 months begin to develop symptoms of accelerated aging.
The skin takes on the appearance of the very old, bones become fragile and most of the children are bald by the age of four.
The children never grow much taller than three feet. Their internal organs also quickly age and death is usually caused by heart disease or stroke at an average age of 13.
Even as teenagers, said Dr. W
Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome, a rare disorder that turns children into old people and often causes them to die in their teens, has been linked to a single genetic mutation, a finding that may help science learn more about normal aging. The disorder is caused by a misplaced DNA molecule within the human genome that contains some three billion DNA units.
Ted Brown, the children with progeria will weigh only 30 to 35 pounds.
Children with disorder, however, tend to have above-average intelligence, said Brown, a coauthor who has studied progeria for 20 years at the New York State Institution for Basic Research in Development Disabilities.
John Tacket, a 15-year-old from Bay City, Mich., who has progeria, said at the news conference that he was just a regular guy who is "very content" even though he knows his disease is fatal.
Tacket, who stands about three feet high, is a ninth grader who is a whiz at math and an expert pool player. He has a job as a cashier at
Progeria affects only about one baby per 4 million to 8 million worldwide, according to the Progeria Research Foundation.
The disease was first identified in 1886, but Brown said it has been difficult to study because "there are only a handful or so alive at one time." He said about one patient with progeria is born each year in the U.S.
A scarf covered his bald head.
But angina, a symptom of advancing heart disease usually seen in people in their 60s and 70s, is already causing him to limit some physical activities.
Collins and his co-authors found the mutation on a gene called lamin A in DNA specimens from 18 of 20 progeria patients. A similar study, appearing in the journal Science, found the gene mutation in two progeria patients.
a Bay City restaurant.
Lamin A, or LMNA, has already been linked to six other diseases. The mutation and the effect is slightly different, on a molecular basis, in each of the diseases.
Linking LMNA to aging, said Collins, means that studying the gene "may provide us with a bet-
genetic complim progeria patients a parents. He said they found 18 of the patients shared the same mutation in the LMNA gene on Chromosome 1
The flaw, he said, was a substitution of single DNA base. The amino acid guanine is switched to adenine.
"Initially, we could hardly believe that such a small substitution was the culprit," said Maria Eriksson, a researcher at the NHGRI and the first author of the study in Nature. "How could these bland-looking mutations lead to such terrible consequences?"
Collins said that only recent advances in sequencing of the human genome, or genetic structure, enabled researchers to find the misplaced amino acid.
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Collins said that disease is not genetically inherited but develops "de novo," or new, in each patient. He said there is a suggestion that the progeria gene is transferred to the embryo through a flaw in the genes of the father's sperm.
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In the study, Collins said researchers looked at the genetic compliment of 20 progeria patients and their parents.
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