8A • THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
NEWS
WEDNESDAY,FEBRUARY 19,2003
Bush turns to spirituality to help nation, draws criticism
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — President Bush, often portrayed as using a strict good-and-evil compass to navigate national issues, has always peppered his speeches with exhortations to moral and civic duty. With war, tragedy and terrorism confronting him now, his allusions to spirituality and morality seem to be increasing.
"I welcome faith to help solve the nation's deepest problems," Bush told a convention of religious broadcasters last week. Referring to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he said, "We carried our grief to the Lord Almighty in prayer."
Earlier, in his State of the Union address, he said, "The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world, it is God's gift to humanity."
Hours after the shuttle Columbia disintegrated, Bush turned to religion and a quote from the book of Isaiah to help console the nation.
"The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home." the president said.
Expressions of faith and values are familiar ground for American presidents, and this one, who became a born-again Christian in the 1980s after concluding he was drinking too much, is no exception.
Yet lately, Bush has gone beyond his usual broad remarks on the power of faith in general to use language and ideas specific to Christianity.
"I think his rhetoric implies a lack of appreciation for the vast pluralism of religion in this nation."
It is a welcome message for some, particularly the evangelical Christian conservatives whom Bush is courting as he seeks a second term. Some others are uncomfortable.
The Rev. C. Welton Gaddy Pastor and executive director of the Interfaith Alliance Foundation
"This president is using general references and, beyond that, terminology and vocabulary that come straight out of a very particular religious tradition, which is
evangelical Christianity," said the Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, a Louisiana pastor and executive director of the Interfaith Alliance Foundation, an umbrella interfaith group.
Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said Bush speeches have started sounding "more and more like a sermon in a church" and risk alienating significant chunks of his constituency.
"I think his rhetoric implies a lack of appreciation for the vast pluralism of religion in this nation," Gaddy said.
"When presidents start to become theologians on a regular basis, they begin to exclude people from their audience," Lynn said.
White House press secretary
Ari Fleischer said Bush is comfortable speaking about religion because of its importance to him personally.
"The president when he speaks, speaks in a very inclusive way, very respectful ... of the fact that we are a nation whose great strengths come from the fact that we have people of so many faiths and people who have chosen not to have any particular religious affiliation," Fleischer said.
In his State of the Union address, Bush reflected on the challenges facing the nation as it prepares for possible war:
"We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone. We do not claim to know all the ways of providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God
behind all of life and all of history. May he guide us now, and may God continue to bless the United States of America."
In Nashville, Bush praised Americans' "deep and diverse religious beliefs." But he also singled out a special place for Christianity, calling the gospel that the broadcasters share over the airwaves "words of truth."
More generally, the president has delivered several passionfilled speeches recently on behalf of his proposal to spend billions more to combat AIDS abroad. In Grand Rapids, Mich., the day after his State of the Union address, Bush said the humanitarian crisis is a chance"a moral nation cannot pass up to use its riches and know-how for good.
Columbia began break up above California
Space shuttle shed pieces for six minutes before disintegrating
The Associated Press
SPACE CENTER, Houston Space shuttle Columbia began losing pieces over the California coast, well before it disintegrated over Texas, the accident investigation board reported yesterday, confirming what astronomers and amateur skywatchers have been saying from day one.
But board member James Hallock, a physicist and chief of the Transportation Department's aviation safety division, said the fragments were probably so small they burned up before reaching the ground.
He said the conclusion that the space shuttle was shedding pieces a full six minutes before it came apart over Texas was based on images of the doomed flight. Astronomers and amateurs on the West Coast photographed and videotaped the shuttle's final minutes.
"Obviously, it would be very important to understand what those pieces are, particularly the ones that started falling off at the very beginning," because they would shed light on the earliest stages of the breakup, he said.
from the light reflected off them.
However, Hallock said that the pieces that came early did not seem to be very big, judging
"For us to find something that far back along the path, I think it's going to have to be a pretty substantial piece of the shuttle itself," he said.
Moreover, he added: "That's a lot of area to be looking. ... We have the Grand Canyon area and all of the areas of Southern California, the mountainous area and stuff like this, that even if we could home in on some of these things, it's going to be very difficult to find it. But we sure would like to see it."
In their second news conference in as many weeks, the board members also said that they are not convinced that the debris that hit the left wing shortly after liftoff on Jan. 16 was insulating foam from the external fuel tank. It is possible the debris was actually ice or a much heavier coating material beneath the foam, they said.
Hallock said the suspected breach in Columbia's left wing had to have been bigger than a pinhole, in order to allow the superheated gases surrounding the ship to penetrate the hull.
In other news:
The board said it will hold its first public hearing next week to listen to non-NASA experts who have theories about what destroyed the shuttle. The hearing will be Feb. 27, but the location has not yet been decided. The board has been criticized by
some U.S. lawmakers as being too closely tied to NASA.
"We will invite experts who are not associated with any U.S. government program who have theories or hypothesis, who have written to us or provided research documents, to express to us their opinions," said board chairman Harold Gehman Jr., a retired Navy admiral. "That way we get input ...not by any government agency."
The board split into three teams Tuesday — materials, operations and technology — and began delving into what may have caused a breach in the shuttle's left wing.
An Air Force telescope in Maui took pictures as Columbia soared toward the California coast, Gehman said. He said the images were still being analyzed and it was too soon to know whether they may hold any clues to the shuttle's demise.
Nearly 4,000 pieces of debris have been shipped to Florida's Kennedy Space Center, of which 2,600 have been identified and cataloged. Gehman said. Investigators hope to partially assemble the pieces to help them figure out what happened to the space shuttle. An additional 10,000 pieces are headed to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana and Kennedy.
represents only a tiny portion because so much of the wreckage is small, like fragments of insulation.
It is impossible to calculate how much of Columbia the recovered pieces represent, the board said. In terms of weight, it
In the more than two weeks since the tragedy, the NASA-appointed board has publicly put forth just one hypothesis: that the superheated gases surrounding the spaceship during its descent through the atmosphere penetrated the left wing.
Still a major focus of the investigation is the supposed 2 1/2pound chunk of rigid insulating foam that broke off Columbia's external fuel tank shortly after liftoff and slammed into the left wing at more than 500 mph.
NASA concluded while Columbia was still in orbit that any damage caused by the foam was slight and posed no safety threat. But engineers are now redoing their analysis to see if they made a mistake or missed something.
Air Force Maj. Gen. John Barry, a member of the investigating board, identified four previous launches, as far back as 1983, in which foam from the same part of the fuel tank struck a shuttle's thermal tiles. "We've got some backtracking to do," he said.
The board has yet to order any foam or thermal tile impact tests, Gehman said. Over the years, NASA has shot .22-caliber bullets, BB pellets and even ice at tiles, and the board wants to read up on this "enormous library of testing" first, he said.
Transplant mix-up leaves 17-year-old in critical condition
The Associated Press
DURHAM, N.C. — A 17-year-old girl who mistakenly received organs from a donor with a different blood type is not expected to live more than a few days, a family friend said yesterday.
Jesica Santillan, whose family moved to the United States from Mexico so she could get a heart and lung transplant, was in critical condition, said Richard Puff, a spokesman for Duke University Hospital.
"She's only got a couple of more days to live on this heartlung machine, and she's already experiencing damage to her kidneys," friend Mack Mahoney told ABC's Good Morning America.
The girl's own antibodies are attacking the organs, he said, and she almost died from a heart attack Feb. 10.
Duke Hospital, which did the transplant. has accepted responsibility for the error.
Jesica was suffering from a heart deformity that prevented her lungs from pumping enough oxygen into her blood. After a three-year wait, she received a transplant Feb. 7 with a heart and lungs flown in from Boston.
The organs were sent with paperwork correctly listing the donor's blood type, said Sean Fitzpatrick of the New England
Organ Bank, which sent the organs.
Speaking through an interpreter, the girl's mother, Magdalena Santillan, told Good Morning America the hospital told her they had received the same blood-type organs and that they fit exactly to her daughter's measurements.
Yet somehow, the type-A organs were transplanted into the girl with type O-positive blood.
"This was a tragic error, and we accept responsibility for our part," said Dr. William Fulkerson, chief executive of Duke University Hospital. "This is an especially sad situation since we intended this operation to save the life of a girl whose prognosis was grave."
Mahoney said Jesica would have died within six months without a transplant.
The natural antibodies most people have in their blood will try to destroy an organ from someone of a different blood type. Some hospitals have found ways of filtering the blood so that an organ from a donor of a different blood type is not rejected.
Jesica remains on the national waiting list kept by the United Network for Organ Sharing. Spokeswoman Anne Paschke said the organ procurement group cannot specifically search for a heart and lungs for Jesica.
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