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8A NEWS
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 29 2008
MEDICINE KU Med Center to offer acupuncture next month
Patients seeking alternatives to western medicine will soon have more options at the University of Kansas Medical Center's Integrative Medicine Clinic.
Next month, the clinic will begin offering acupuncture therapy. In January, it will offer yoga classes and massage therapy. Although the Med Center already offers yoga and massage, including them in the Integrative Medicine clinic will give patients a more centralized outlet for treatment.
The program, which began with one person in 1998, has consolidated its offices into a single floor of the Med Center's Sudler Building in June.
The clinic already uses natur-
opathic treatments, nutritional counseling and intravenous therapy with doses of ascorbic acid. The intravenous treatments are part of an ongoing research program.
Garrett Sullivan, a medical doctor and research fellow with the clinic, said he typically saw patients two days a week. He worked with patients for about an hour at a time, as opposed to the standard 15 minutes that doctors consult with their patients during a traditional office visit.
"Being trained as a medical doctor, I find out what their symptoms and chief complaints are, but my therapy won't be focused toward pharmaceuticals, and that's part of what sets us apart," Sullivan said.
Ryan McGeeney
Charges may be filed in Uzi gun case
NATIONAL
ASSOCIATED PRESS
BOSTON — A prosecutor said Tuesday he was investigating whether criminal charges should be filed after an 8-year-old boy accidentally killed himself while firing an Uzi submachine gun at a gun fair in western Massachusetts.
Christopher Bizill of Ashford, Conn., shot himself in the head when he lost control of the 9mm micro submachine gun as it recoiled while he was firing at a pumpkin. Police have said the shooting at the Machine Gun Shoot and Firearms Expo at the Westfield Sportsman's Club on Sunday was an accident.
Hampden County District
Attorney William Bennett said he was investigating whether the gun fair violated the state's firearms law by allowing the boy to fire the machine gun, and also whether it was "a reckless or wanton act to allow an 8-year-old to use a fully loaded automatic weapon."
"At this point in the investigation, I have found no lawful authority which allows an 8 year old to possess or fire a machine gun," Bennett said in a statement.
Daniel Vice, senior attorney with the Washington-based Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said his interpretation was that Massachusetts law specifically prohibited "furnishing a machine gun
to any person under 18."
"It is unconscionable that the gun fair allowed and encouraged young children to fire machine guns," he said in a statement.
On Monday, Westfield police Lt. Hipolito Nunez said it was legal in Massachusetts for children to fire a weapon if they had permission from a parent or legal guardian and they were supervised by a properly certified and licensed instructor.
The section of the statute that mentions that exception, however, only lists rifles, shotguns and ammunition — and is silent on the use of machine guns.
Bennett did not return calls seeking additional comment.
The boy was attending the gun fair with his father and brother Colin, a sixth-grader. His father, Charles Bizil, said Christopher had experience firing handguns and rifles, but Sunday was his first time firing an automatic weapon. A certified instructor was with the boy at the time.
On Monday, Bizilj told The Boston Globe he was about 10 feet behind his son and reaching for his camera when the weapon fired. He said his family avoided larger weapons, but he let his son try the Uzi because it was a small weapon with little recoil. The family did not return messages for comment Tuesday.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Pedestrians walk by the Christian Science Church in Boston. A century after it began publication, The Christian Science Monitor is going its daily print edition to focus on posting news online. The international newspaper, started in Boston by the founder of the Christian Science Church, plans to print its final daily editions in April. After that, it will print only a weekend edition.
NATIONAL
The Christian Science Monitor to abandon weekday print editions
ASSOCIATED PRESS
BOSTON — The Christian Science Monitor said Tuesday it would become the first national newspaper to drop its daily print edition and focus on publishing online, succumbing to the financial pressure squeezing its industry harder than ever.
Come April, the Boston-based general-interest paper — founded in 1908 and the winner of seven Pulitzer Prizes — will print only a weekend edition after struggling financially for decades, its editor announced Tuesday.
The Monitor's circulation has fallen from a peak of 223,000 in 1970 to about 50,000 now while its online traffic has soared. The newspaper gets about 5 million page-views per month, compared
with about 4 million five years ago and 1 million a decade ago.
The Monitor was one of the first newspapers in the country to put content online, beginning in 1995, when correspondent David Rohde was taken prisoner in Bosnia.
"Obviously, this is going to help with our costs, but it also enables us to put much more emphasis on the Web and basically put our reporting assets and our editorial assets where we think growth will be in a very tough industry in the future, which we think is the Web," said Editor John Yemma.
Cutting print editions also will help the paper reduce its dependence on sizable subsidies from its owner, the First Church of Christ, Scientist, which now provides more than half its operating budget, Yemma said.
Yemma said the move to "Webfirst" publishing will likely result in some job cuts, but it is unclear how many.
The Monitor is known for its in-depth international reporting, particularly in the Middle East.
In 2006, till Carroll, a freelance reporter for the Monitor, was kidnapped in Baghdad and released safely after nearly three months in captivity. Carroll, who was made a staff writer while she was still being held hostage but has since left the newspaper, described her ordeal in an 11-part series published in the Monitor.
Like many other newspapers, it has suffered as more people get their news from the Internet — which offers newspapers much less revenue even when it brings many more readers.