THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
MONDAY OCTOBER 23, 2007
MONDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2007
NEWS
5A
NATION
Louisiana chooses youngest governor
BY MELINDA DESLATTE ASSOCIATED PRESS
BATON ROUGE, La. — U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal easily defeated 11 opponents and became the state's first nonwhite governor since Reconstruction, decades after his parents moved to the state from India to pursue the American dream.
Jindal, a 36-year-old Republican, will be the nation's youngest governor. He had 53 percent of the vote with 625,036 votes with about 92 percent of the vote tallied. It was more than enough to win Saturday's election outright and avoid a Nov. 17 runoff.
"My mom and dad came to this country in pursuit of the American dream. And guess what happened. They found the American dream to be alive and well right here in Louisiana," he said to cheers and applause at his victory party.
His nearest competitors.
Democrat Walter Boasso with 208,690 votes or 18 percent;
Independent John Georges had 167,477 votes or 14 percent;
Democrat Foster Campbell had 151,101 or 13 percent. Eight candidates divided the rest.
"I'm asking all of our supporters to get behind our new governor," Georges said in a concession speech.
The Oxford-educated Jindal had lost the governor's race four years ago to Gov. Kathleen Blanco. He won a congressional seat in conservative suburban New Orleans a year later but was widely believed to have his eye on the governor's mansion.
Blanco opted not to run for reelection after she was widely blamed for the state's slow response to hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005
"My administration has begun readying for this change and we look forward to helping with a
smooth transition," she said in a prepared statement. "I want to thank the people of Louisiana for the past four years, though there is still much work to do in my last few months as your governor."
Jindal, who takes office in January, pledged to fight corruption and rid the state of those "feeding at the public trough," revisiting a campaign theme.
"They can either go quietly or they can go loudly, but either way, they will go," he said, adding that he would call the Legislature into special session to address ethics reform.
Political analysts said Jindal built support as a sort of "buyer's remorse" from people who voted for Blanco last time and later had second thoughts. Blanco was widely criticized for the state's response to Hurricane Katrina.
"I think the Jindal camp, almost explicitly, (wanted) to cast it this way: If you were able to revote, who would you vote for?" said Pearson Cross, a University of Louisiana at Lafayette political scientist.
Jindal has held a strong lead in the polls since the field of candidates became settled nearly two months ago.
The race was one of the highest-spending in Louisiana history. Jindal alone raised $11 million, and Georges poured about $10 million of his personal wealth into his campaign war chest while Boasso plugged in nearly $5 million of his own cash.
In India, Jindal's family members were going to celebrate with the traditional Punjabi folk dance called bhangra.
"We're very proud that he has reached such a high position in the United States," said Subhash Jindal, a cousin who runs a pharmacy in the Jindal family's hometown in Maler Kotla in northern Punjab state.
Museum lets visitors make exhibit
SCIENCE
BY DYLAN SANDS
dsands@kansan.com
Lions and tigers and bears, and masstodons and meteors and moose! Oh my!
The University of Kansas Natural History Museum invited the public to bring in their own archeological finds for examination Sunday.
"What on Earth? Rocks, Fossils and Meteorites" gave visitors a chance to show off their own discoveries while they browsed other finds on display at the museum. Some displays included fossils of extinct bears, large cats and fossils of "sea monsters," dinosaurs that swam
through Kansas when it was under water millions of years ago.
Ali Nabavizadeh, Olathe junior, helped examine objects at the vertebrate table. He said most of the objects brought in that afternoon were run-of-the-mill, with one exception.
"We've had a lot of moose bones come in and lots of bison bones" he said. "But one guy brought in a mastodon tibia."
According to the Illinois State Museum Web site, the mastodon was an elephant-like animal that often reached 10 feet tall and weighed four to six tons. It roamed parts of North America until its extinction
11,000 years ago. The mastodon tibia brought in Sunday was found in the Kansas River.
Katherine Loeck/KANSAN
Most of the fossils had been discovered in or along the banks of the Kansas River. Dan Williams, Cartersville, Ga., graduate student, said the river contained more ancient fossils than many people realized.
"It is a great concentrator of bones," he said.
Williams was on hand to examine a fossil brought in by Lawrence resident David Unekis. Unekis said his wife found the dark brown, circular bone along the Kansas River during a canoe trip ten years ago.
"We've found cow bones and stuff like that before, but now they're telling us this came from an extinct moose," Unekis said.
The Natural History Museum displays a saber-toothed tiger skull in Dyche Hall. The exhibit "What on Earth? Fossils, Rocks and Meteorites" ran Sunday afternoons.
The fossil had distinct markings that led Williams to identify it as part of a stag-moose skull. The now extinct stag-moose resembled cross between an elk and moose but with complex antlers.
Katherine Loeck/KANSAN
Several visitors brought in what they assumed were meteorites. Randall Van Schmus, retired KU professor of geology, said most of the objects visitors thought were meteorites were actually pieces of iron ore and other industrial metals.
"We've got a lot of junk," he said.
He said one person did bring in a possible meteorite.
"Most of the time people think they have a meteorite, 98 percent
Sofa Dominguez, 7-year-old Lawrence resident, explores Kansas plant fossils in Dyche Hall. The Natural History Museum presented an exhibit that allowed visitors to get their fossils examined on Sunday.
of them are wrong," he said. "I'm 99 percent sure I did find one meteorite today."
He said the meteorite had been in the finder's family for generations.
Van Schmus said that in 40 years of examining such objects, he had found only four authentic meteorites.
"One a decade, that's about par for the course," he said with a laugh.
Edited by Luke Morris
COUNTRY
Ladybugs come to rescue battle apartment pests
NEW YORK — It sounds like a horror movie: 720,000 ladybugs on the attack in Manhattan.
In this real life story, however, the red-and-black bugs have been unleashed on the 80-acre grounds of one of New York's biggest apartment complexes with a mission: eat pests infesting the neatly landscaped property.
The ladybugs from Bozeman.
Mont., arrived at the Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village complex on Manhattan's East Side on Thursday afternoon, packed in boxes shipped by a natural gardening company.
From mesh bags filled with wood shavings, groundskeepers scattered them in clusters of 72,000 per box.The ladybugs quickly took to the skies of the 80-acre rental complex.
In the next days and weeks, they will crawl into plants, flowers and shrubs in search of insects whose
small attracts them — soft-bodied, leaf-sucking aphids and mites.
Buying the bugs means the complex's owner, Tishman Speyer, can avoid using chemical insecticides.
"In most cases, we reach for a can of pesticide — and we kill not only the 'bad guys', but the 'good guys'," said Eric Vinje, owner of Planet Natural, which supplied the pest-killers for Manhattan.
"All we're doing here is putting more of the 'good guys' to tip the scale," he said.
On its Web site, the company offers "Ladybugs — Free Shipping!" at $16.50 for 2,000.
This species of ladybug — Hippodamia convergens — converges in the wilderness, where they are harvested.
Apartment residents need not worry about confronting swarms of ladybugs, since this is not the Asian ladybug typically spotted in urban areas. "This one is not prone to entering homes," Vinie said.
Associated Press
© 2007 ERNST & YOUNG LLP
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