THE UNIVERSITY DARY KANSAN MONDAY, MARCH 31, 2008
NEWS
9A
ELECTION
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Democratic presidential hopeful, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., campaigns at Sara's Diner in Fort Wayne, Ind., Friday. With women the majority of Democratic voters nationwide, strategists warn of damage to the party's chances in November if female voters sense Clinton was unfairly muscled out by a mostly male party establishment.
Females may hold party's fate
BY BETH FOUHY ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW ALBANY, Ind. — Debra Starks has heard the calls for Hillary Rodham Clinton to quit the presidential race, and she's not happy about it.
The 53-year-old Wal-Mart clerk, so bedecked with Clinton campaign buttons most days that friends call her "Button Lady," thinks sexism is playing a role in efforts to push the New York senator from the race. Starks wants Clinton to push back.
"The way I look at it, she's a strong woman and she needs to stay in there." Starks said at a Clinton rally. "She needs to fight. If you want to be president, you have to fight for what you want. If she stays in there and does what she's supposed to do, I think she'll be on her ..."
A m i d m o u n t i n g calls from top Democrats for Clinton to step aside and clear the path for rival Barack Obama, strategists are warning of damage to the party's
"I don't think it's up to our campaign or any individual to tell Hillary Clinton or their campaign when that is." Kerry, the 2004 Democratic nominee, said on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday. "But there will be, I think, a consensus about it, and I think it's going to occur over these next weeks."
"Women will indeed be upset if it appears people are trying to push Hillary Clinton out of the way."
To be sure, Clinton campaign officials concede her path to winning the nomination is not at all clear.
chances in November if women
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson on Sunday called Obama's lead all but insmountable, while Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry said the contest would be reaching "a point of judgment" very soon.
She almost certainly will end the primary season narrowly trailing Obama in the popular vote and among pledged delegates unless the nullified primaries in Florida and Michigan are counted — an unlikely scenario at best. But Obama is unlikely to end the race with the 2,024 pledged delegates needed to win outright either, meaning the
in November if women — who make up the majority of Democratic voters nationwide, but especially the older, white working-class women who've long formed the former first lady's base — sense a mostly male party establishment is unfairly muscling Clinton out of the race.
Other Obama supporters have echoed that view while stopping short of asking Clinton to withdraw.
"Women will indeed be upset if it appears people are trying to push Hillary Clinton out of the way," said Carol Fowler, the South Carolina Democratic Party chair who is backing Obama. "If you are going to ask her to withdraw, you'd better be making a strong case for it — both to the candidate and the public."
Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy last week became the first leading Democrat to openly call on Clinton to abandon her bid and back Obama, a sentiment shared by many activists worried that a drawn-out nominating contest only bolsters Republican nominee-inwaiting John McCain.
CAROL FOWLER
South Carolina
Democratic Party Chairwoman
nominee will be determined by roughly 800 "superdelegates" — elected officials and party insiders who can back whichever candidate they want.
Most observers believe the
superdelegates are unlikely to risk an intraparty uproar — not to mention the ire of black voters thrilled to support a black candidate — by siding with Clinton if Obama maintains his lead among pledged delegates.
But Clinton advisers believe many superdelegates remain at least persuadable, due in no small part to the influence of women voters on the party and in the general election.
"My e-mail is bursting with women who are furious, and it's grown in the last week," said Ann Lewis, Clinton's director of women's outreach and a longtime Democratic activist.
" These women are the volunteer infrastructure of the Democratic Party who've been proud to support Democratic officials for what they believe
36 percent among women. She beat him by 54 percent to 45 percent among women in Ohio, an important general election battleground state.
Obama, in turn, has walloped Clinton among men in nearly every state. But he's prevailed among women in just a handful of places, including his home state of Illinois and states with large black populations.
and stand for," Lewis said. "They are very angry that people they worked for so hard would be so dismissive of Hillary and, by extension, of them and what they value."
For his part, the Illinois senator — whose seemingly disrespectful crack of "You're likable enough, Hillary" during a debate with Clinton may have cost him the New Hampshire primary — said Saturday he did not believe Clinton should end her campaign.
Clinton insists she's in it to the end, saying a "spirited contest" is good for the party and ultimately will produce a stronger nominee.
Indeed, the gender gap in most of the primaries thus far has been stark.
Nine more primaries follow, ending June 3.
"My attitude is Senator Clinton can run as long as she wants," Obama said in Pennsylvania, which holds its primary April 22.
In California, Clinton bested Obama by a margin of 59 percent to
Campaigning across the state Saturday, Clinton was greeted by large, heavily female crowds that shouted "You go, sister!" and "We've got your back!" in support of her pioneering candidacy. Indiana votes May 6.
"There are millions of reasons to continue this race; people in Pennsylvania, Indiana and North Carolina, and all of the contests yet to come," she told reporters Friday in Hammond, Ind. "This is a very close race and clearly I believe strongly that everyone should have their voices heard and their votes counted."
Marie Wilson, president of the White House Project that trains women to run for office, noted that women typically have rallied around Clinton when she's appeared most
"Women have always been asked to step aside if it was somehow for the greater good."
MARIE WILSON White House project president
Obama in Iowa.
vulnerable
— from the revelations of her husband's dalliance with White House intern Monica Lewinsky to January's New Hampshire primary after the bruising loss to
"Women have always been asked to step aside if it was somehow for the greater good. In this case, Clinton, and a lot of her female supporters, clearly feel that she would make the better president and that it would not be for the greater good for her to step aside," Wilson said.
》 ENVIRONMENT
Lights out for Earth Hour
The Montreal skyline is seen a couple of minutes after 8 p.m. on Saturday. The environmental group WWF urged governments, businesses and households to turn back to candle power for at least 60 minutes wherever they were during a worldwide campaign to highlight the waste of electricity and the threat of climate change.
BY CARYN ROUSSEAU
ASSOCIATED PRESS
ASSOCIATED PRESS
CHICAGO — From the Sydney Opera House to Rome's Colosseum to the Sears Tower's famous antennas in Chicago, floodlit icons of civilization went dark Saturday for Earth Hour, a worldwide campaign to highlight the threat of climate change.
"What's amazing is that it's transcending political boundaries and happening in places like China, Vietnam, Papua New Guinea," said Andy Ridley, executive director of Earth Hour. "It really seems to have resonated with anybody and everybody."
The environmental group WWF urged governments, businesses and households to turn back to candle power for at least 60 minutes starting at 8 p.m. where they were.
The campaign began last year in Australia, and traveled this year from the South Pacific to Europe to North America in cadence with the setting of the sun.
Earth Hour officials hoped 100 million people would turn off their nonessential lights and electronic goods for the hour. Electricity plants produce greenhouse gases that fuel climate change.
In Chicago, lights on more than 200 downtown buildings were dimmed Saturday night, including the stripe of white light around the top of the John Hancock Center. The red-and-white marquee outside Wrigley Field also went dark.
"There's a widespread belief that somehow people in the United States don't understand that this is a problem that we're lazy and wedded to our lifestyles. (Earth Hour) demonstrates that that is wrong." Richard Moss, a member of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the climate change vice president for WWF, said in Chicago on Saturday.
Workers in Phoenix turned out the lights in all downtown city-
owned buildings for one hour. Darkened restaurants glowed with candlight in San Francisco while the Golden Gate Bridge, Coit Tower and other landmarks extinguished lights for an hour.
New Zealand and Fiji were first out of the starting blocks this year. And in Sydney, Australia — where an estimated 2.2 million observed the blackout last year — the city's two architectural icons, the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, faded to black against a dramatic backdrop of a lightning storm.
Lights also went out at the famed Wat Arun Buddhist temple in Bangkok, Thailand; shopping and cultural centers in Manila, Philippines; several castles in Sweden and Denmark; the parliament building in Budapest, Hungary; a string of landmarks in Warsaw, Poland; and both London Castle Hall and Canterbury Cathedral in England.
Greece, an hour ahead of most of Europe, was the first on the continent to mark Earth Hour. On the isle of Aegina, near Athens, much of its population marched by candlelight to the port. Parts of Athens itself, including the floodlit city hall, also turned to black.
In Ireland, where environmentalists are part of the coalition government, lights-out orders went out for scores of government buildings, bridges and monuments in more than a dozen cities and towns.
But the international banks and brokerages of Dublin's financial district blazed away with light, illuminating floor after empty floor of desks and idling computers.
"The banks should have embraced this wholeheartedly and they didn't. But it's a start. Maybe next year," said Cathy Flanagan, an Earth Hour organizer in Dublin.
Ireland's more than 7,000 pubs elected not to take part — in part because of the risk that Saturday night revelers could end up smashing glasses, falling down stairs, or setting themselves on fire with candles.
Likewise, much of Europe including France, Germany, Spain and European Union institutions planned nothing to mark Earth Hour.
DEATH
Internet search engine Google lent its support to Earth Hour by blackening its normally white home page and challenging visitors: "We've turned the lights out. Now it's your turn."
BY RICHARD PYLE ASSOCIATED PRESS
New York Times journalist dies
NEW YORK — Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country's murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film "The Killing Fields," died Sunday. He was 65.
Dith died at a New Jersey hospital Sunday morning of pancreatic cancer, according to Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times. Dith had been diagnosed almost three months ago.
Dith was working as an interpreter and assistant for Schanberg in Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital, when the Vietnam War reached its chaotic end in April 1975 and both countries were taken over by Communist forces.
Schanberg helped Dith's family get out but was forced to leave his friend behind after the capital fell; they were not reunited until Dith escaped four and a half years later. Eventually, Dith resettled in the United States and went to work as a photographer for the Times.
It was Dith himself who coined the term "killing fields" for the horrifying clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims he encountered on his desperate journey to freedom.
"That was the phrase he used from the very first day, during our wondrous reunion in the refugee camp," Schanberg said later.
The regime of Pol Pot, bent on turning Cambodia back into a strictly agrarian society, and his Communist zealots were blamed for the deaths of nearly 2 million of Cambodia's 7 million people.
With thousands being executed simply for manifesting signs of intellect or Western influence — even wearing glasses or wristwatches — Dith survived by masquerading as an uneducated peasant, toiling in the fields and subsisting on as little as a mouthful of rice a day, and whatever small animals he could catch.
After Dith moved to the U.S., he became a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and founded the Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project, dedicated to educating people on the history of the Khmer Rouge regime.
He was "a journalist and hero," New York Times executive editor Bill Keller said in a letter to the staff Sunday. He added: "that last word is not one I use lightly."
He was "the most patriotic American photographer I've ever met, always talking about how he loves America," said Associated Press photographer Paul Sakuma, who knew Dith through their work with the Asian American
ASSOCIATED PRESS
New York Times journalist Dith Pran died Sunday. The Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country's murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film "The Killing Fields," died Sunday. He was 65.
Journalists Association.
Schanberg described Dith's ordeal and salvation in a 1980 magazine article titled "The Death and Life of Dith Pran." Schanberg's reporting from Phnom Penh had earned him a Pulitzer Prize in 1976.
"Pran was a true reporter, a fighter for the truth and for his people," Schanberg said. "When cancer struck, he fought for his life again.
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