565 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(10/10/08 2:09am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>The U.S. Supreme Court recently issued a ruling that child rape is a crime that does not merit the death penalty, and IU experts say the ruling narrows the scope of capital punishment. In the recent Supreme Court case of Kennedy v. Louisiana, the Court denied re-hearing the case involving the death penalty for a child rapist. On Oct. 1, the Supreme Court amended but held its initial decision on the case. Indiana is among the more than 40 states that do not have laws extending the death penalty to child rape cases.Jody Madeira, associate professor at the IU School of Law, said this lack of law might have played a role in the Court’s decision.“There are two open questions going into the Supreme Court’s hearing of Kennedy v. Louisiana,” Madeira said. “In its decision, they basically said there is not enough of a nation-wide consensus to authorize the death penalty for child rape. The majority of states that have the death penalty do not have books authorizing execution for child rapists in their state statutes.” In 1998, defendant Patrick Kennedy was convicted of raping his 8-year-old stepdaughter.Initially, Kennedy’s lawyers appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which struck down the appeal, ruling the death penalty was a suitable punishment in this case. The U.S. Supreme Court did not agree.The Court not only considers laws on the books, but also public consensus, she said.“Public ire not withstanding is not enough to demonstrate public consensus,” Madeira said. “People are angry about the decision.”Many people, such as current law school student John Keele, said they agree with the court’s decision because they believe capital punishment is an unconstitutional act.“I felt the decision was correct out of the general principle I have that the death penalty is wrong,” Keele said. “I just object to the death penalty in general.”Despite some outrage with the Court’s decision, Madeira said there are some positive aspects of the ruling. She said the court noted in the original opinion that if capital punishment were to be upheld, rapists might have less incentive to keep the child victims alive.“The other thing is that if family members know that a relative is molesting a child they might not turn their relative in for fear that they will be setting them up for the death penalty,” Madeira said. “It facilitates reporting as well.”A case like this one would take consensus across the nation for the Supreme Court to revisit the issue and likely new judges to overturn the decision.For Michael Grossberg, a professor of history and adjunct professor of law at IU, the court’s ruling was not a surprise.“It seems to me the basic message of the case is that the courts have become more and more insistent that the death penalty only be used in cases that are clearly cruel that involved murder,” Grossberg said. “This case represented a case to get beyond that by including child rape and the courts said no to that. It strikes me as part of a trend in the court, to narrow the kinds of crimes and the kinds of individuals subject to the death penalty. The decision of the court would suggest that if a law like that were passed in Indiana it wouldn’t meet constitutional muster.”And even if the court had upheld the Louisiana Supreme Court’s decision, the death penalty might not have affected the numbers of criminals or victims.“Child rapists aren’t going to be deterred by punishment,” Keele said. “For child rapists, I don’t think they are going to take punishment into account.”
(10/07/08 3:53am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Fuel prices forced public transportation throughout Bloomington and IU’s campus to cut back on services. Now both Bloomington Transit and IU Campus Bus Service will receive federal grants, but the new money won’t be used to fill gas tanks.Last week, Congressman Baron Hill, D-9th, approved a grant of $915,618 in federal funds for the Bloomington Public Transportation Corporation. Hill also approved a $594,000 grant for the IU Campus Bus Service. Bloomington Transit will use the funding to design and operate environmental improvements to the downtown transit facility, which no longer accommodates the number of buses and riders. The facility, located at Washington and Fourth streets, was built in 1987.“With our ridership growth, with the expansion of our service, with the volume and number of buses we’re operating, we have outgrown that location down there,” said Lew May, Bloomington Public Transportation Corporation general manager.IU Campus Bus Service will also use the money to improve facilities.The grant money will be used by the IU Campus Bus Service to improve the “ride and park” area on 17th and Dunn streets.Improvements to the area include a waiting area that will include public restrooms, said Kent McDaniel, executive director for the bus services. The area will also be paved and have traffic lights.Both transportation services agree the renovations are long overdue. May and McDaniel said the grant awarded to them had to be used on the specific projects they were given, instead of for purchasing gas. Throughout the past 21 years, the Bloomington Public Transportation Corporation has worked to keep up with growing ridership. Although the downtown location is still functional, the corporation sees the need for improvements to provide for future growth.“There is a need for an expanded facility,” May said. “One that will give us the ability to prove better customer amenities, things like a larger indoor wait facility, things like air conditioning and heating, things like public restrooms, wider sidewalks, more sheltered locations to wait for buses, better signage, better lighting, better security. All these things are things that we envision in the new and improved passenger transfer facility.”McDaniel said IU has been trying to get a grant to improve the area for the safety of students. Sophomore Alison Kaiser said the traffic lights would improve her daily ride on the X bus.Kaiser said she always struggles to get into the parking lot because of the all the drivers going in the opposite direction of her.Senior Andrea Hera agrees.“I think it’s good,” Hera said. “I commute every day. It’s hard for students to cross the road.”Students who use Bloomington Transit are also happy about the improvements. “If they are making the shelters bigger, it is going to be easier for a lot more people to stand under the shelters because as of right now, when it becomes the main time when people shuttle back and forth, it gets crowded,” said junior Ryan Thiery.With the rising cost of fuel, more students on campus and people around the community are turning to the Bloomington Transit to move around campus and Bloomington. In 2007, a record 2.7 million riders used the bus system.“It’s beneficial that this is getting updated so that they can transport everyone back and forth between class,” Thiery said. “We won’t have to stand out in the rain or anything anymore.”The first installment of the grant is one of four the Bloomington Public Transportation Corporation will receive during the next four years.McDaniel said he is not sure when the project for the IU Campus Bus Service will begin but said it should begin by next year. “It’s obviously an important grant for IU and the city of Bloomington because the bus service will go campus-wide and will help the efficiency and the safety of the bus service,” said Hill’s press secretary Kara Seward.However, none of the federally funded money will go toward new buses or the rising cost of fuel, May said.“Thanks to a lot of efforts from people like Baron Hill and others, we’ve been replacing buses over the years.” May said. “We’ve been able to find hybrid buses and new diesel buses, and that’s going to continue over the next few years, but this project is strictly for a downtown passenger terminal.”
(10/03/08 3:55am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>Locking, jiving, move-popping; so you think you can breakdance? Footwork, tops, power moves, freeze; so you really think you can breakdance? B-boys and b-girls, crews and battles cyphering until the late morning, this is break dancing.And for junior Justin Wolverton, breakdancing is life.“I breakdance because it gets steam off, (it’s) really fun, great exercise and the cultural influence is amazing,” he said. “There are a lot of ways to express yourself.”Wolverton, who started break-dancing two years ago to get in shape, is the president of IU’s Break Dancing Club.“I was overweight when I first started,” Wolverton said. “It just became something I got a passion about.” Break dancing, or breaking, is the original hip-hop dance performed throughout the country, from the streets of New York to the warehouses in Los Angeles to its newest home on the curbs outside Ballantine Hall.Wolverton said they’re break-dancing outside Ballantine to increase voter registration and to draw bigger crowds.Their influence is not limited to Bloomington. The break dancing crew competes all over the United States. Competitions, or “battles” as they are called in the breaking world, consist of 16 teams or crews with four rounds of dance battles. Battles usually last from mid-afternoon to the early morning. Between the rounds, the crews stand in a circle and start cyphering.“(Cyphering is when breakers) take turns just going out in the middle of the circle showing what they’ve got, basically. You know: dancing, grooving, booty-shaking,” Wolverton said. “The final round is huge and everybody watches.”Break dancing is a free-style, create-your-own-moves dance. There are different types of this less-controlled style of dancing that a b-boy (male break dancer) or b-girl (female break dancer) can specialize in, such as tops, or dancing on one’s feet; footwork, a variation of groundwork and tops; freeze, holding a position, and power-moves, such as flairs, handstands and windmills. Aerial moves can be thrown in the mix of all the popping, locking and dropping. Wolverton’s passion for break dancing goes beyond being the president of the club to influencing potential breakers. “Justin inspired me. He gave me the idea (to join the break dancing club), and it was more fun than I expected, so I decided to stay with it,” freshman Anthony “Skeeter” Long said. “I’ve had to learn that there really are no rules. You can’t be like ‘how do you do this? How do you do this?’ You kind of have to just do stuff, and if it looks good, it works.”So why do the b-boys and b-girls break-dance? “It’s like its own culture. It has a substance and a history,” junior Clinton Parker said. “Because it’s a free-style dance, it’s something I can control completely. I make the moves up as I go, and nobody can really tell me if it’s wrong or right or good or bad because it’s the way I dance.”Wolverton and the club’s passion for break dancing led to the group’s largest call-out meeting. Wolverton’s belief is that every person who is new to break dancing will begin to understand what it truly is. “Most people don’t exactly know what real breaking is,” Wolverton said. “They think it’s all tricks and moves, but it’s a lot deeper than that.”
(09/25/08 3:59am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____>To some, this University is known as Good Ole IU. To others it’s the former “No. 1 party school” in the nation, and for many it’s the home of the Hoosiers. But to 40,354 students, IU is currently known as home.IU and Purdue University recently released figures about their freshman classes and enrollments. Both schools exceeded the number of students they expected, but IU outnumbered Purdue in freshman class size: 7,564 newcomers on campus.“The last couple years we have been pleasantly surprised about the number of students showing up after being accepted,” said IU spokesman Larry MacIntyre. “We’re very proud of the quality of the incoming freshman classes. We’ve got more academically accomplished students, more academically talented students. It’s a very good thing for IU.”As for Purdue, 7,063 freshmen joined the Boilermaker ranks. Purdue’s current enrollment of 40,090 is the highest ever.“A lot of the increase is spread over the entire University,” said Pam Horne, assistant vice president for enrollment management and dean of admissions at Purdue. “There isn’t really one large bulge of students. It makes things a little easier to manage. Both Purdue and Indiana did really well this year. We can be proud to have two great institutions in the state.”Sixty-two percent of both IU and Purdue’s freshman classes are Indiana residents, with 4,679 and 4,361 residents, respectively.“The single most notable thing about this incoming freshman class is the high number of Indiana students,” MacIntyre said. “In the last couple of years IU-Bloomington has focused a lot more of its scholarship assets on Indiana students. As a state institution, our mission is to serve Indiana and we really are serving about the maximum number of Indiana’s top high school students. We really think that is significant.”Although her class is smaller than IU’s, freshman Boilermaker Alaina VornDran is happy at Purdue.“I love the campus.” VornDran said. “I really like the stuff that Purdue has done towards making me feel at home, like I really belong here, definitely a very warm feeling.”Similarly, Hoosier freshman Tim Cash loves IU.“I’m happy with the class size because you get a lot more diversity; it gives you a lot more options of people to meet,” Cash said. “I love it here. The reason I came here was because of the great opportunities the University offers.”With more opportunities on campus, IU’s standards are rising. While the current national SAT scores have been lowering, the scores of students admitted to IU has been rising. Compared to the average national composite SAT score, IU is considerably above the national and state marks, coming in at 1151 whereas the national average is 1017 and the state average is 1004.IU’s selection process is also becoming stricter. Currently, 73 percent of IU’s freshmen in-state students graduated at the top 25 percent of their high school class.“It’s more competitive. If you’re marginally successful in high school and you don’t have a particularly good SAT, chances are good you are not going to be accepted here at Bloomington,” MacIntyre said.Among many out-of-state students, IU is known as the up-and-coming public university or the “new Wisconsin,” according to the Wall Street Journal’s article “From Bloomingdale’s to Bloomington.” IU is receiving a large amount of national recognition, both as a result of academics and athletics, through these out-of-state students.The students who are accepted from out-of-state are welcomed at IU. Since IU has students from both in-state and out-of-state, IU will not be turning into the “new University of Texas,” where 94 percent of students come from within the state.“We believe that the educational experience is better if there are both in-state, out-of-state, plus international students,” MacIntyre said. “IU would not be the great place if it was all in-state students. We need that mix.”The school prides itself on serving Indiana.“We want to serve as many of Indiana’s top high school students as we possibly can.” MacIntyre said. “We think we’re really serving the state best by educating as many students as possible in the top 25 percent of their graduating class.”
(09/19/08 3:46am)
____simple_html_dom__voku__html_wrapper____> Walking is a daily activity for students at IU. Whether going to T.I.S. College Bookstore, the Indiana Memorial Union or class, most students spend a good amount of their time walking around campus. But for sophomore Gaby Cheikh, that was not always the case.When Cheikh was 18 months old she woke up one morning and was paralyzed from the waist down. She began working with a physical therapist, Dr. Chuck Dietzen, the founder of the Timmy Foundation, which is named after his younger brother Tim, who died as an infant. Since she was 9 years old, Cheikh has been a part of the Timmy Foundation. Now that she is a student in Bloomington, Cheikh is involved with IU’s Timmy chapter and most recently has brought Timmypalooza to campus last year.Through Timmypalooza, which takes place from 1 to 7 p.m. Sunday at Dunn Meadow, the IU Timmy chapter is teaming up with the chapters at Purdue University and the University of Colorado-Boulder to raise money. All the money raised will go to reach IU’s chapter goal of $20,000 to help build an intensive care unit and postpartum ward in Ecuador. “Our primary goal is to raise health care awareness in third-world countries,” said Ben Fischer, last year’s professional recruiter for the IU Timmy chapter. Timmypalooza has seven bands, five of which are local, and some area restaurant participants. The bands performing will be The Giggles, The Mirror Stage, Alexander the Great, Husband&Wife, The Delicious, Rodeo Ruby Love and Company of Thieves. Local non-profit organizations will also be present to talk about their causes. “It’s our first initiative that’s cross-campus, cross-community based,” said Anna Remenschneider, president of IU’s Timmy chapter. “We’re pulling in local bands and local student groups and getting everyone involved. Timmypalooza is our second-annual benefit concert raising money for our International Partner Organization in Ecuador.”Each year IU’s Timmy chapter takes two trips to help fulfill the needs of these third-world countries.“The stuff that we face down there hasn’t been seen in the U.S. in decades. It’s stuff that most people here don’t even have to deal with,” Fischer said.Timmypalooza has been a way for Cheikh and the other Timmy officers to bring third-world countries to Bloomington. Since 2001, IU’s Timmy chapter has raised money for an ambulance for crossroads in the Dominican Republic, a tilapia pond for a hospice in Honduras and prescription medications for every trip they have gone on.“We focus on the health of children because they can grow up to be healthy adults, and that’s where your community starts,” Remenschneider said. “Our biggest emphasis is for the IPO to tell us what we can do to help them.” Today, Cheikh is just another college student walking around IU’s large campus. She still attends physical therapy and often has aches in her legs. Cheikh is using her life’s experience to help IU’s community grow.“Timmy Foundation has been something I have done since I was 9, so by making it more aware it’s helped others,” Cheikh said. “It just shows how a big passion can start off small but has the opportunity to change people’s lives.” Just as Dr. Chuck changed Cheikh’s life, now IU’s Timmy chapter and other Timmy chapters around the nation are changing lives by “building healthy futures one child at a time.”
