The Week in Brief

Amnesty International protests censorship

Amnesty International sponsored a booth for "Banned Book Week" that provided petitions and information about outlawed authors on Wed., Sept. 23 and Thurs., Sept. 24.

Event coordinator Kaatie Furuyama, PC '02, said, "The authors are imprisoned for writing what is contrary to what the government thinks people should know."

Amnesty literature explained that the Maine chapter started the event to "draw attention to writers, editors, librarians, and publishers who suffer human rights violations." Petitions from Amnesty have helped in the liberation of political prisoners.

"Censorship [is] relevant to everyday people--there are issues of media control as far as movies and TV," Furuyama said.

-Emily Breunig

Law society debates web anonymity

In chatrooms across the Internet, participants take on alternate personas: a male 20-something can pretend to be a naïve teenage girl, or a malicious stalker can secretly gather information. When should anonymity be protected under law? Computer science professor Robert Dunne, School of Management professors R. Bhaskar and Stephen Latham, and Johnathan Kidd, GRD '04, attempted to answer these questions on Tues., Sept 21. The Yale Internet Law Society convened the panel to debate, "Resolved: That anonymity in cyberspace should be unconditionally protected."

The panelists straddled the fence, protecting anonymity for some activities and drawing the line on others. While Professor Latham defended collecting information on shopping habits, he did not support giving newspapers anonymous access to information. "What worries me is the oddball...and the journalist," Latham said.

Read more on this subject by visiting www.yaleherald.com.

—Ayon Nandi

Aging general hopeful for peace in Kashmir

COURTESY CNN.COM Kashmir militants take on Indian police in a recent struggle.

Since winning independence in 1947, India and Pakistan have been involved in an ongoing struggle over the state of Kashmir, engaging in numerous border wars. At a packed Pierson Master's Tea on Tues., Sept. 21, Yalies had the opportunity to hear about that conflict from 85-year-old Major General Miakakhakel Jailani, a former Pakistani official.

Jailani first explained that during the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan, Kashmir--a state with a Muslim majoriy and a Hindu monarch--decided to join India at the last moment. Jailani placed some of the blame for the current state of affairs on the British. "The British left in haste without solving many problems," Jailani said.

Jailani explained that Pakistan wishes to draw international support for its cause. "Now that the U.N. is interfering with Kosovo and East Timor, Paksitan is hoping that they will pick Kashmir," he said.

Students had mixed reactions to Jailani's comments. Shruti Adhar, ES '01, appreciated Jailani's interpretation. "He had a really optimistic oulook--through separation you can have integration," she said. Rahul Rajkumar, SY '00, however, pointed out that the General "sidestepped difficult questions." Rajkumar felt that Jailani did not have a very clear view of the current state of affairs, given that the general had left Pakistan in 1975. "I felt he had an interesting perspective, but not very insightful," Rajkumar said.

—Zoë Konovalov and Ayon Nandi

Students go the distance for charity

Emerging from weenie bins and the stacks on Wed., Sept. 22, roughly 300 Yalies gathered in front of Lanman Wright Hall to run in the third annual Midnight Mile. Sponsored by Habitat for Humanity, the event raised $725 to fund projects in New Haven.

Founder Chris Edwards, ES '01, started the event in 1997 after becoming inspired by an early morning jogger and was pleased with this year's turnout. "The most important thing about this event is that people come out and have fun," Edwards said.

Many of the participants came out for the novelty of the run itself. "When else am I going to get the opportunity to run outside at midnight on a Wednesday night?" Molly Silfen, CC '02, said.

—Janey Lewis

Professor's departure leaves intelligence gap

Political science professor Bradford Westerfield, TD '47, one of the nation's international relations experts, is retiring after 42 years to "start reinventing" himself. "I want to be where I was as an undergrad. I want to read fiction and poetry, and books on the history of remote places," he said.

Students said that Westerfield would be missed. "I see him as one of the authorities that Yale has to offer on international relations," Ying Tin Li, MC '02, commented. Westerfield's popular course, "Introduction to International Relations," will be taught one last time this spring. His other popular lecture, "Intelligence and Covert Operations"--better known as "Spies and Lies"--will not be offered this year. Westerfield's retirement will weaken his department in the area of intelligence studies.

While political science professor Alan Stam said that intelligence is a topic more appropriate for a professional school, he added, "it will be hard to find someone like Westerfield. He'll be missed."

Westerfield's most recent book, Inside CIA's Private World, synthesized his work on the previously classified documents of the CIA. According to Westerfield, his next book will detail "the major, insufficiently studied aspects of intelligence."

—E. Tammy Kim

 

JOHN YI/YH YEAH, BABY, YEAH: Yalies took it all off at Timothy Dwight's Exotic Erotic on Friday, Sept. 17.

AROUND THE GLOBE

Celebrate good times, come on!

Try this tongue twister: `The Fundamental Task of the Socialist Society is the Development of Productive Forces!' This is just one of the catchy slogans for the celebration of Chinese Communist rule, to be held Fri., Oct. 1.

The whole country is gearing up for a party: elderly women--the government's neighborhood-level eyes and ears--have reported all illegal guests in their neighborhood, leading to the expulsion of more than 16,000 migrant workers from cities.

When the happy day arrives, these celebrations will culminate in a ceremony where bureaucrats declaim Marx while holding their noses, and hit each other on the heads with baseball bats.

Never clean your blankets

A girl unknowingly threw her father's savings out the window on Tues., Sept. 21 while airing out a blanket in Guadalajara, Spain. The girl, who wanted to use the blanket to warm up during a recent cold spell that hit the area, later went to ask her father for money for college fees. He told her he had $6,250 in cash secretly hidden in a blanket--the same one she had aired.

The family has appealed to passers-by who may have found the money to return it in exchange for a reward.

"I am heart-broken," the girl was reported to have said. "That money could have paid for two and a half precious hours at Yale."

Hey! I didn't get purified!

A French fraud trial against members of the Church of Scientology went into its second day on Tues., Sept. 21 amid protests by supporters outside the courtroom.

The trial was held after complaints filed a decade ago finally made their way into French courts. One of the plaintiffs had allegedly paid 150,000 francs for a "purification cure."

Over 50 documents amassed by the prosecution had been destroyed by "error" in a regular clean-out of paper in the court clerk's office, the second instance in a year of judicial files going missing in the scientology case.

French newspapers reported that a sect-busting government committee was busy collating a report on scientologists in the civil service.

—Compiled by John Ching and Zoë Konovalov from the Associated Press

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