Two gay seniors at George Washington University say they feel alienated because the chaplain at George Washington?s Newman Center rejects homosexuality, and they aren?t going to take it anymore.
The seniors, Damian Legacy and Blake Bergen, have announced a coordinated campaign to rid the campus of the Roman Catholic priest, reports The GW Hatchet, the school?s independent student newspaper.
They also assert that 12 or more students have quit the Newman Center in recent years because they can?t tolerate Father Greg Shaffer?s ardent anti-gay ?? and, for the record, anti-abortion ? beliefs.
Shaffer has worked for five years at George Washington?s Newman Center. He told the Hatchet that religion and unrestricted speech ?play a vital role at a diverse university like GW.?
Legacy and Bergen say they are primarily upset about the counseling Shaffer offers. They say he urges students who have homosexual feelings to lead a life of celibacy.
Catholic Church doctrine maintains that homosexual desire isn?t a sin, but acting on that desire is, according to the website Catholic.com.
Legacy told the Hatchet that he spent considerable time at the Newman Center during his first two years at George Washington. He was an altar server at mass. He believed that he would become a Catholic priest after graduating.
All that changed, though, when Legacy told Shaffer that he and Bergen had entered a homosexual relationship. Shaffer allegedly charged Legacy with being immoral and lacking in faith.
?To have my faith leader view me that way, just because of one piece of the way that God made me, and to think that one part is responsible for the destruction of my human dignity, it just didn?t?I can?t even begin to describe the mental conflict that it creates,? Legacy told the Hatchet.
The two gay seniors are also unhappy about a blog post Shaffer authored back in May 2012, just after President Barack Obama publicly endorsed gay marriage.
?As Vatican II states, God is the author of marriage. He has defined marriage as between a man and a woman,? Shaffer then wrote. ?Every single rational person knows that sexual relationships between persons of the same sex are unnatural and immoral. They know it in their hearts.?
The plan to oust Shaffer includes the creation of a video containing the statements of several students who have left GW?s Newman Center. That video, Legacy and Bergen hope, will surely arouse the generally left-leaning campus to anger, thus forcing school officials to act.
Other aspects of the proposed GW Newman Center insurgency include filing a formal complaint with the administration and conducting a series of prayer vigils outside the center.
Legacy and Bergen will also distribute a letter to high-ranking administrators. According to The Hatchet, the letter will cite academic studies connecting homophobic behavior to loss of appetite, insomnia and other detrimental psychological consequences.
Finally, Legacy will request that GW?s Student Association defund the Newman Center (which is affiliated with the school but officially part of the Roman Catholic Church). This year, the Center reportedly collected $10,000 in funding.
Last semester, Legacy presented a report to the school?s Office for Diversity and Inclusion explaining that other schools, such as New York University, vet and evaluate religious leaders before allowing them to work with campus-affiliated groups.
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Discovery of 1,800-year-old 'Rosetta Stone' for tropical ice coresPublic release date: 4-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Pam Frost Gorder Gorder.1@osu.edu 614-292-9475 Ohio State University
Find offers the most complete picture of Earth's low-latitude climate history to date
COLUMBUS, OhioTwo annually dated ice cores drawn from the tropical Peruvian Andes reveal Earth's tropical climate history in unprecedented detailyear by year, for nearly 1,800 years.
Researchers at The Ohio State University retrieved the cores from a Peruvian ice cap in 2003, and then noticed some startling similarities to other ice cores that they had retrieved from Tibet and the Himalayas. Patterns in the chemical composition of certain layers matched up, even though the cores were taken from opposite sides of the planet.
In the April 4, 2013 online edition of the journal Science Express, they describe the find, which they call the first annually resolved "Rosetta Stone" with which to compare other climate histories from Earth's tropical and subtropical regions over the last two millennia.
The cores provide a new tool for researchers to study Earth's past climate, and better understand the climate changes that are happening today.
"These ice cores provide the longest and highest-resolution tropical ice core record to date," said Lonnie Thompson, distinguished university professor of earth sciences at Ohio State and lead author of the study.
"In fact, having drilled ice cores throughout the tropics for more than 30 years, we now know that this is the highest-resolution tropical ice core record that is likely to be retrieved."
The new cores, drilled from Peru's Quelccaya Ice Cap, are special because most of their 1,800-year history exists as clearly defined layers of light and dark: light from the accumulated snow of the wet season, and dark from the accumulated dust of the dry season.
They are also special because of where they formed, atop the high Andean altiplano in southern Peru. Most of the moisture in the area comes from the east, in snowstorms fueled by moist air rising from the Amazon Basin. But the ice core-derived climate records from the Andes are also impacted from the westspecifically by El Nio, a temporary change in climate, which is driven by sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific.
El Nio thus leaves its mark on the Quelccaya ice cap as a chemical signature (especially in oxygen isotopes) indicating sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean over much of the past 1,800 years.
"We have been able to derive a proxy for sea surface temperatures that reaches back long before humans were able to make such measurements, and long before humans began to affect Earth's climate," Thompson said.
Ellen Mosley-Thompson, distinguished university professor of geography at Ohio State and director of the Byrd Polar Research Center, explained that the 2003 expedition to Quelccaya was the culmination of 20 years of work.
The Thompsons have drilled ice cores from glaciers atop the most remote areas of the planetthe Chinese Himalayas, the Tibetan Plateau, Kilimanjaro in Africa, and Papua Indonesia among othersto gauge Earth's past climate. Each new core has provided a piece of the puzzle, as the researchers measured the concentrations of key chemicals preserved in thousands of years of accumulated ice.
A 1983 trip to Quelccaya yielded cores that earned the research team their first series of papers in Science. The remoteness of the site and the technology available at the time limited the quality of samples they could obtain, however. The nearest road was a two-day walk from the ice cap, so they were forced to melt the cores in the field and carry samples back as bottles of water. This made some chemical measurements impossible, and diminished the time resolution available from the cores.
"Due to the remoteness of the ice cap, we had to develop new tools such as a light-weight drill powered by solar panels to collect the 1983 cores. However, we knew there was much more information the cores could provide" Mosley-Thompson said. "Now the ice cap is just a six-hour walk from a new access road where a freezer truck can be positioned to preserve the cores. So we can now make better dust measurements along with a suite of chemical analyses that we couldn't make before."
The cores will provide a permanent record for future use by climate scientists, Thompson added. This is very important, as plants captured by the advancing ice cap 6,000 years ago are now emerging along its retreating margins, which shows that Quelccaya is now smaller than it has been in six thousand years.
"The frozen history from this tropical ice capwhich is melting away as Earth continues to warmis archived in freezers at -30C so that creative people will have access to it 20 years from now, using instruments and techniques that don't even exist today," he said.
###
Coauthors on the study include Mary Davis, Victor Zagorodnov, and Ping-Nan Lin of Byrd Polar Research Center; Ian Howat of the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State; and Vladimir Mikhalenko of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation's Paleoclimatology Program and Ohio State's Climate, Water and Carbon Program.
Contact:
Lonnie Thompson
614-292-6652 Thompson.3@osu.edu
Ellen Mosley-Thompson
614-292-6662 Thompson.4@osu.edu
Written by Pam Frost Gorder
Editor's note: Lonnie Thompson will be on travel from Saturday, March 30 until Thursday, April 4. During that time, he can be reached through Pam Frost Gorder.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Discovery of 1,800-year-old 'Rosetta Stone' for tropical ice coresPublic release date: 4-Apr-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Pam Frost Gorder Gorder.1@osu.edu 614-292-9475 Ohio State University
Find offers the most complete picture of Earth's low-latitude climate history to date
COLUMBUS, OhioTwo annually dated ice cores drawn from the tropical Peruvian Andes reveal Earth's tropical climate history in unprecedented detailyear by year, for nearly 1,800 years.
Researchers at The Ohio State University retrieved the cores from a Peruvian ice cap in 2003, and then noticed some startling similarities to other ice cores that they had retrieved from Tibet and the Himalayas. Patterns in the chemical composition of certain layers matched up, even though the cores were taken from opposite sides of the planet.
In the April 4, 2013 online edition of the journal Science Express, they describe the find, which they call the first annually resolved "Rosetta Stone" with which to compare other climate histories from Earth's tropical and subtropical regions over the last two millennia.
The cores provide a new tool for researchers to study Earth's past climate, and better understand the climate changes that are happening today.
"These ice cores provide the longest and highest-resolution tropical ice core record to date," said Lonnie Thompson, distinguished university professor of earth sciences at Ohio State and lead author of the study.
"In fact, having drilled ice cores throughout the tropics for more than 30 years, we now know that this is the highest-resolution tropical ice core record that is likely to be retrieved."
The new cores, drilled from Peru's Quelccaya Ice Cap, are special because most of their 1,800-year history exists as clearly defined layers of light and dark: light from the accumulated snow of the wet season, and dark from the accumulated dust of the dry season.
They are also special because of where they formed, atop the high Andean altiplano in southern Peru. Most of the moisture in the area comes from the east, in snowstorms fueled by moist air rising from the Amazon Basin. But the ice core-derived climate records from the Andes are also impacted from the westspecifically by El Nio, a temporary change in climate, which is driven by sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific.
El Nio thus leaves its mark on the Quelccaya ice cap as a chemical signature (especially in oxygen isotopes) indicating sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean over much of the past 1,800 years.
"We have been able to derive a proxy for sea surface temperatures that reaches back long before humans were able to make such measurements, and long before humans began to affect Earth's climate," Thompson said.
Ellen Mosley-Thompson, distinguished university professor of geography at Ohio State and director of the Byrd Polar Research Center, explained that the 2003 expedition to Quelccaya was the culmination of 20 years of work.
The Thompsons have drilled ice cores from glaciers atop the most remote areas of the planetthe Chinese Himalayas, the Tibetan Plateau, Kilimanjaro in Africa, and Papua Indonesia among othersto gauge Earth's past climate. Each new core has provided a piece of the puzzle, as the researchers measured the concentrations of key chemicals preserved in thousands of years of accumulated ice.
A 1983 trip to Quelccaya yielded cores that earned the research team their first series of papers in Science. The remoteness of the site and the technology available at the time limited the quality of samples they could obtain, however. The nearest road was a two-day walk from the ice cap, so they were forced to melt the cores in the field and carry samples back as bottles of water. This made some chemical measurements impossible, and diminished the time resolution available from the cores.
"Due to the remoteness of the ice cap, we had to develop new tools such as a light-weight drill powered by solar panels to collect the 1983 cores. However, we knew there was much more information the cores could provide" Mosley-Thompson said. "Now the ice cap is just a six-hour walk from a new access road where a freezer truck can be positioned to preserve the cores. So we can now make better dust measurements along with a suite of chemical analyses that we couldn't make before."
The cores will provide a permanent record for future use by climate scientists, Thompson added. This is very important, as plants captured by the advancing ice cap 6,000 years ago are now emerging along its retreating margins, which shows that Quelccaya is now smaller than it has been in six thousand years.
"The frozen history from this tropical ice capwhich is melting away as Earth continues to warmis archived in freezers at -30C so that creative people will have access to it 20 years from now, using instruments and techniques that don't even exist today," he said.
###
Coauthors on the study include Mary Davis, Victor Zagorodnov, and Ping-Nan Lin of Byrd Polar Research Center; Ian Howat of the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State; and Vladimir Mikhalenko of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation's Paleoclimatology Program and Ohio State's Climate, Water and Carbon Program.
Contact:
Lonnie Thompson
614-292-6652 Thompson.3@osu.edu
Ellen Mosley-Thompson
614-292-6662 Thompson.4@osu.edu
Written by Pam Frost Gorder
Editor's note: Lonnie Thompson will be on travel from Saturday, March 30 until Thursday, April 4. During that time, he can be reached through Pam Frost Gorder.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Secret Service said on Thursday it was investigating the claim that new Director Julia Pierson's personal information had been hacked and published on a website, another in a string of such incidents against top officials including first lady Michelle Obama and CIA Director John Brennan.
The information on the website included a Social Security number, phone numbers, and a credit report that includes accounts with The Home Depot, Sears, and Macy's.
It was unclear how much of the data that appeared on www.exposed.re was accurate or who posted it. The website appeared to have information about other government officials and celebrities that had been published online previously at another Internet address, www.exposed.su.
"We are investigating and we are aware of the matter," a Secret Service spokesman said without commenting further.
Pierson was sworn into office on March 27 and is the first woman to head the agency which protects the president.
An FBI spokeswoman said "we're aware of the reports" but she would not say whether the FBI was investigating them.
The Internet domain country code for the island of Reunion is .re, while .su was the domain code for the Soviet Union.
(Reporting by Tabassum Zakaria; editing by Jackie Frank)
PARIS -- Thierry Costa, the 38-year-old staff doctor for French "Survivor" spin-off "Koh-Lanta," committed suicide Monday in Cambodia, where the show had been filmed. Costa?s death comes 10 days after contestant Gerald Babin suffered a fatal heart attack on the first day of filming the series? 12th season.
PHOTOS: The dark side of reality TV: 25 tragic deaths
Production company Adventure Line Productions (ALP) announced Costa?s death and responded to the news of his passing in a statement late Monday.
"We have learned with dismay that Dr. Thierry Costa passed away in Cambodia today," said the statement. Costa had been with the show for four seasons. "His high level of professionalism and humanity towards participants and production teams has always been unanimously recognized."
AFP - Getty Images
A reproduction of a document received from Adventure Line Productions on April 1 shows the suicide letter of Thierry Costa, a French doctor who was working for "Koh Lanta" the French version of the hit reality TV show "Survivor."
Babin, 25, died while en route to hospital after completing the first two contestant challenges of jumping from a boat and swimming to shore and competing in a tug-of-war on the beach.?Babin complained of arm cramps and collapsed on the sand. He was treated on the scene before Costa ordered an emergency helicopter airlift, according to initial reports.
On Thursday, an anonymous source who identified themselves as a member of the production team, said that the producers declined to give Babin immediate medical attention for up to nine minutes so as not to interrupt shooting, and that he was initially taken from the scene to a local infirmary by boat and not helicopter as it was considered ?too costly.? The source said that Babin was finally transferred by to a hospital nearly two hours after his initial collapse.
STORY: French 'Survivor' season canceled after death of contestant
Costa left a suicide note that said his reputation had been harmed by the accusations. ?In recent days my name has been sullied in the media,? he wrote.?
Copies of the handwritten letter on hotel stationery were released by ALP and reprinted in the newspaper Le Parisien, which stated the family had approved the publication. In the letter Costa requested that it be released.?
?Unjust accusations and assumptions have been made against me,? he wrote.? He emphasized his love of medicine and said he had been devastated by the ?false accusations.?
?I am sure I treated Gerald with respect as a patient and not as a contestant.?
As a result, Babin?s family announced Monday they will seek damages on the basis of ?illegal conditions? and ?breaches of health and safety,? according to lawyer Jeremie Assous. Assous is seeking all of the footage from ALP as evidence.? French authorities have also opened a preliminary investigation into the circumstances surrounding his treatment and death, and may pursue manslaughter charges.
Nimbuzz, which has become a major mobile messaging application for emerging markets like India, is making a more aggressive moves into smartphone platforms. Today it announces the release of its app for Windows Phone 8. This will take advantage of the platform's Live Tiles and locked home screen notifications, although in fairness it's biggest growth platform remains Android and its core base of feature phones. Existing Nimbuzz users on Windows Phone 7.5 users can simply upgrade. The Nimbuzz platform has 150 million users spread across 200 countries.
AT&T (T) on Tuesday announced that it will launch the HTC One on April 19th and pricing will start at $199.99. The carrier will sell two different versions of HTC?s (2498) new flagship smartphone, a 32GB version for $199.99 and a 64 GB model that will cost $299.99 with a two-year contract, and preorder availability will begin on April 4th. Key specs include a quad-core 1.7GHz processor, a 4.7-inch full HD display, 2GB of RAM and Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. BGR reviewed the HTC One earlier this week and said it was the best Android smartphone we?ve ever tested. AT&T?s full press release follows below.
HTC One Arrives at AT&T April 19 Starting at $199.99
[More from BGR: HTC One Review]
Pre-Sales Begin April 4 Dallas, Texas, April 02, 2013
Beginning April 19, AT&T* plans to offer the highly-anticipated HTC One? smartphone to customers for $199.99 with a two-year commitment, for the 32 GB memory variant. AT&T is the only U.S. wireless carrier at launch to also offer a version with 64 GB of memory for $299.99 with a two-year commitment.
Customers eager to reserve their HTC One will be able to pre-order at http://www.att.com/htcone on April 4 starting at 1:00 p.m. CT. Only AT&T offers a free** HTC Media Link HD wireless HDMI adaptor*** (a $90 value), which lets you wirelessly share content from your phone to your HD television.
The HTC One runs on AT&T 4G LTE, the nation?s fastest 4G LTE network.**** AT&T has the nation?s largest 4G network, covering 288 million people.
HTC One is available in black and silver and boasts a powerful 1.7 GHz quad-core processor, and zero-gap aluminum unibody with a 4.7-inch full HD (1080p) screen and HTC Sense? innovations, to re-shape your smartphone experience.
HTC BlinkFeed? provides customized content and real-time updates streamed live on your home screen. HTC BlinkFeed aggregates your content from a variety of media sources, serving up fresh content all in one place, without the need to jump between multiple applications and web sites.
HTC Zoe? mode on the HTC One lets you grab the entire moment and bring it to life in three-second snippets. Special moments can be captured in HTC Zoe highlights, and displayed in a living gallery that you can set to music and special effects. AT&T Locker helps you hold onto those memories no matter where you are. You can automatically store photos, videos and documents in the cloud, so you can access and share from your smartphone or computer.
The HTC UltraPixel Camera with a breakthrough sensor gathers 300 percent more light than traditional smartphone camera sensors and delivers outstanding low-light performance.
HTC BoomSound? provides rich, clear sound with minimal distortion, as well as the authentic sound experience you expect from built-in Beats? by Dr. Dre Audio. HTC One features dual front-facing speakers and a built-in amplifier to bring music, movies and games alive. Since the speakers are on the front of the device, you no longer have to worry about muffled sound when setting your phone down.
HTC Sense TV? lets you use your HTC One as an interactive TV guide and remote control. It can be set up in a few simple steps and gives you the ability to access electronic program guides and control a receiver and home theatre right from your phone?s screen.
The HTC One features AT&T DriveMode?, an app that helps curb texting and driving. The app can be set-up to automatically send a customizable reply to incoming messages once a vehicle starts moving 25 mph. The auto-reply message is similar to an ?out-of-office alert? and can reply to texts, emails and wireless callers letting your friends know that you are driving and unable to respond.*****
Setting up your new HTC One is a snap with AT&T Ready2Go, a free service that helps you to easily set up and personalize your device in minutes from the comfort of your personal computer. With Ready2Go, it?s easy to set up your email accounts, import your contacts, connect to your social networks and more.
For more information, visit http://www.att.com/htcone.
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Public release date: 4-Apr-2013
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