College senior wants to be
Mayor of New York town
By Ryan Van Winkle
Campus Correspondent -
Syracuse University
College Press Exchange
NEW PALTZ, N.Y. (CPX) - This
isn’t your typical campaign
headquarters. The walls are adorned
with old New Yorker magazine
covers impressionist art and posters
of Budweiser babes. There’s also a
dartboard bearing a photo of Tom
Nyquist, mayor of the village of New
Paltz, N.Y., and arch-rival of the
candidate who’s name is plastered all
over this joint: Russ Ferdico, a senior
at Stale University of New York at
New Paltz who, at the ripe old age of
23, wants to become the village’s
next head honcho.
The race is shaping up to be the
hottest one New Paltz has seen in
years. While Ferdico’s budget
prevents him from conducting polls,
he promises more voters will show
up to vote than in the last six years.
Not that that would be too hard to
guarantee. In 1993, voter turnout was
just 450 people. That figure dropped
to a measly 34 voters in 1997.
As the March 16 election nears,
Ferdico, a history major, is confident
that the village of about 5,500 will
support him and his platform of
common sense, communication and
consolidation. He's depending on his
buddy and campaign manager, 22-
year-old Clark Whitsett, a junior at
SUNY-New Paltz, to help him spread
his message and convince voters that
he’s not the clueless kid his opponent
is making him out to be.
Ferdico moved from the Bronx to
the New Paltz area in 1991 and
decided he’d found a place he’d like
to call home. He worked on projects
concerning the university and got
involved with the local government
scene. Most recently, he landed a job
as a paid political advisor to state
Sen. Emanual Gold while also taking
16 credit hours.
Ferdico was lobbying in Albany
for lower tuition costs when he met
Whitsett, who was reporting for the
college newspaper. A year later they
bumped into each other again while
working as state Senate interns.
Ferdico was waiting for an elevator
when Whitsett asked about his future
plans.
Plans to destroy last known samples of Smallpox virus debates
By David Brown
The Washington Post
A plan to destroy the world’s last
known samples of smallpox virus
later this year is threatened by the
growing suspicion that secret caches
of the microbe probably exist,
increasing the chances it could fall
into the hands of a rogue nation or
terrorist organization.
If thflt is the case, some scientists
believe stocks of the deadly virus
should be kept so they can be used to
help develop antiviral drugs and a
better vaccine against the disease,
which was eradicated from the world
in 1978. That view, however, is not
universal, with some people saying
that destruction of the known viral
stocks would actually discourage the
use of any pirated ones.
Monday, an expert panel convened
by the National Academy of Sciences
Institute of Medicine will offer its
opinion of the future scientific needs
for the virus, which officially exists
only at the federal Centers for Disease
Control in Atlanta and at a laboratory
run by the Russian government in
Siberia.
The report was requested by the
departments of defense and health
and human services, and is expected
to carry substantial weight in the
current debate in the Clinton
administration on whether to support
the World Health Organization’s
(WHO) recommendation to
incinerate the smallpox stocks on
June 30.
That plan will be reviewed in May,
when representatives of WHO s 190
member countries meet in Geneva.
The destruction date was set by
consensus at a similar meeting in
1996. In the intervening three years,
“I told him I was thinking of
running for mayor,” Ferdico said.
“Clark’s eyes got wide, and he said,
‘You gotta let me help you!’” We met
for a beer the next week. He wanted
to check out my ideas and make sure
it wasn’t a joke. And it just
escalated.”
Escalated into a vigorous and
exhausting contest against Nyquist,
who criticizes Ferdico’s youth and
his out-of-town background. The
campaign has spun into the biggest
challenge Nyquist has faced in years.
Nyquist has held the $lO,OOO-a-year
job for three four-year terms, two ot
which were unchallenged.
Ferdico, who expects to graduate
in May, one month after the new
mayoral term begins, is running a
campaign that’s focused on marrying
town and gown for once and for all.
He acknowledges local sentiment
that college students cause problems
for the village’s year-round residents.
He readily admits that some college
students bring binge drinking,
rowdiness, crime and property
destruction to town, but he suspects
most of that trouble is actually caused
by students living outside of New
Paltz. He points to police logs that
routinely display many out-of
towners’ names after weekend
festivities.
Ferdico is also bent on getting the
student vote. So far, convincing
students that they need to get
involved in the political process has
been like pulling teeth, Whitsett said.
“I’m like, 'Hey, vote for a student’s
mayor. The current mayor wants to
close bars at 2 instead of 4. That's
bad for you. The current mayor wants
to bring state cops in so if you get
caught with an open container, that's
immediately jail and not just a ticket
or a nice slap on the wrist,”' he said.
If Ferdico wins, he won't be the
only 23-year-old mayor in New York.
Marc Molinaro was elected to the top
post of Tivoli, N.Y., when he was 19.
He’s now also 23. But it Ferdico
loses, he says, in mock
Swarzenagger, “I’ll be back. I’m not
giving up; I’ll help these people.
They’re not rid of me.”
scientists in the United States and
Russia were to clone pieces of the
virus’ genes into harmless samples
suitable for research after the
microbe’s demise. Although some
researchers argued for keeping the
virus indefinitely, the general
consensus was that this posed risks
far outweighing any scientific
insights that might be gained.
Events of the past few years,
however, have challenged that last
assumption. "One would have to be
ridiculously optimistic to conclude
there are now only two locations in
the world where smallpox is stored.
And I do mean ridiculously
optimistic,” Amy E. Smithson, an
expert on biological and chemical
weapons proliferation at the Henry L.
Stimson Center in Washington, said
last week.
This view is shared, somewhat less
emphatically, by advocates for virus
destruction, who until recently
doubted there were secret stores of
smallpox. “I think there’s more in
Russia than in the one center
(designated as a smallpox
repository),” said Donald A.
Henderson, the American physician
who led the global smallpox
eradication effort from 1966 to 1977.
“There’s no question about that.”
Recent revelations that the Soviet
Union made industrial quantities of
smallpox for years after it signed a
1972 treaty prohibiting such work has
hugely damaged Russian credibility.
“I think the likelihood that the
Russians destroyed everything except
what they had in the WHO laboratory
is very small,” said Frank Fenner, an
Australian physician, now 84, who
chaired the global commission that
“certified” the world as smallpox-free
in 1980.
National Campus News
Professor
topics for
By Christine Tatum
College Press Exchange
SANTA CLARITA, Calif. (CPX) -
Efforts by officials of College of the
Canyons to resolve allegations of
sexual harassment against one of the
school’s speech professors failed
miserably when nationally renowned
attorney Gloria Allred showed up at
a board of trustees’ meeting with a
camera crew.
Allred, who focuses on women’s
rights, announced March 10 that she’s
representing Kelly Friscia, a
sophomore at the college who claims
to have been subjected to sexual
harassment by a professor who
repeatedly encouraged his students to
deliver sexually graphic speeches.
Allred accused the professor of
creating “an offensive and sexually
charged hostile environment" as
addressed by Title IX of the Education
Amendments of 1972.
Peace Corps looks to
of volunteers
By Carol Masciola
The Orange County Register
LOS ANGELES, Calif. - America,
really, is not much like the show
“Beverly Hills, 90210.” And the
Peace Corps is on a mission to show
that to the world. This week, Peace
Corps recruiters are gathered to
discuss ways to attract more
minorities into the service, hoping to
make the corps reflect the ethnic
diversity of America.
“We want to give a correct
perception of what Americans are
like. We are not a white, middle-class,
homogeneous nation,” said Charles
R. Baquet 111, Peace Corps deputy
director. "Peace Corps volunteers can
counteract the perception of
Americans that people develop from
watching Arnold Schwarzenegger
movies and John Wayne movies.”
The corps is striving to have 25-30
percent minorities, compared with
about 18 percent now. The recruiters,
about 20 of them from Western states,
are discussing ways to approach
minority students and show them the
benefits of joining the corps.
World and Nation
“If we are serious about bio
defense, the stocks are necessary for
developing an antiviral drug, and
possibly necessary for developing a
vaccine more suitable for the general
population than the current one,” said
Alan Zelicoff, a scientist at Sandia
National Laboratories in New
Mexico, and a consultant to the
Defense Department.
Proponents of destruction argue
that the essential scientific work can
be done without live samples ot the
virus, and that destruction will make
a moral statement about its use that
even terrorists could not ignore.
If smallpox were to reappear,
Fenner said, “it couldn’t be the result
of untoward escape from a laboratory.
It would have to be from deliberate
use. That could then be condemned
as a horrendous crime against
humanity, reintroducing a disease that
the world with great effort had freed
itself from,” Fenner said.
Last year, WHO polled its 190
member countries to learn whether
there was still consensus for
destroying the known stocks of virus.
About 70 nations answered. The
United States, Britain, France and
Italy said they were undecided.
Russia said the virus should be
retained. All the rest favored
destruction.
Variola virus, the formal name for
smallpox virus, killed untold millions
of people over the centuries. Like
chickenpox, it’s highly contagious
and produces a striking, pustular rash.
Unlike that infection, however, it kills
about 20 percent of people who
contract it. The last naturally
occurring case was contracted in
Merca, Somalia, in October 1977.
The last cases ever were in
Birmingham, England, in 1978, when
accused of urging sexual
his speech students
Allred outlined her client's
complaints at a press conference
before taking them to trustees. She
said the professor assigned his
students to give various speeches.
Among them was one demonstrating
how to do something. To further
explain the assignment, Allred said,
the professor told his class that a
former student had given a talk on
“how to spank your monkey,” which
is slang for masturbation. Another
student delivered a speech on how to
use a condom with help from a
pressurized can of whipped cream,
Allred said, noting that the professor
“had remarked on how clever that
particular speech and topic were.”
Even worse, Allred said, was a
graphic talk given by yet another
student on Feb. 8 about techniques for
oral sex titled “How To Pet Her Cat.”
The speaker went on to detail various
techniques women could use to shave
their pubic hair and drew some of his
“This could be described as cultural
sensitivity training,” Baquet said.
Some local people who’ve served in
the Peace Corps say minority
Americans are sometimes seen as a
strange and surprising phenomenon
by the people they go abroad to serve.
Monica Ovieto, 27, a Hispanic
woman who grew up in Santa Ana,
Calif., returned last year from
Cameroon, where people at first
referred to her as “nasara,” meaning
“white person” in the Fulfulde
language. Later, after spending some
time under the African sun, her skin
turned very brown and the people
started calling her a word that meant
“white-black person.”
"I tried to explain that I wasn’t
white, that I was Hispanic, but they
just said, ’No, you’re white,"’ Ovieto
said. "I never thought being Hispanic
was important to me until 1 got there
and people were calling me a white
person.”
A Korean-American colleague of
Ovieto’s had a similar problem.
“People would just not accept the fact
that he was American,” Ovieto said.
"They’re like, ’You can’t be American
virus apparently escaped into the duct
work of a laboratory. One person died,
and the scientist in charge of the
laboratory committed suicide.
Smallpox vaccine prevents
infection in most cases, even if given
within a few days after a person
contacts the virus. The protection isn’t
lifelong, however. Routine
vaccination in the United States ended
in 1971. Except for some soldiers and
laboratory workers, nobody has been
vaccinated anywhere since 1983.
Today, virtually the entire population
of the globe is susceptible to the
disease.
In the early 1980 s, most samples of
smallpox virus in labs around the
world were destroyed. Samples of
about 400 strains were gathered at the
CDC repository, and about 120 strains
at a scientific institute in Moscow,
then moved to the laboratory called
VECTOR.
The idea that smallpox posed a real
threat took hold a year ago, when Ken
Alibek, a scientist and former high
official at VECTOR who’d defected
to the United States in 1992, testified
to Congress that through the end of
the 1980 s, the Soviet Union had
produced “hundreds of tons of anthrax
weapon. ..along with dozens of tons of
smallpox and plague.”
There is no hard public evidence
that smallpox exists anywhere outside
Russia or the United States. At a
scientific meeting in Munich last year,
Russian researchers reported that in
1991 they tried to extract virus from
the body of 19th Century smallpox
victim unearthed from a frozen grave
in Yakutia. Although they were
unsuccessful, antibodies against
smallpox reacted with the extracted
tissue, suggesting that remnants of the
virus remained.
Thursday, March 18, 1999 - The Rehreml College Beacon - page 5
proposed designs on the blackboard
behind him. And as if that weren't
enough, Allred said, the student
described the benefits of each of the
various shaves and explained in
graphic detail the best ways to
perform cunnilingus.
Allred said Friscia was shocked
and disgusted when the professor
congratulated the student and said, "I
am proud of you.” Neither Allred nor
the college has publicly identified the
professor, but faculty members have
reported that he is adjunct professor
Fred Martin. School spokeswoman
Sue Bozman confirmed that the
accused instructor has an adjunct, or
temporary, teaching position.
Attorney Jeff Hacker told College
Press Exchange that he is
representing Martin but would not
comment about any accusations
against his client while the university
investigates the matter. Hacker said
Martin has been teaching for about
increase
because you don’t look American.'
It really bothered him."
Ovieto spent almost three years in
Koza, a village in Cameroon, and
will be talking about her experiences
with students at Santa Ana College
later this month. She said she hopes
to introduce the Peace Corps to other
young Hispanics.
“For Hispanics, generally, most
people are very family-oriented, and
the thought of someone going away
is (not acceptable),” she said. “People
don’t see that there are a lot of
different opportunities out there.”
Rebecca Otte, 25, of Orange,
Calif., returned in October from
Niamala, a village in Mali, where she
was a water and sanitation volunteer.
Otte, who is white, noticed that the
villagers were more patient with the
white Peace Corps volunteers than
with the black ones.
“They (blacks) were expected to
fit in quicker, to know the cultural
norms better, to learn the language
faster,” Otte said. On the other hand,
the black volunteers were able to
blend in better. “Everyone just kind
of stares at you,” Otte said. "In the
Bill to curb global sex traffic to be
officially announced
By Anthony M. DeStefano
Newsday
NEW YORK _ In an effort to battle
the international sex traffic in
immigrant women to U.S. cities such
as New York and Chicago, legislation
will be announced Tuesday in the
Senate that is aimed at providing
temporary asylum for the migrant
victims and stopping federal
assistance to foreign governments
directly involved in the trade.
The proposal is aimed at protecting
the victims, notably from Russia, of
the global sex trafficking networks
that by some estimates have moved
tens of thousands of women and
children yearly across international
borders for work as prostitutes.
In a letter to his colleagues last
week, Sen. Paul D. Wellstone, D-
Minn., one of the bill’s two co
sponsors, said trafficking into the
United States is a rising problem and
that the proposal would increase
protections and services for women
and children who find themselves in
this country.
“In particular, it seeks to stop the
practice of speedily deporting
victims back to uncertain and
potentially dangerous situations,”
and would grant them a limited time
to stay in the United States to seek
civil and criminal actions against
traffickers, Wellstone said in his
letter. The bill was introduced late
last week but is slated for a formal
announcement Tuesday.
Wellstone’s staff has said the bill
calls for giving the sex worker
immigrants three months to decide
whether to take legal action against
the smugglers involved and to decide
25 years, three of which have been
spent at College ot the Canyons.
School policy allows officials to
work for up to 50 days to try to resolve
a sex-harassment dispute informally,
Bozman said. The month-long
attempt to reach an informal
resolution, which in this case expires
March 17. is a prerequisite for
bringing a formal complaint, which
leads to a process that can last another
90 days, she said. Throughout the
process, the instructor often is allowed
to continue teaching, Bozman added.
"Remember, there are rights on
both sides." she said. "The employee
has the rights to due process and to a
fair and objective investigation. We
are taking the allegations very
seriously, but we are imintr through
the process very carefully, following
it to the T." Allred dismissed the
college’s informal 50-day policy and
called for th school to begin its formal
investigation right away.
diversity
market they'll try to charge you
exorbitant prices and they'll be less
natural with you
Baquel, who served in the Peace
Corps in the Somali Republic in
1965-67, said black volunteers
sometimes hope to find their roots in
Africa and are stunned b“y how
foreign it is. "I learned very quickly
there's 500 years of history and
10,000 miles between me and
Africa." said Baquet, who is black.
"I was able to deal with that and get
on with what I was supposed to do,
the education of Somalis."
The minority recruitment is part ot
a $lOO million expansion of the Peace
Corps approved this month in
Congress. By 2005. the corps plans
to expand its ranks from 6.700 to
10.000 volunteers. The corps was
founded in 1961 and reached its peak
of about 15.000 volunteers in 1966-
67. Baquel said that corps
participation dwindled
in the 19H0s because of a lack of
funding, falling to 4,500 volunteers.
To learn more about the Peace
Corps, call (800)424-8580.
whether to ask for asylum because ol
the risk they face of reprisals from
traffickers if they returned to their
countries. The three-month period
could be extended.
The proposal would also amend the
U.S. law- on "involuntary servitude"
to include abuses sutlered by
trafficked immigrants who are forced
to work through non-physical
coercion such as blackmail, lraud.
debt bondage and psychological
pressure, tactics commonly used by
traffickers against women and
children, according to Wellstone’s
staff.
Wellstone is also calling for
penalties against foreign
governments whose officials are
directly involved or complied in the
sex trade. The sanctions would
include the withholding of police
assistance to those governments.
The trafficking of women and
children in the global sex trade has
been documented for decades,
particularly in the Far East. But with
the economic collapse in the former
Soviet Union, the activity is believed
by law enforcement officials to have
taken on a new dimension as women,
desperate for jobs and money, have
been smuggled to work abroad as bar
waitresses, dancers and prostitutes,
sometimes under oppressive
conditions.
Major destinations for the Russian
and Ukrainian women have been
Israel, China. Korea and Japan,
according to Russian officials. But
human rights officials also say the sex
traffic has moved farther west,
specifically to the eastern United
States.