puge 4- The Behrend Collegi Beacon. Thursday. October 29. 199$ The Behrend College Beacon published weekly hx the students of Penn State Erie. The Behrend College News Editor Will lonian Photography Editor \ndn;t /iiftmo Associate* Editor Mark ( Ik < nb,ink Business Manager bimu Pd\ is Advisors Robert Sfwt I lint O I oinfhltn Postal Information: The Beacon is published weekly by the students of Penn State brie. The Behrend College: hirst Floor. The J. hlmet Reed Union Building. Station Road, brie. PA IbS6T The Beacon ean be reached by calling ( X 1 4 1 X9X b4XX or (X 14' ; :-)X Old (bAX). ISSN 1071 9288. A view from the lighthouse Vote for Fall Break the right decision The University Faculty Senate met on Tuesday and voted to implement a Fall Break starting in 1999. This has been an issue that has been discussed for a long time in our own Student Government Association and also in the Campus of Commonwealth Stu dent Governments. Penn State only has one holiday during the Fall semes ter, not including Thanksgiving. That one holiday is Labor Day. only a week after classes start. Nearly every other college and uni versity in the United Slates has some sort of break in the Fall. In fact. Penn State has one of the longest semesters of any university in the country. Al though Graham Spanter. Penn State's president, commented that some of the faculty are proud of our long semes ter. many students aren't so happy at this fact. The long stretch between Labor Day and Thanksgiving gives students no opportunity to catch up on work they ha\e fallen behind on. or simply take a break. The University Faculty Senate made a good decision when they voted in Some good news about teens and safe sex By David W. Kaplan Special to The Washington Post New figures from the Centers lor Disease Control (CDC) show that since 1991, the proportion of Ameri can high school students who have never had sexual intercourse has risen 11 percent. The percentage of young men who have never had sexual in tercourse has risen from 43 to just over 51 percent, and of young women, from 49 to 52 percent. In a nation with high teenager rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs); including HIV, unintended pregnancy and births; this is excellent news. At the same time, sexually active high school students now are more likely to use condoms and less likely to have multiple sexual partners than teenagers in 1991. Nearly 63 percent of the young men and 51 percent ol the young women used a condom dur ing their most recent sexual inter- course Both the abstinence-only crowd and the abstinence-plus-contracep tives crowd; the conservative anti the liberal sides ol the sexuality educa tion controversy; are taking credit lor these heartening data. I think both should take some credit. Messages to postpone sex and those to 'Have Sale Sex or No Sex" are not mutually ex clusive but compatible and comple mentary. In fact, extensive research shows that sexuality education that empha sizes abstinence and includes contra ceptive information and services helps youth in two ways. It helps ab stinent youth delay the onset of sexual intercourse, and it supports young people in protecting themselves from unintended pregnancy and STDs once they become sexually active. A recent fact-finding mission to the Netherlands. France and Germany, sponsored by Advocates lor Youth and the University of North Carolina Editor in Chief \rilU' Ril/ottC Managing Editor \ \ i hit'll' Jones Features Editor Joti Siubbs Sports Editor .bison Snsder Layout Editors \flkt I’t I KOIS Advertising Managers //in l dm i ( \ll, \ S null, Letter Policy: The Beacon encourages letters to the editor. Letters should include the address, phone number, semester standing and major of the w riter. Writers can mail their letters to behrcoll2t«'aol com. Letters must be received no later than spm Tuesday for inclusion in that week s issue. favor of the Fall Break. Having one of the longest semesters of any college is of no advantage to students. In fact, the long stretch between breaks is most likely detrimental to many students, as they have no rest during the semester. Another benefit of a semester break is that students who don't live close to school can see their families before Thanksgiving. If a student live many hours away, just a weekend isn't enough time to go home lor a visit. This can result in a student's going sev eral months without seeing her or hjs fanulv. This break would provide that opportunity. at Charlotte, found striking differ ences between the United States and these European nations. The Euro pean approach to teenage sexuality is characterized by openness and readily available free or low-cost contracep tive services and information. Teen reproductive health is a public health, not a political or religious, issue. Re search drives public health policies to reduce unintended pregnancies, abortion and STDs. Teenagers receive open, honest, consistent information about sexuality from parents, grand parents, media, schools and health care providers. The government funds massive, consistent, long-term public education campaigns using television, radio, discos, billboards, pharmacies and clinics to deliver clear, explicit portrayals of respon sible sexual behavior. Mass media are partners with government and health officials in this campaign. The result: Birih rates of 13 per 1,000 teenage women in Germany, nine per 1,000 in France and seven per 1,000 in the Netherlands com pared with 55 per 1 .000 in the United States. Rates of STDs, including HIV, are four to seven times lower in these European countries than in the United By contrast, in the United States, teenagers are exhorted to "Just Say No" until marriage. The result: Teen agers in the United States Irequently report that intercourse "just hap pened" or "was an accident." What this means is that many American teenagers are having unprotected sexual intercourse because they feel guilty when they protect themselves, since contraception is planned. To underline this point, the recent CDC survey found that 37 percent of the young men and 49 pereent of the young women did not use condoms the last time they had sexual inter- course Current responses in the United Rose I on, si The Critic Pro-life groups must preach non-violence There are holy wars being waged today, and not all of them are spill ing only Muslim and Arab blood. Right here in the United States, a countrv that was founded on the be liefs of religious freedom, snipers and bombers who believe they have God on their side are killing doctors who perform abortions. Last Friday, Dr Barnett Slepian. a gynecologist and obstettician in Amherst. New York, was shot to death in his own kitchen by a sniper as his wife and one ol then four sons watched on. Slepian was known to perform abortions and to speak out in sup port of a woman's right to choose. He was known by his friends to be quiet, but stubborn. Betsy Kozinn, a nurse who worked with Slepian said of the doctor: "As long as abor tion was legal, he would provide safe, legal abortions ... He wasn’t going to be bullied by somebody else to not do it. He didn’t enjoy doing The Lobster and the music to the dance of life Space, The Final Frontier With John Glenn, the first American to orbit the Earth, getting ready to return to space at the age of 77, many people are re-evaluating the space program. Some see this is as only a beginning, and anxiously await the coming years. Others, however, feel that the space program is waste of time and that sending an old man into space is a waste of time and resources. These people are ig- norant. The history of mankind is tilled with tales of exploration. It is a de fining part of our collective culture. We have an innate need to learn more, to expand our horizons and explore the unknown. Why else would we have climbed to Mount Everest, reach the poles, dive under the seas or reach across the oceans? States, such as the congressionally mandated abstinence-until-marriage education, indicate that policymakers are not taking stock of reality. The average age of puberty is now under 13, the average age of marriage is 26 for men and 25 for women, and by age 20, about 90 percent of young people have initiated sexual inter course. What the United States most ur gently needs is to protect all of its youth, both the sexually active and the sexually abstinent. That means continuing to encourage and support young people in choosing abstinence and actively encouraging and sup porting young people in protecting themselves when they have sexual in- tercourse Kaplun is chief of adolescent medi cine and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and the Children’s Hospital in Denver. Editorial them, but he felt that no one else would While no pro-life organization has taken credit for the doctor's slaying, one would guess that the sniper held the same beliefs as many right-to-fife institutions do. “There are no words to describe the person who did this,” says neighbor Sal Curcil. “If you’re a right-to-lifer, that’s all life, includ ing the doctor.” Mr. Curcil is exactly right. How pro-family could a per son he that kills a father of four sons, ages 7 to 15? My personal beliefs about abortion are tar from the point at hand. For all purposes herein, I shall remain completely neutral on the subject. My guess is that the members of pro life groups do not want this kind of publicity. However, they have done very little, or at least obviously not enough, to prevent such attacks. Vio lent events such as this and the bombing of a North Carolina abor- Space is indeed the final frontier, an area so massive that it boggles the mind. With the world growing smaller and smaller through ad vances in technology, and a high birth rate, we must expand ourselves once again. The quest for knowledge is the greatest endeavor someone can un dertake. By acquiring new informa tion we satiate our curiosity and im prove the lives of everyone. That is what the space program does. It is a quest for knowledge about the larger world around us. Sure, some people prefer to focus on just understanding our planet, but it’s time to wake up, to realize that we are a part of some thing much bigger than anyone can possibly imagine. And by under- Old Laws Work Against Net Porn 1998, Los Angeles Times editorial There are several widely held no tions about Internet-related crime. One holds that law enforcement can not deal with quick-hit criminals whose global computer transactions can be accomplished in seconds. An other is that the police forces of many nations will never close ranks to share information and coordinate in vestigations. Still another holds that Washington must have the means to decode computer encryption if law enforcement is to do its job. As Los Angeles Times staff writers Mark Fritz and Solomon Moore showed last Friday in an article about a child pornography investigation, none are necessarily true. U.S. Customs Service computer experts worked closely with local law enforcement and several foreign po lice agencies to conduct, over the course of two days, 100 raids in Cali fornia and 21 other states and in Aus tralia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Fin- tion clinic this summer are seriously hurting right-to-life groups' credibil ity and political power. Earlier in the summer, during “Gay Day” at Disney World, extreme conservative groups brought their families down to Orlando, Flordia. to shout slurs and obscenities to openly gay patrons of the amusement park. The contorted faces of mostly white protestors and their children damning the homosexuals to hell as they passively walked through the gates and into the park were reminicent of the faces of young schoolboys and schoolgirls harrassing the first black students to be integrated into public schools. The sexually insecure homopho bic protestors claimed that they were preaching Christ’s word as they os tracized the openly gay men and women. No matter how badly the protestors desecrated the Bible to turn it into a message of hate, many standing that larger universe that sur rounds us we learn not only about distant objects, which we may never see, but also about our past, and our possible future. It is a sad world that we live in if people are more concerned about the cost of scientific progress than in the progress itself. What would have happened if Columbus never got the financing for his trip? Don't worry about how much the Space Program costs, because the information that it generates will pay you back several fold. Back to the story of John Glenn. There are already two companies of fering flights into space, so custom ers can experience weightlessness. It is also estimated that within twenty years, private enterprise will be fi land, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Sweden. Their target was the largest Internet child pornogra phy ring discovered to date, known as Wonderland. “I’m unaware of another police operation that has ever pulled to gether so many law enforcement agencies worldwide,” Bob Packham, the deputy director general of Britain’s National Crime Squad, told a reporter. Wonderland was a tight-knit group that freely traded 100,000 images of child pornography. Its members had production studios for live child sex shows that they transmitted over the Net. The operation had a computer security designer and programming and hardware specialists who built a daunting array of codes and power ful encryption to maintain secrecy. Encryption employs complicated algorithms to scramble documents until they can be decoded by the in tended receiver. Although encryption religious leaders would agree that Christ did not scream and spit in the faces of Jews to get them to listen to him. Even conservative priests and pastors who concede that homosexu ality is wrong would most likely agree that this kind of behavior is the wrong way of communicating their message. Whenever I see the Pope visiting a country to speak, I don't want to think of him as a leader of a terror ist-hate group. Conservative alli ances must speak out more fre quently against such violent acts against humanity. The Religious Right must do so quickly and ada mantly to keep the political power they have and to remain clean and credible. If they do not, "God" may soon become a devil term. Stubbs is features editor for The Beacon. The Critic appears every three weeks nancing most space missions. You could very well retire in a condo floating in space, where the low grav ity will allow you to live for years longer. John Glenn is once again explorer. He is risking his life to gain more information about the universe around us, and its effects on people. His work over the next several days could very well impact your life in the future. So don’t try to put a price tag on exploration, and don’t be upset that an old man is using tax money to return to space. Think of it as an investment in your future. Perkins is layout editor for The Bea con. His column appears every three surely will be a backbone of trust and security in the electronic communi cations and business transactions of the future, U.S. federal law enforce ment agencies presently maintain that they need access and eavesdrop ping ability to prevent criminals from plying their trade in secrecy. But in the child pornography case, tradi tional law enforcement means like wiretaps, search warrants and mes sage tracing proved sufficient. In other words, traditional methods were applied to a new medium. Some privacy advocates are un nerved by what they see as entrap ment in this case, but that’s prepos terous. Depravity has been brought to light. Some of the children de picted have been identified as rela tives and neighbors of accused Won derland members. This case exposes vile secrets. But more important, it shows how an electronically well-defended crime ring can be broken without overarching laws and assaults on pri vacy.
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers