Page 5 The Lion’s Eye April 13, 2010 Eveon World&Local Health Care Bill Extends To Student Loans? By: Tiffany Ragins-Morris Lions Eye Staff Writer Tjr5073@psu.edu March 30th 2010- NBC’s Nightly News covered - Obama signing ‘fixes’ into the health care bill. Some of these ‘fixes’ are aimed at college students across the United States. As he toured across the country to anchor sup- port for the health legislation, one of his stops was Northern Virginia Community College where he explained the revi- sions that would directly affect college students. According to MSN- BC, the major change will be to remove commercial banks ability to handle Federal Student Loans. Commercial banks have acted as a middleman between government loans and students for decades. Loan issuers in- clude Salle Mae and Wells Fargo, as well as many more private lenders. According to the MSNBC report the bill would cap loan repayments to 10 percent of a gradu- ate’s income and provide more funding to community colleges, and historically black colleges and universities (HBCU s) would be granted $2.5 billion. Private lenders are afraid of the * potential job loss which would add to the 9.7 unemployment rate. On the political side, Republicans fear that a complete government takeover of student aid would be a burden to an already thriving Students pursuing higher education benefit from the Health Care Bill. (photo courtesy of cbsnews.com) program. Obama reassures his college audience and students across the country that, “It represents a major step forward.” The hope, Obama explains, is that this new revision will save tax payers $68 bil- lion over the next ten years. With the added controversy of student aid, anticipation still rests on whether the House Republicans will sup- port the bill. According to the New York Times, the House Republicans may not support the reform and are expected to filibuster due to concerns for taxpayers. With a growing page count, the health care bill is becoming one of the most im- portant pieces of legislation in US history. ~ GOOGLE Vs. CHINA? A DIFFERENT KIND OF GREAT WALL By: Jennifer Knowlton and Nancy Perone Lion's Eye Campus/World and Local News Editors Jak 5450@psu.edu/Nip5014@psu.edu GENEVA ATOM SMASHER SETS RECORD By Jennifer Santangelo Lion's Eye Staff Writer Jms1084@psu.edu Scientists celebrate after their first suc- cessful collision of the miniature “Big Bang” experiment. (photo courtesy of Reuters and Yahoo! News) Ever wonder what the world was like seconds after the Big Bang took place? Scientists have for many years. A tunnel located deep down inside the bowels of the earth is where scientists are coming amazingly close to replicating conditions moments after the Big Bang took place. The European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, built a machine capable of mimicking these condi- tions. The machine is called the Large Hadron Collider or LHC for short. The media has adopted the name Geneva Atom Smasher. “This is probably because it is more dramatic and more self explanatory than the name Large Hadron Collider,” observes Dr. Timo- thy Lawlor, professor at Penn State Brandywine. “It is a particle accelera- tor, designed to collide two beams of particles head-on at high energies. These particles are typically protons,” states Lawlor. According to the American Institute of Physics, the Cockcroft- Walton Accelerator was first intro- duced in 1930. Cockcroft and Walton used a 200-kilovolt transformer to accelerate protons down a straight dis- charge tube, but they concluded that tunneling did not work and decided to seek higher energies. So what about this machine makes it so significant? “This accelerator is significant be- cause it will accelerate the particles to a record braking 7 TeV. An eV is a unit of energy used to measure the energy of small particles like protons and electrons and a TeV is a trillion eV,” explains Lawlor. How does the LHC mimic Big Bang conditions? “Collisions at these energies will shed light on conditions in the universe when the universe was only one bil- lionth of a second old! A time when the universe was so dense and hot that particles at that time would have had energies comparable to the beams of particles being used in the LHC,” says Lawlor excitedly. The scientists at CERN would also like to find the identity of the dark matter that shapes the visible cosmos and the strange particle known as the Higgs boson, believed to infuse other particles with mass, according ~ to an article in the New York Times. “Detecting the Higgs Boson is one of the goals of the LHC but it cannot be achieved before the LHC is running at full power,” notes Lawlor. “This is probably at least three years off, due to some needed upgrades to accom- modate such high energies. The LHC is currently running at half power” he adds. Google has been censoring websites for the Chinese government for many years, but on March 30, 2010 Google stopped censoring websites after the Chinese government had been suspected of cyber attacking Google. According to BBC News, the firewall was up for one day where Chinese citi- zens were not able to visit the official Hong Kong website. Once the firewall was down, people were able to see what the government had been censoring for the first time. The phrase “gs rfai” had started appearing in search result links from the firewall blocking anything having to do with Radio Free Asia. Radio Free Asia, which is located in Wash- ington, DC, is a non-profit organization that allows people in Asian countries access to print and broad- cast journalism that would otherwise be censored. The website for RFA, www.rfa.org, is available in 9 different Asian cultures languages, as well as English. According to its website, Radio Free Asia was founded March 12, 1996 within the guidelines of the International Broadcasting Act and is funded by the Broadcasting Board of Governors. The RFA Code of Ethics states that, “Strict adherence to the highest standards of journalism is at the very core of RFA’s mission. Our broadcast and online stories and programs must be accurate, fair, and balanced.” Citizens of Asian countries can choose to have their news delivered to them via email news- letters if they encounter web searches like with the case of Google and China. Radio Free Asia’s Presi- dent, Libby Liu, wrote a blog that was published by the Huffington Post. In her blog post she says, “The deep irony is how authorities use the Internet -- with its enormous potential to promote discussion and the free exchange of ideas -- as a means to silence and intimidate.” : Google has officially stopped censoring websites because the firm believes that censor- ing websites is denying human rights. All citizens should be allowed to see what the government is hiding from them and how to connect to the world at a national level. As a result, the Internet is no longer being censored by Google. How the Chinese government will retaliate is to come. (AR ha The Google/China debacle could be tied to a non-profit news organization. (photo courtesy of BBC News and the Associated Press.) AAA ANS
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