April 20, 2004

Carolina in the News

Here is a sampling of links and notes about Carolina
people and programs cited recently in the media:

International Coverage

BOOKS: Top 10 reading on Rwanda
Reuters, U.K.
Ten years after some 900,000 people were killed in Rwanda in just 100 days, we are still coming to terms with what happened, trying to understand it, and why the rest of the world failed to stop it...."The Cohesion of Oppression: Clientship and Ethnicity in Rwanda, 1860-1960", by Catharine Newbury also sheds light on the geographical and political context in which the genocide occurred. Newbury, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writing before 1994, considers the effect of the Europeans' preferential treatment of the Tutsi, which led to an explosion of Hutu power at Rwandan independence in 1962.

National Coverage

A New Window to the Cosmos Opens in Chile
Yahoo! News
Astronomers opened a new window to the cosmos on Saturday by inaugurating a powerful U.S.-Brazilian telescope under northern Chile's famously clear skies.

Online bogeyman? (Editorial)
Herald Tribune, Sarasota, Fl.
Record companies like to blame declining sales of CDs on Internet piracy....The study by professors Felix Oberholzer of Harvard Business School and Koleman Strumpf of the University of North Carolina found that "Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero."

Regional Coverage

Brunswick County teams up with UNC
The Sun News, Myrtle Beach
Brunswick County Schools and Brunswick Community College plan to announce a science education partnership with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that could eventually lure biotechnology businesses to southeastern North Carolina.

State & Local Coverage

Opening of telescope helps UNC soar (Editorial)
The Herald Sun
Astronomy is at once perhaps the purest of sciences and one of the most difficult in which to make a lasting contribution....And SOAR is just the start, as UNC's also helping build a telescope in South Africa that's more than twice the size of the instrument in Chile. Clearly, brighter days are ahead for the folks in Phillips Hall.

Outside the Box
Winston Salem-Journal
Mike Kelley, a developer for the Wal-Mart Supercenter that opened in 2001 on Hanes Mill Road, spent months working with neighbors who were opposed to that project....North Carolina is no different than the rest of the country, said David Owens, a professor with the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

N.C.'s law is superior on subprime lending
Business North Carolina
North Carolina's predatory-lending law, one of the nation's first, took a hit in early 2004 when the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency weakened states' authority over the subprime-lending practices of nationally chartered banks, which are regulated by the federal government. State officials have said they will ignore the federal rules. Michael Stegman, director of the Center for Community Capitalism at UNC Chapel Hill, has studied the North Carolina law and discusses its impact and the OCC rules.

Gelt Trip
Business North Carolina
Night has fallen - it's past 6 - on the one- day special session that Gov. Mike Easley called last December for the General Assembly to consider his latest economic-incentives package...."It is like a game of chicken," says Mike Luger, a professor of management at UNC Chapel Hill who has studied incentives.

'Apprentice' reaps rewards of TV run
The Charlotte Observer
Kwame Jackson, who spent his childhood in Charlotte, became the nation's most famous runner-up job candidate when Donald Trump declined to hire him on the hit NBC show "The Apprentice" Thursday....Jackson, 30, graduated from East Mecklenburg High School and UNC Chapel Hill before going on to earn his MBA at Harvard and work on Wall Street.

Issues and Trends

Not satisfied at UNCW (Editorial)
The Wilmington Star News
The little college that New Hanover County taxpayers founded after World War II has risen with surprising speed into the ranks of respectable regional universities. Some schools would be comfortable with that status. UNCW is not.

Chancellor search to start soon
The News & Observer
The quest to replace N.C. State University Chancellor Marye Anne Fox is expected to begin in the next two weeks with the formation of a search committee.
NCSU trustees Chairwoman Peaches Gunter Blank wants a committee of 10 to 12 people with representation from students, faculty, alumni, trustees and universitywide administrators.

Hearn resumes his duties at WFU
Winston Salem Journal
Thomas K. Hearn announced yesterday that he is returning immediately as president of Wake Forest University. But he also said that he planned to retire from the presidency in June 2005.

Note: If you have any questions about Carolina in the News, please call Russell Campbell at News Services, (919) 962-2091, russell_campbell@unc.edu, or Mike McFarland in University Communications, mike_mcfarland@unc.edu

Note: Web links on this page are time-sensitive, so stories might not be available after the day they first appeared.