News Roundup (5/11/06)

Some of these topics deserve a bit more coverage than this post will give them, but still, here are the skinnies…

• Tom Vilsack will make his first visit to New Hampshire next month, headlining a fund-raiser for Democrats from Manchester (NH’s largest city).  He was supposed to go last Fall, but somehow hurricane Katrina forced him to reschedule.  Past guests at this particular event include both Al Gore and John Kerry.
• Results from the immigrant protests are beginning to be quantified here in Iowa.  United for the Safety and Dignity of Immigrants, a big immigrants’ rights organization here in Iowa, has estimated that 40,000 Iowans participated in the May 1 “Day Without Immigrants.”  It’s also being estimated that 17 Iowans who participated were fired as a result.  It seems impossible to even begin to understand how either of those statistics were compiled, but there they are.
• The University of Iowa is trying to improve gender equity in its faculty hiring and promotion process.  They’re still well short of their (somewhat meager) goal of making their faculty 32% female by 2010, but a committee today proposed improving the situation with a fairer tenure review process that wouldn’t penalize women who take maternity leave.  Women make up an “increasing” percentage of their faculty, but the “increase” is less than 1% a year.
• Archer Daniels Midland is building two new ethanol plants, one of which will be in Cedar Rapids (the other will be in Columbus, NE).  Both plants will output about 275 million gallons a year.  The Cedar Rapids plant will be finished in the second half of 2008, and it’ll expand ADM’s ethanol output from 1 billion gallons a year to 1.5 billion.
• Diebold screws up again, and it looks like it’s going to affect us in Iowa.  Computer scientists are calling this newly discovered way of tampering with “black box” voting machines the “worst case scenario” and the “most serious security breach.”  They won’t even describe the flaw because of the risk of any Joe Schmo doing it to tamper with or disable the voting machines.  Maybe private companies shouldn’t be controlling the way we elect our government officials?
• And, finally, Iowa’s corn is looking a little purple.  I don’t know enough about agriculture to know how big a deal it is, but it sounds kind of funny.

I’m going to try to take some time to write up another post about the political implications of the Maytag closure tonight, so don’t be alarmed that I haven’t included a single story on that in this roundup.

Add comment May 11th, 2006