Columns:: Newsmakers

since 12/15/98

Columns::April 1, 2002

61st Peabody Awards: September 11 programming prominent among this year’s winners
Kleven, head of avian medicine, is named a Regents Professor
Researcher receives $1 million grant to study stuttering in children
International symposium participants will discuss biotechnology in textiles
Food safety director will deliver annual Woodroof Lecture
Out of the woods
Driven to succeed
Human development specialist’s career is an extension of himself
New director appointed to Coca-Cola Center for Marketing Studies
New recruitment office opens in metro Atlanta

Campus News

Newsmakers

Collecting European taxes?
CNet reported on the January decision by the European Union to require companies outside the E.U. to collect taxes on the goods and services--such as music, videos and e-books--that they deliver digitally to European customers. The proposal immediately drew questions and objections from U.S. businesses and trade organizations. “The U.S. is not about to set up a VAT compliance arm of the Internal Revenue Service,” Walter Hellerstein, a tax law expert at UGA, told the reporter. “I think the E.U. is going in a direction that it needs to go in philosophically, knowing full well there [are] going to be leaks in the system. If nobody complies, obviously it is going to be a problem.”

Lost village site found
The Charlotte Observer recently reported that the lost Indian town of Ylasi may have been found in Lancaster County, N.C. The city is believed to have been built around a huge mound of earth and visited by the troops of 16th-century Spanish explorers Hernando de Soto and Juan Pardo. “Ylasi has never been located and this site certainly could be it, given its proximity to the water and the fact that artifacts have been located there,” Charles Hudson, a retired professor of history and anthropology at UGA, told the Observer.

Overwhelmed by numbers
The Newark Star Ledger reported on the All-Taxa Biodiversity Inventory of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, currently being carried out by 2,200 volunteers. It the most ambitious plant and animal census ever attempted, and the results are overwhelming. Since it began in 1998, about 1,480 species have been discovered on a half-acre preserve on the Tennessee-North Carolina border, adding to an original list of about 12,000. Of those,144 species are new to science. “I don’t want to trivialize what has been accomplished, but it is not going to be done in a generation at the rate we are going,” said John Pickering, a UGA entomologist.

Forgiveness and repentance
USA Today reported on the relationship between forgiveness and repentance in the world’s major religions. UGA religion professor Alan Godlas was quoted on the need for remorse in Islam as well as Christianity and Judaism. Repentance is a “pretty clear element,” he said. “God is always forgiving, but for humans to participate in that, they have to repent.” But, he said, “it is basically up to God whom God forgives.”

U.S.-India military relations
The United States is currently willing to sell military weapons to India to thwart terrorism, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, drug trafficking and piracy. Seema Gahlaut, director of the South Asia program at UGA’s Center for International Trade and Security, told the New York Times that this kind of negotiation has not occurred since Ronald Reagan was president in 1984. Because American officials fear the spread of nuclear weapons, they have not been willing to sell a significant amount of warfare to India. According to Gahlaut, American technological exports there totaled $25 million.

Kim Carlyle of the UGA News Service monitors coverage of UGA in local, state and national media. Contact her for information about these or other stories in the news. Newsmakers appears in every other issue of Columns.

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