A Sampling of Clips for July 14^th, 2008

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UC Union Defies Court Order, Declares 5-Day Strike
KGTV, July 14 -- About 2,000 service workers at UCSD and its medical facilities plan to defy a judge's order and walk out on strike Monday morning, joining their counterparts statewide. About 8,500 members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees across California are set to go out on strike, including custodians, landscapers, security officers and cafeteria employees. UCSD Medical Center custodian Angie Mendoza said union members have been working without a contract since Jan. 31, and have been unsuccessfully negotiating a new contract since last Aug. 31.More

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MSNBC

Escondido Pushes Ahead With Immigrant Crackdown
Los Angeles Times, July 14 -- Officials in this San Diego County city are trying to discourage illegal immigration by enacting ordinances that crack down on border-crossers and the residents who harbor them. Escondido, a city with a burgeoning Latino population, is considering outlawing the pickup of day laborers along some streets and restricting overnight parking without a permit -- a move aimed at discouraging multiple families from sharing homes. (Quotes Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UCSD) More

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KNSD
KCAL

Are You Crazy Enough to Succeed?
MSNBC, July 13 -- I sit in the glass-walled nurses' station, waiting for my day to begin. A steady stream of people — all living with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD —approach the half door and utter some variation of "I have to go to the bathroom." The attractive young woman on duty smiles and hands over a small quantity of toilet paper, a squirt of soap in a specimen cup, and a paper towel with a cheery "Here you are!" This is what grade school must have seemed like to George Orwell. (Quotes Sanjaya Saxena, M.D., an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCSD) More

Young Survivors Get Their Day in the Sun
San Diego Union-Tribune, July 13 -- He ran in that slightly off-balance way toddlers do, on the green grass of De Anza Cove at Mission Bay. Peyton Fillat, just a month shy of his third birthday, looked healthy and happy. But when he was first born at UCSD Medical Center, things were not so bright for Peyton, his mother, Heidi, recalled as she watched him.  Born seven weeks early, Peyton had several critical medical problems that meant he had to stay in the hospital's Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for almost two months. More

$5K Murder-for-Hire Scheme Revealed
KABC, July 14 -- Arraignment is scheduled Monday for an Imperial Beach man accused of trying to pay someone $5,000 to kill his former business partner. Byron David Bensman, 32, was arrested last Thursday at his home in the 1200 block of 13th Street.  The arrest came after detectives got a tip from a man who reported that Bensman had been looking for someone to kill his business partner, according to sheriff's Detective Gary Williams. (Mentions UCSD) More

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San Diego Union-Tribune
KFMB

String Quartet That Also Whistles, Whispers and Wails
New York Times, July 8 -- The only disappointment about the opening night of Summergarden at the Museum of Modern Art was that it never rained. This popular free concert series is normally held in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, which has a capacity of around 600. But with gloomy skies threatening on Sunday, the event was moved to the entrance foyer, which seats only half as many. (Mentions UCSD music professor Chinary Ung) More

50th Birthday a Threshold to Many New Adventures
San Diego Union-Tribune, July 14 -- Images of professional athletes dressed in jerseys and shorts race back and forth across several strategically placed TV screens at Charcoal House Restaurant – Brian and Becky Hames' place in La Mesa. (Mentions UCSD) More

As Gas Costs Keep Rising, Look at Ways to Fight Back
San Diego Union-Tribune, July 13 -- With gas prices hovering above $4.50 per gallon and with the growing likelihood that those prices may rise to $7 or more in the near future, the time has come for America to declare war. “Declare war?” you may say. “Aren't we already waging one too many wars these days?” But I'm not talking about war on another nation. We need to declare war on oil itself: a multipronged attack involving business, government and you and me. (Mentions UCSD) More

When Ends Won't Meet
San Diego Union-Tribune, July 13 -- Jacqueline Gonzales and her husband, David, a machine operator, can't imagine how they could cut a dime more out of a budget that allows them just $15 every two weeks for their big splurge: takeout from McDonald's. Saddled with payments on a gas-guzzling truck and SUV and facing escalating food and gasoline costs, the Poway couple expect they'll be left with few options to economize should gasoline prices continue their rapid ascent. For now, their $925 monthly rent is reasonable, but any increase could be financially debilitating. (Quotes On Amir, an assistant professor of marketing at UCSD’s Rady School of Management) More

Actor Tests Her Mettle as Blanche DuBois
San Diego Union-Tribune, July 13 -- When Ion Theatre opens its reconceived version of Tennessee Williams' “A Streetcar Named Desire” tonight, it promises to be a boundary-stretching experience for both audiences and the performer playing the brittle Blanche DuBois. Monique Gaffney, daughter of retired UCSD professor Floyd Gaffney, works on a scene from "A Streetcar Named Desire," in which she plays Blanche. But a few years back, another Williams play proved similarly eye-opening for Monique Gaffney – by virtue of the fact she didn't appear in it.  More

Carrots, Sticks and Good Deeds
London Sunday Times, July 12 -- Alistair Darling and George Osborne agree on something - you can pay people to do good. The Shadow Chancellor's proposal to pay households for recycling waste and the Chancellor's reform of vehicle excise duty to encourage us to buy greener cars, are both founded on the belief that financial incentives can help to turn folk green. However, when politicians agree, it's often a sign they are all wrong. Incentives don't always work. (Mentions Uri Gneezy at UCSD’s Rady School of Management) More

Robert V. Phillips, 91; Official Helped
Los Angeles Through 1970s Energy Crisis
Los Angeles Times, July 9 -- Robert V. Phillips, a former general manager and chief engineer of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power whose novel plan to ration electricity helped the city get through the Arab oil embargo in the early 1970s, has died. He was 91. Phillips died June 28 of heart failure and pneumonia at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, said his daughter, Jane Phillips Wehrey. Until his health began deteriorating in April, he had lived in Bishop, Calif. (Quotes Steve Erie, a UCSD political science professor)  More

Nanoparticle Stops Cancer From Spreading
Health Day News, July 11 -- California researchers say they have developed molecular "smart bombs" that stop pancreatic and kidney cancer from spreading in mice while causing fewer side effects and damage to healthy surrounding tissues than traditional chemotherapy. A team from UCSD, designed a "nanoparticle" anti-cancer drug delivery system that zooms in on a protein marker called integrin avB3, which is found on the surface of certain tumor blood vessels. The marker is tied to the development of new blood vessels and malignant tumor growth. More

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Roundtable Guests Offer Divergent Economic Predictions
San Diego Daily Transcript, July 11 -- Two high profile people -- one a government regulator, the other a well-known banker -- came to San Diego last Monday to discuss the housing market and the condition of both the national and local economies. As expected, their opinions differed. Janet Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, spoke to members of the Economics Roundtable at UCSD, saying that several key questions need to be addressed. More

Nanotechnology 101
Voice of San Diego, July 9 --  Having already established itself as a hub for the burgeoning field of biotechnology, San Diego is now poised to become a prime player in the growing global market of nanotechnology -- the emerging body of small-scale science that researchers predict will revolutionize the medical world. (Mentions UCSD chemist Michael Sailor) More

Streaming Larry Smarr
San Diego Reader,  July 9 -- UCSD’s California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, which spends a tidy chunk of its taxpayer-furnished budget on public relations, has recently outdone itself, coming up with what it calls an “experiment in institutional lifecasting.” What the heck is that? Well, actually, it’s just an elaborate blog, called Calit2.Life, with Flickr streams and YouTube links “capturing the institute’s previously unwritten history with stories that might not qualify yet for a long-form news release or feature article on the main Calit2 Web site.” More

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