PCC Courier, October 20, 2005

Ghoulish Sleepover Page 8 Oct. 20, 2005 pcc-courieronline.com Vol. 92, Issue 9 Red Cross Sued by PCC Instructor Jennifer MacDonald News Editor Adjunct faculty member Dereck Andrade, who teaches public rela¬ tions at PCC, is taking legal action against his former employer, the San Gabriel Valley chapter of the American Red Cross, who accused him of divulging sensitive informa¬ tion. The local non-profit organization has recently come under scrutiny from the press for hiring a convicted felon and allegedly attempting to cover it up. Andrade, who has been an instructor at PCC since Spring 2004, was fired from his position as public relations director for the local chap¬ ter of the American Red Cross after working there for two years. In a lawsuit filed by Andrade on Oct. 1 3, he claims that the American Red Cross’ San Gabriel Valley Chapter and CEO Angie Turner, violated the Whistleblower Act when they fired him for filing a discrimination complaint over the termination of another former employee, Elizabeth Lopez. Under the Whistleblower Act, an employee cannot be fired for disclos¬ ing information that shows the com¬ pany is participating in activities that violate any law, rule or regula¬ tion. In the suit, Andrade also claims the Red Cross retaliated against him when he refused to cover up the agency’s sexual discrimination against Lopez, who is also filing suit. Turner reportedly asked Andrade to back up statements that Lopez was an unfit employee who was “undependable and incompe¬ tent at her job,” according to the lawsuit. The real reason Lopez was fired, according to Andrade, is that Turner wanted a man in the position of chief development officer. “In retaliation for Dereck’s refusal to collaborate a false state¬ ment by Angie Turner, they fired him,” said James Otto, the attorney representing Andrade and Lopez. The chairman of the local chap¬ ter’s board of directors, Michael Zoeller, dismissed Andrade’s claims as actions of a “disgruntled employ¬ ee.” Zoeller would not discuss details relating to Andrade or Lopez because they are personnal matters, but he did say the Red Cross sup¬ ported the decisions that have been made by Red Cross management, including Turner. Some in the city do not agree. Steve Madison, vice mayor of Pasadena, is questioning whether the city council should make a planned $100,000 donation to the Red Cross. Madison believes Andrade’s dismissal was retaliation, according to the Pasadena Star- News. Andrade’s termination letter states he was fired for reasons including portraying the Red Cross in a negative light by filing a com¬ plaint against the organization for discrimination against Lopez. But a week before he was fired, Andrade was put on suspension for disclosing information about Fred Brito, the man who was hired in Lopez’s place, to reporters from the Pasadena Star News and Los Angeles Times. Brito turned out to be a fraud. He used the alias of Fred Gomez when he applied for the position of chief development officer at the Red Cross. He was hired on Aug. 10. Brito slipped through a back¬ ground check conducted by the Red Cross, but couldn’t escape a “Google” search conducted by a wary Andrade, who found a Los Angeles Times article about him from Aug. 17. The front-page story on Brito detailed his dismissal from a $100,000-a-year fundraising job at the University of California, Los Angeles, for falsifying his resume and identity. The Times article also described [see Andrade, PAGE 3] Study Reveals Teen Sex Habits Caroline Ikeji, Mario Aguirre Courier Editors A survey about sex habits of young people, conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, found some of the most comprehensive information of its kind. The survey revealed such information as the prevalence of oral sex among teenagers and homosexual behavior among men and women aged 15 to 44. The study, titled “Sexual Behavior and Selected Health Measures,” found that more than half of all teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 have engaged in oral sex, a quarter of those admit¬ ting to never having participated in vaginal intercourse. While 49 per¬ cent of boys and 53 percent of girls have had intercourse, 55 percent of boys and 54 percent of girls who have had intercourse have also had oral sex. “We were surprised that the per¬ centages were similar,” said Jennifer Manlove, director of fertil¬ ity research for Child Trends. “You assume that females are more likely to give, males more likely to receive.” The belief here is that teens are turning to oral sex as another means of safer sex, according to the Washington Post. Though people engaging in oral sex also run the risk of contracting sexually trans¬ mitted diseases, the odds of that are less than those of a couple engag¬ ing in random sex without protec¬ tion. “While not all teens are having oral sex, a substantial percentage of teens who have not had sexual intercourse are having oral sex and may think of themselves as vir¬ gins,” Manlove said. “We’re not sure whether these teens who have not had sexual intercourse are engaging in oral sex because they view it as a way to maintain their technical virginity, or because they regard it as an easy method of birth control.” [see Sex, PAGE 3 ] PCC Walks for a Good Cause Taking a stand (top): Flo Briones and Adam Kratt head the 20 PCC students who walked the 6. 2-mile stretch through West Hollywood. A Place for Friends (right): Jose Sosa was pleasantly sur¬ prised that a friend of his was also walking for AIDS and HIV awareness. Jennifer Perez Staff Writer Twenty PCC students joined 26,000 others who gave up their Sunday to help raise money for HIV and AIDS awareness organi¬ zations. People filled the streets of West Hollywood Sunday for the 21st annual AIDS Walk Los Angeles to benefit AIDS Project Los Angeles. The walk raised approximately $3.2 million to sup¬ port those living with HIV and AIDS. Despite rain in the weather fore¬ cast, over 1,000 volunteers arrived early to set up and welcome the [see Walk, PAG E 3 ] Nader Calls for Civic Action Paul Aranda Staff Writer Former presidential candidate Ralph Nader discussed various issues at Caltech on Sunday night, kicking off the Caltech Y’s Social Activism Speaker Series. Nader dis¬ cussed topics ranging from the importance of academic science to the gradual downfall of a society “growing up corporate.” For many years General Motors told the American public that there was no connection between lack of seat belts in their vehicles and the high rate of casualties in automobile accidents. For one man, this expla¬ nation was not good enough, initiat¬ ing a long journey to expose the truth. The result was the ground¬ breaking book “Unsafe at Any Speed,” released in 1965, launching its 35-year-old author Ralph Nader into the national spotlight as the leader in the struggle for consumer rights. Throughout the last 40 years Nader has battled giant corpora¬ tions and the federal government on various consumer interests as well as environmental concerns. Nader has been credited as being instru¬ mental in the development of sever¬ al government organizations, including the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. More recently Nader was thrown into the national spot¬ light after the 2000 presidential elec¬ tion when the Supreme Court awarded Florida’s Electoral College votes to President George W. Bush. In the final vote count, Bush received 527 more votes than Gore, while Nader received 97,421 votes. Nader opened his speech by talk¬ ing about the difference between academic and corporate science. He spoke of the scientist who discov¬ ered the connection between parti¬ cles produced from vehicle emission pipes and smog in Los Angeles. As a result of this study, General Motors could no longer claim that there was no connection between vehicle emissions and air pollution. The research was not funded by the automobile industry. Nader’s speech entailed how aca¬ demic science is vital because it is open to peer review, not connected to political power in Washington, D.C., and it looks for civic values in order to apply science in the interest of people. According to Nader, cor¬ porate science, on the other hand, is often very secretive and not open to peer review. Corporate science favors trivial but very lucrative com¬ mercial values and disregards civic values. As an example, Nader point¬ ed out that the drug industry is not interested in conducting vaccine research for diseases that strangle third world countries because they are not profitable. As his speech progressed, Nader shifted from science to the dilem¬ mas of people in modern society “growing up corporate.” Nader said that modern corporations have taken away the constitutional rights of the people by effectively forming inside connections with the federal government. “When we grow up corporate, we don’t say we can turn this coun¬ try around if we can control what we legally already own,” said Nader. Looking to increase power and profit, corporations have taken over public ownership of the airwaves in the media, as well as access to the government. “Corporations now have the constitutional rights to lobby, engage in politics, to fund initiatives [see Nader, PAG E 3 ] Possible New Planet Causes Controversy Dean Lee Staff Writer The announcement in July of the discovery of a possible new planet by Caltech astronomer Michael Brown has astronomers no closer to an agreement about what consti¬ tutes a planet than before. Brown and his team at Caltech used the Gemini Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii to study the light reflected from the surface of the object, nicknamed Xena. They found that although Xena looks similar to Pluto, it is much larger in mass, with a surface covered in solid frozen methane. This possible new planet is con¬ sidered the largest object found in the Kuiper Belt, an area further from Earth then Neptune and made up of icy bodies. It is the largest object found orbiting the sun since the discovery of Neptune in 1846. “If it was not for the size of this new object, this would not be a con¬ troversy,” said John Sepikas, an astronomy instructor at PCC. “But because it’s larger than Pluto with similar characteristics to Pluto, astronomers don’t agree.” The word “planet” in Greek means “to wander.” In the past, stars seemed so far way in the solar system that they appeared to be fixed. Anything else that moved was once considered a planet. “About five new objects are dis¬ covered every month, ” Sepikas said. “Should everything we find with better and better technology be considered a planet? I think this is the real question here.” Eight of the nine defined planets move in the same direction in the same plane, known as the ecliptic. This plane can be thought of as a disk with all the objects a few degrees apart. “Objects in our solar system with steep inclination away from the ecliptic, above 20 degrees, and things with random orbits are not planets,” said Mark Rooney, a NASA ambassador. Pluto is the only planet with an extremely elliptical orbit, and has the greatest tilt away from Earth at 17.5 degrees. Xena is tilted at 45 degrees and has a greater elliptical orbit than Pluto, according to Brown’s research. “Their elliptical orbit around the sun and their mass define them bet¬ ter as large comet-like bodies in the Kuiper Belt,” Sepika said. “It is up to the International Astronomical Union to make this distinction.” Astronomers also do not agree on naming objects in the Kuiper Belt as planets because, even though the both Pluto and Xena are consid¬ ered large for Kuiper Belt objects, [see Xena, PAG E 3 ]