Columbus, Ohio Mayor Michael B. Coleman has drawn the line. Sort of. He has taken a stand against the Arizona immigration bill. Kind of. He has acted foolishly and hypocritically. That, I’m sure of.

Coleman last week banned all city-worker travel to Arizona because of its new controversial immigration law. In doing so, Coleman, like many others, has proved that he values political correctness more than reality. He is falling directly in line with other opponents to the bill who have spread negative rhetoric.

Honestly, the Arizona bill is probably long overdue. Between 2000 and 2009, the number of illegal immigrants in the state increased 42 percent. Illegal immigration costs Arizona taxpayers $1.3 billion every year, according to the Federation of Immigration Reform.

Some critics say it forces immigrants to carry extra “papers,” which is untrue. They do not have to carry any documents other than those already mandated by the federal government. Just the thought of carrying papers is enough to turn some against the bill, but all American citizens need to prove their identity when purchasing alcohol, driving a vehicle or going to an R-rated movie.

Under the bill, someone’s status can only be questioned after a law enforcement official makes lawful contact. If officers have reasonable suspicion, they must call immigration officials to determine whether the person is in the country illegally.

Constitutional? Kris Kobach, a law professor at U. Missouri-Kansas City thinks so. “It only reinforces existing federal law and does not introduce new laws,” he said.

A recent Rasmussen poll shows that Americans support such a bill 55 percent to 33. They support the specific Arizona bill 69 percent to 23.

Yet Mayor Coleman finds the bill discriminatory, which prompted him to ban all state- funded travel to the Valley of the Sun. On the first day, he rejected a request from the city’s technology director to attend a seminar in Phoenix.

But this is where it gets interesting. Coleman, despite seeing the bill as unconscionable, continues to do business with companies in Arizona. In fact, the city just extended its contract with a business that operates red-light cameras in Columbus. His reasoning was that eliminating it would not be in the best interest of taxpayers (voters).

But if a state has just passed a law so awful that you won’t even allow someone to go there, why would you continue doing business with them? Why would the mayor want to be associated with a state that is so racist, oppressive and overreaching?

It seems like Coleman opposes Arizona’s immigration law except when it benefits Coleman. Banning travel to Arizona does not send the message: “We will not tolerate this!” It sends the message that Columbus is so easily influenced that it will allow another state to dictate what it does. It sends the message that we do not understand the illegal immigration problem in Arizona. Or, maybe it just sends the message that there are illegal aliens working for the city of Columbus.

Maybe we should invite all the illegal aliens too afraid to live in Arizona to Columbus. Coleman would be more than happy to have them, and all of our grounded city workers will stay right here to help.

Lamar Abel, a former walk-on defensive lineman for the U. Florida Gators football team, died Saturday after an apparent seizure.

After participating in a roadside cleanup with his fraternity brothers at Southwest 62nd Boulevard on Saturday afternoon, the 21-year-old reported feeling chest pains around 7 p.m.

He suffered a seizure at his home in Campus Lodge Apartments, according to Michael Bowie, an adviser to Abel’s fraternity, Omega Psi Phi.

Bowie said one of Abel’s fraternity brothers called the paramedics and tried to resuscitate him before help arrived. He was taken to Shands Hospital where he was pronounced dead shortly after midnight.

Bowie remembered Abel as a funny person who truly cared about people.

“He was more than just a student to me,” Bowie said. “He was a friend.”

When friends learned of Abel’s death, they arrived at Campus Lodge Apartments to hold a prayer vigil in the parking lot, according to Kimone Codner, a close friend to Abel through the National Panhellenic Council.

“He touched a lot of people while here,” Codner said.

Codner’s sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha, named him Mr. Congeniality during a men’s appreciation event. Abel’s sense of humor, motivation and good nature earned him the title, she said.

An official candlelight vigil was organized on Turlington Plaza on Sunday at 8 p.m. in memory of the athlete.

“It was helpful for people to get out their emotion,” Codner said.

The former athlete, who also played for football for Blanche Ely High School in his hometown of Sunrise, Fla., was known as quite the cook to those close to him, often offering to prepare meals on Sundays for his fraternity brothers and neighbors.

The 6-2, 263-pound Abel wore the No. 62 jersey, dressed for 10 games and saw playing time when the Gators played the Citadel in 2008. He was named  Scout Team Player of the Week prior to the game against South Carolina in 2008. Abel also made the SEC Fall Academic Honor Roll in 2008-2009, according to UF archives.

Demario Atwater, one of two men charged with killing former U. North Carolina at Chapel Hill student body president Eve Carson, pleaded guilty to state charges of first-degree murder Monday. Because of his guilty plea, Atwater will not receive the death penalty.

Atwater also pleaded guilty today to first-degree kidnapping, possession of a firearm by a felon and robbery with a dangerous weapon and received life in prison without the possibility of parole for the March 5, 2008 incident.

Monday’s court session marked the second time Atwater, 23, could have received the death penalty. Last month, Atwater pleaded guilty to federal charges of carjacking resulting in death and kidnapping and received a life sentence without parole.

Carson, a pre-med Morehead-Cain scholar who was close to graduation, was found dead in a neighborhood near UNC’s campus. Before shooting Carson five times, Atwater and Laurence Lovette, his alleged accomplice, kidnapped her and forced her to withdraw money from an ATM.

Lovette was also arrested for the death of Duke U. engineering graduate student Abhijit Mahato, 29, who was shot and killed in his home at the Anderson Apartments near West Campus Jan. 18, 2008. Lovette faces first-degree murder charges for both students’ deaths.

Carson’s family offered a statement after the hearing supporting Atwater’s life sentence.

“We won’t be talking to the court about how our lives are diminished without Eve,” said Wade Smith, a Raleigh lawyer, on behalf of Carson’s family, as reported by the (Raleigh) News & Observer. “The effects of her death are both obvious and personal. We choose not to confront Demario Atwater. The selfishness of taking another’s life is incomprehensible.”

Over 100 years after his death, Mark Twain will be given one last opportunity to dish out his sardonic wit this November when U. California-Berkeley publishes his long-awaited uncensored autobiography.

Twain – who was known for his sharp wit and clever one-liners as much as his literary masterpieces – had a reputation for voicing strongly worded and often controversial views on subjects ranging from religion to politics. That, some experts say, is part of the reason why the posthumous release of his autobiography is causing such a stir.

The full manuscript contains over 1,000 pages of never before published writing that Twain explicitly instructed must not be printed in full until a century after his death.

“The idea is that it gave him the freedom to say what he had to say in a frank way,” said Robert Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project and Papers at UC Berkeley. “Religion, politics, but also people … (Twain) didn’t want to injure them or their sons or their grandsons.”

The publication of the complete autobiography has been long anticipated among literary scholars and English professors. A lucky few have obtained access to the full manuscript – the result of a decade’s worth of work with a stenographer. The original contained thousands of pages of Twain’s thoughts about his life.

“His autobiography is so big,” said Forrest Robinson, professor of American studies at U. California-Santa Cruz, who has written several books about Twain. “I think he had something like 350 sessions with the stenographer … there are literally hundreds of hours.”

Robinson, who has already read the autobiography, says the book promises to be a great read, in keeping with Twain’s style.

“He’s just terrific fun – all he does is lie,” Robinson said. “It’s priceless … There’s just hundreds of hours of Twain talking away to the stenographer about whatever’s on his mind.”

Though this will be the first complete and uncensored version of the autobiography published, parts of the manuscript have been released before. According to Hirst, many of these were edited and revised to read more like traditional narratives.

“That’s one of the things we’re fixing,” he said. “What (Twain) wanted was to stand up and talk about whatever he wanted to talk about and change the subject whenever he wanted to.”

The publication of the full manuscript will present a much more complete picture of the man, according to Robinson. He said that, until now, the plethora of biographies and partial publications of the manuscript have provided several very different versions of Twain.

“It’ll make a huge difference,” Robinson said. “It’s a window on (Twain’s) personality.”

The U. California Press will be publishing the first volume of the autobiography in the fall. It will run about 750 to 770 pages, and the initial print run will be about 7,500 copies. It will also be made available on the project’s website.

Hirst said the other volumes of the autobiography are expected to be published “as soon as we can.”

Funding for the publication came almost entirely from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and private donors, according to Hirst.

Though Hirst said there hasn’t been a celebration planned for the book’s release, he expects a big one is in store.

“I’m sure there will be,” he said. “This is a big deal for us.”

I deactivated my Facebook a few weeks ago. Fortunately, it was before the website implemented new changes that make all users’ profile information publically available by default. This includes name, age, likes, status updates, group memberships and even sexual orientation.

The social networking site, which has nearly 500 million users worldwide and is projected to make $1 billion in revenues this year, now has a privacy policy longer than the U.S. Constitution. Some of the changes have alarmed users who prefer their privacy.

If we’re not supposed to feel safe posting our information on Facebook, there’s no point having a profile on the site. Users worried about privacy should delete or deactivate their accounts.

April’s revision was met with Federal Trade Commission complaints about Facebook’s frequent changes. Facebook has continually reduced user privacy since 2005, and the latest changes prove it can’t be trusted with our information.

Understandably, many users are concerned. A poll by a U.K.-based Internet-security firm, Sophos, found that more than 45 percent of surveyed users have either already quit Facebook or have serious plans to do so.  “How do I delete my Facebook account?” is a popular query on Google.

The privacy changes and backlash are unfortunate because Facebook had great potential.  It played a valuable role in enhancing Iranian protesters’ communication last year.  However, after the changes, many Iranians have fallen victim to government crackdowns, and others have had to delete their accounts when their information went public.

But they’re not the only ones who could be seriously affected by Facebook’s disregard for its users. A site at youropenbook.org allows anybody to see all public status updates.  Searches yield embarrassing and often compromising information that could endanger relationships and careers.

“I’m going to bed … at 7 a.m.. I hate my job,” wrote one Facebook user from Ardmore, Okla., on Sunday.

“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people,” Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg said. “That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”

This presumptive attitude suggests the company may escalate its privacy invasions in the future.  While it’s possible to negate the recent privacy changes by manually updating settings, trying to keep up with Facebook’s constant modifications is ridiculous.

I wouldn’t take my friends on a cruise in a leaky ship. Likewise, I wouldn’t try to connect with them on a leaky site like Facebook. More than 13,000 users have already agreed to delete their accounts on May 31, and more should consider doing the same at quitfacebookday.com.

For nine months, Guang-il Jung was confined to an underground cell, beaten with a wooden club until his teeth fell out, handcuffed to an iron bar to prevent him from sleeping, hung upside down and denied a toilet and clean clothes.

“Even if I screamed, nobody heard,” he said through a translator on Saturday. Jung’s was just one of many tales of human rights abuses discussed at a conference held over the weekend at Stanford U. on “The North Korean Crisis: Human Stories & Taking Action.”

Jung was joined by David Hawk, former executive director of Amnesty International USA, Dan Chung, communications director of Chicago-based NGO Crossing Borders, and Sharon Perry, a senior researcher at Stanford School of Medicine’s Division of Infectious Diseases.

Jung, 47, relayed his harrowing story as a political prisoner in North Korea. He was arrested in his home in July 1999 and sent to the underground quarters of the city’s security agency, where he was charged with spying–likely because he had several business contacts in South Korea, he said. For nine months, Jung denied the charges, even as investigators told him he wouldn’t get out alive if he didn’t confess.

“Later, I became too weak,” he said. “Just to survive, I had to make a false confession.” By then, Jung’s weight of 165 pounds had dropped by half.

In April 2000, Jung was sent to the infamous Yodok concentration camp, where he spent the next three years performing hard labor–and watching an estimated 200 of 400 prisoners die of starvation. Several prisoners attempted to escape, Jung said, but they were either impaled by spears dug into the ground or dragged back to the camp by guard dogs and then publicly executed as a warning to others.

In April 2003, Jung was deemed acceptable for release if he swore not to tell anyone about the camp. Twelve days later, upon finding his former house taken away and his family kicked out of the country, Jung defected to China. A year later, he entered South Korea, where he now directs a Seoul-based NGO called NK Gulag for Democracy.

The other speakers at Saturday’s conference spoke of the lack of food security, the state-controlled repression of market-based economics, the prevalence of human trafficking and the dire health conditions, including high incidences of tuberculosis (TB), that exist in North Korea.

These conditions constitute what Professor David Straub, who moderated the conference, called “one of the very worst human rights situations in the world.” Straub, the associate director of Stanford’s Korean Studies Program, accompanied former President Bill Clinton on his August 2009 trip to Pyongyang to secure the release of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee from North Korean captivity.

“I think it was one of the great scandals of the second half of the 20th century that nothing was effectively done in the North Korean humanitarian crisis,” he said.

Hawk called the current global response to the crisis only a “response-to-provocation phase.”

“On the ground, in the area of human rights, nothing much has changed,” he said, noting later that more NGOs are becoming active in the crisis, but that their effects are slow. “The repression grinds on.”

A confluence of events that took place 10 to 15 years ago brought more attention to the humanitarian crisis, Straub said. These included the breakup of the Soviet Union, which engaged heavily in trade with North Korea, the global demise of communism, the rise of Internet-based communication and the move to full democracy by South Korea.

“The result is we’ve seen much more access to the world of North Korea and information about it,” Straub said. “We’ve seen the rise of many organizations, NGOs, around the world, and we’ve seen the development of global networks of these organizations.”

The regime in North Korea, Hawk said, may be beginning to lose its footing for the same reasons. Three legs normally prop up the government–ubiquitous police surveillance, punishment of counterrevolutionary thought and strict control over outside information–and of those, the control over information has broken down, Hawk said.

“As of 2004 and 2005, some 20,000 North Koreans have made it through China and into South Korea, and an awful lot of them remain in contact with their friends, family and neighbors through their cell phones,” he said. “North Koreans are learning that South Korea is free, democratic, prosperous, even rich.”

Several thousand North Korean women make it across the border to China each year but are victims of human trafficking, Chung said. While trafficking has usually been done by kidnapping women or brokering them between North Korea and buyers in China by telling the women that jobs awaited them, Chung said a third method is now arising: matchmaking, or telling North Korean women that potential husbands await them across the border.

“It’s the same thing, just dressed up in different wrapping,” Chung said.

Perry, who returned from North Korea earlier this year after working with Pyongyang’s Ministry of Public Health to initiate installation of the country’s first diagnostic laboratory for drug-resistant tuberculosis, lamented the incidence of TB there.

“Health care indicators in DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the official name of North Korea] show that it has fallen out of the developed world,” Perry said. “TB incidence is similar to that in sub-Saharan Africa.”

Still, Perry said the work being done by her group and by the many NGOs involved in the North Korean humanitarian crisis are steps in the right direction. Quoting from the 1919 Korean Declaration of Independence, she told the audience in Encina Hall’s Bechtel Conference Center, “To begin is to succeed. We only need to march in the direction of the light.”

Jung, who has traveled the world speaking about the years of torture and repression he spent in North Korea, had a different idea: “Let’s talk about when Kim Jong-il is going to die.”

Thousands of half-naked Ohio State U. students stripped to their skivvies and ran through the streets Thursday night to support local homeless during the OSU AXE Undie Run Challenge. Through the clothes shed and other donations, AXE collected 1,760 pounds of clothing for the Columbus Coalition for the Homeless.

“I thought the event was a total success,” said Jake Schnall, a third-year in marketing and logistics and an organizer of the run. “We collected a ton of clothes, everyone had a blast and no one was injured. I think this might become a tradition at OSU.”

Schnall estimated 2,000 people were at the run.

The run began at about 9:45 p.m. with a Columbus Police cruiser clearing the streets and leading the way. Students ran chanting “U-S-A” and singing, “We Don’t Give a Damn for the Whole State of Michigan.” Many along the route gathered outside their homes to watch the half-naked runners.

The mass of students running in their underwear, along with additional police and chants for OSU, the scene Thursday night brought back memories of another Thursday night tradition at OSU — the Mirror Lake jump — without the frigid temperatures and dirty lake smell.

According to AXE’s Facebook page, the purpose of an undie run is to “unwind and give back to the community” by having students “run buck-ass wild across campus.” AXE picked OSU and nine other schools to participate in undie runs across the country and donate clothes shed to local homeless shelters.

The majority of students were dressed in boxers, bras and briefs, but some got creative with their outfits. Ryan Blatz, a fourth-year in computer science, ran in a head-to-toe lime green bodysuit similar to the Green Man suit from the television show “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” Tyler McCarrom, a third-year in horticulture, ran in nothing but a diaper.

Students came out to run for many reasons. Some said they came to give back to the homeless, others said it was a good distraction from homework, and a few said they came out just because they were drunk.

Alisha Chow, AXE Brand Ambassador to OSU and a fourth-year in communication, said much of the event’s success can be attributed to Facebook. Many people who came said they heard about the run through a Facebook invite to the event. Much of the advertising for the event was done through the popular networking site because just about every college student has a Facebook and that’s where they hear about events, Chow said.

This is the first year AXE has held the Undie Run Challenge. AXE has also pledged to donate $5,000 to each of the charities chosen by the universities.

Whichever school accumulates the most clothes will win a statue of a half-naked person. It looks as if Arizona State U. will receive the statue, with a donation of 5,300 pounds of clothing. OSU placed fourth in the challenge.

Obesity expert and Indiana U. Associate Professor Dong-Chul Seo conducted a study that indicated engaging in the recommended amount of leisure-time physical activity decreased obesity rates in only white women, blurring the lines of the roles gender and ethnicity play in obesity prevention.

“What surprised me is the finding that the dose-response effect of leisure-time physical activity was not clear for men of all races and ethnicities and women of minority race and ethnicity,” Seo said, “especially among Mexican women, whose prevalence of obesity increased as physical activity increased among overachievers.”

Seo said he conducted this research because no prior studies have compared the dose-response relationship of leisure-time physical activity and obesity on a population level.

Seo combined National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data from 1999 to 2006 to examine this issue by using a large sample of people. The data analyzed a sample of 12,227 adults aged 20 to 64.

“I expected that there would be a dose-response relation between the amount of leisure-time physical activity and obesity rates regardless of gender and race and ethnicity, because the more energy you expend, the less likely you will gain weight,” Seo said.

He added that although relatively little is known about the effect of lifestyle physical activity of the human metabolism on a population level, the findings of this study suggest regular physical activity helps create an energy deficit which, in turn, promotes weight loss among women aged 20 to 64 years in a dose-response manner.

He also said it deserves mention that the biggest decline in the prevalence of obesity between adjacent leisure-time physical activity groups was found between women who engaged in physical activity but fell short of the recommended minimum guideline and women who met the recommended guideline.

National guidelines call for a minimum of 450 to 750 metabolic equivalent, or MET, minutes per week. This is a way of quantifying the total amount of physical activity in a way that is comparable across various forms of physical activity.

Walking briskly for 30 minutes, for example, is about 100 MET. Running 6 mph for 30 minutes is about 300 MET.

“This finding supports the efficacy and efficiency of the current recommended minimum guideline of physical activity at least in terms of weight control, although it was only applicable to women,” Seo said.

Seo said the difference might be because leisure-time physical activity might account for a much smaller proportion of total daily energy output. Another finding of this study illustrates that those who perform heavy work or carry heavy loads might not necessarily create an energy deficit.

Though Seo said he will continue to research this topic further, this study could provide a new insight to the recommended amount of leisure-time physical activity for different ethnicities.

“White women are highly recommended to engage in the recommended level of physical activity,” Seo said. “But men and women of other races and ethnicities are recommended to watch what they eat while engaging in more physical activity.”