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Mayor Dena Mossar created a stir Monday evening when she walked out of the Palo Alto City Council rather than listening to testimony concerning the passage of an anti-war resolution. The council voted 6-1 in favor of such a resolution, with Vice Mayor Bern Beecham and Mossar absent and Councilman Vic Ojakian dissenting.

Ojakian said he voted against the proposed resolution because he wasn't elected to make foreign policy decisions.

Mossar said she walked out of the meeting for the same reason: "I left the meeting because I felt it was not an appropriate item for council consideration," she said. "It was the wrong venue for an important issue."

Mossar declined to state her stand on a possible war against Iraq. "My personal feeling are not relevant," she said.

Mossar said she felt the anti-war resolution should not have been placed on the agenda. "It's not only do we not do foreign policy, but to purport to represent the community on the issue . . .," she said.

"I've gotten an outpouring of phone calls and e-mails thanking me (for walking out)," Mossar said. "I know the residents of this community are not unified (on the issue)." Don Kazak can be e-mailed at dkazak@paweekly.com
Tuition will go up at Stanford

Stanford University will increase its combined tuition and room-and-board rates by 4.8 percent for the coming academic year. The university's board of trustees decided on the increases this week.

"Given the downturn in the economy, this year is a challenging one," said Isaac Stein, chairman of the board. "But we have attempted to limit the increase as much as possible. Despite mounting economic pressures, we have kept the overall rate of increase slightly below last year's increase."

Undergraduate tuition will increase 5 percent to $28,564, while room and board will be $4,702, bringing the combined rate to $33,266.

Because of the economy, the university is also providing more financial aid than before to students. "Our financial aid program is one of the best in the country and our commitment to need-blind admission remains unchanged," Stein said. "Because of the state of the economy, we have seen a rise in the number of families who need aid, and we will continue to provide necessary funds for those who demonstrated need."

--Don Kazak
Stanford students protesting SUVs at auto mall Friday

Who said activism at Stanford is dead?

On Friday afternoon, students from the university will be rallying and marching to protest gas-guzzling Sport Utility Vehicles and the ways they add to the nation's dependence on Middle Eastern oil, global climate change, and traffic fatalities.

"I wanted to raise awareness about the issue." said rally organizer Jonathan Neril, an senior studying international relations and the co-president of Students for a Sustainability Stanford.

Neril estimated that 75 students would be attending the protest, which will begin at noon at Stanford's White Plaza. The group will then take a bus to the Burlingame auto mall, where they'll march in front of dealerships that sell SUVs and Hummers.

In addition to their obvious environmental problems -- due to the low amount of miles they get per gallon -- SUVs are almost five times more likely to kill the driver of the other vehicle in an accident and SUV drivers are more than twice as likely to die in a rollover, Neril pointed out.

In recent months, SUVs have been the focus of criticism from an unlikely group of bedfellows, including a Christian group that recently began a "What Would Jesus Drive?" campaign.

Have the Stanford organizers felt any backlash to their backlash?

"Not yet, although I anticipate some," Neril said.

--Bill D'Agostino
Fast computers at Stanford

Scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) recently set a data transfer speed record. They transferred 6.7 gigabytes of data across 7,000 miles in less than a minute. The data was equivalent to four hours of DVD movies.

The SLAC team transferred the data at 923 megabytes per second for 58 seconds from Sunnyvale to Amsterdam. The transfer speed was more 3,500 times faster than a typical home Internet connection.

The team transferring the data included people from SLAC, Caltech, the National Institute for Nuclear Physics and High Energy Physics in Amsterdam, and the faculty at Universiteit van Amsterdam.

--Don Kazak