Stanford Report, January 21, 2004

In Print & On the Air

IN A JAN. 20 OPINION ARTICLE IN the Christian Science Monitor, DAVID KENNEDY, the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, took an early look at President George W. Bush’s place in the American presidential pantheon. Kennedy wrote that it is not yet clear what Bush’s single sentence will be -- as in “George Washington -- he founded our country” -- but he noted that history is a stern judge. “Bush’s response to the 9/11 attacks has defined his presidency and will almost surely constitute his core story in the history books,” Kennedy wrote. “Most dramatically, [Bush] and his closest advisers … have undergone the policy equivalent of a born-again religious conversion. … They seek nothing less than remaking Iraq in the Western image, thereby changing the political equation of the entire Middle East and beyond. The ultimate goal is not simply to make the world safe for democracy, but to make the entire world democratic.” Kennedy added that history’s verdicts, although stern, are rarely final. “Few historical reputations are uncontested, and disagreement about Bush’s presidency will persist as long as memory lasts,” he argued.

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES MENTIONED Stanford’s relationship with Palo Alto in a Jan. 19 article on town-gown issues. The university campus of more than 8,000 acres crosses into four cities and two counties; in Palo Alto alone, more than 1,000 acres have been parceled off for commercial use. The Times reported that Stanford paid Palo Alto nearly $6 million for fire and police services during fiscal year 2001-02. In addition, the university and its commercial tenants forked over $47.7 million in utilities and $7.2 million in property taxes. “We have deals in place with each city and county, and we’ve had most of them in place for more than 20 years,” said LARRY HORTON, associate vice president and director of government and community relations. “If we didn’t, it’d be a legal and public relations nightmare.”

ALTHOUGH DOCTORS OFTEN attribute patients’ chronic morning headaches to problems such as sleep apnea, they may signal anxiety, major depression or insomnia, the Los Angeles Times reported Jan. 19. Sleep researcher MAURICE OHAYON, an associate professor (research) in psychiatry and behavioral sciences, and his colleagues analyzed a survey of nearly 19,000 Europeans. On average, 7.6 percent of those surveyed reported having chronic morning headaches, with 1.3 percent of them having such headaches daily. Women were more likely to report headaches than men, and headaches were most common among those aged 45 to 64. In the Jan. 12 Archives of Internal Medicine, Ohayon and his colleagues linked morning headaches to heavy drinking, anti-anxiety medications, sleep-related breathing problems and hypertension. The most significant contributors to chronic morning headaches were the combination of anxiety and depression, depression alone and anxiety alone, the researchers found.