Kenya

At least 147 people were killed at Garissa University in northeastern Kenya on Thursday by al-Shabab militants. Although 104 people were injured and 19 were left in critical condition, more than 500 students managed to escape from the attackers.

After killing two security guards early on Thursday, armed gunmen stormed the university and immediately attacked a Christian prayer service.

Many witnesses later told reporters that the attackers had singled out Christians and spared Muslims, while others reported that the gunmen fired indiscriminately.

Japhet Mwala, a student who woke to the terror, told Agence France-Presse, “We were sleeping when we heard a loud explosion that was followed by gunshots, and everyone started running for safety.” Mwala said that she escaped by jumping through a fence, and that she was lucky to be alive.

Al-Shabab is an Islamic militant group linked to al-Qaeda and based in Somalia that has been battling the Somali and Kenyan governments. The group’s attack on Garissa University is its deadliest attack to date.

United States

Department of Justice prosecutors indicted United States Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) on Wednesday on federal corruption charges.

The indictment charges Menendez for allegedly using his Senate office to push the business interests of a friend and donor, Florida ophthalmologist Salomon Melgen, in exchange for gifts.

The following day, Menendez, who maintained his innocence for three years, pleaded not guilty to 14 criminal counts against him, including eight counts of bribery.

In a statement to his supporters posted on YouTube on Thursday, Menendez claimed the indictment a failure of justice and said, “That failure affords me the opportunity to finally show beyond a doubt that the charges leveled today and through a nearly 3 year campaign of innuendo and smears are completely false.”

Senator Menendez reportedly agreed to step down as the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but pledged to remain in office.

Read more stories from: The Retriever Weekly

Some delicate issues remain; negotiations not yet finished

On Thursday, April 2, Iran, the United States and five other world powers arrived at the base of a deal after 18 months of negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear program. The preliminary deal limits Iran’s nuclear capabilities for the next 15 years.

Although the deal still has some unresolved issues, this preliminary agreement has been hailed a major success across the international community on the part of the Obama administration. Just a few days prior to the agreement, the administration stated that there was a “50-50 chance” of coming to an agreement by the April 2 deadline.

If the final agreement is reached by the set date of June 30, the deal would be “the most significant concord between Iran and major world powers” since 1979, the year of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, according to The New York Times.

The central achievement of this preliminary deal was Iran’s agreement to reduce its current stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98 percent. Iran also agreed to reduce its capabilities to produce a nuclear weapon within a year, by dismantling a significant number of installed centrifuges.

Although Iran will be able to keep two nuclear facilities under the current deal, they must be used for civilian purposes only, and thus will be converted into research facilities for medical and energy purposes.

Iran’s economy has been crippled by sanctions from a significant number of states, resulting in poor access to the international market, high levels of unemployment within Iran and a huge reduction of Iranian oil sales. When the deal was announced in Iran, Iranians took to the streets to celebrate, with Iranian leaders like Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei calling the talks a success.

Although many others are also calling the talks successful, only a preliminary deal has been agreed upon by the parties. Iran is urging the international community to relieve the sanctions immediately, now that a deal has been struck. The United States has said that sanctions will be removed in stages when Iran shows progress of following the agreement by dismantling some of their nuclear capabilities.

In addition, the details of how Iran’s nuclear capabilities will be removed and lessened has not been clarified yet. The United States is pressing for the rights of the United Nations to inspect any Iranian military base, while Iran still presses back against the proposal.

Though many Iranians were pleased with reports of the deal and the potential removal of international sanctions, there were still many detractors from other parts of the world.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a staunch and vocal opponent of the deal, said that it “would threaten the survival” of the state of Israel. In response, President Barack Obama said that he would increase cooperation and consultation with Israel in order to keep Iranian threats at bay.

In addition, many Republicans were critical of the Obama administration’s role in the negotiations. Congressional Republicans have written a bill that could be used to kill the deal if successfully passed.

As a response to this action, Obama said that “if Congress kills this deal, not based on expert analysis, and without offering any reasonable alternative, then it’s the United States that will be blamed for the failure of diplomacy.”

If a final agreement is reached by June 30, President Obama’s diplomatic agenda may be looked on more favorably in the future.

Read more stories from: The Retriever Weekly

As part of our annual assessment plan, the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) encourages the campus community to complete the following annual survey of information technology services: 

http://umbc.edu/go/doitusersurvey

This brief (10 minute max), anonymous survey will help us in our planning for academic year 2015-16 and provides important feedback to understand what technology services are important to you and how well we are meeting your needs. The survey results are shared with our governance committees and used in our planning for the upcoming year.

If you have any questions about this survey or need more information, please contact our Technology Support Center (TSC) located on the first floor of the library or call 410.455.3838.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation and assistance. Your input is critically important in shaping the services we offer.

In this week’s meeting, Sandeep Nair will talk about his work on ‘Preventing SQLIA and OJVMWCU, a web service utility for Oracle RDBMS‘ at 10:00am Tuesday, 7 April 2015 in ITE 346.

SQL Injection attacks have a long history dating back to 1999, but OWASP still maintains Injection attacks, which includes SQLIA, as the top rated vulnerability, due to the simplicity to perform and the high impact it can cause. SIAP is a project aimed at an automated attempt to secure ASP .NET with C# based web applications. The second tool OjvmWCU is a tool which is released with Oracle RDBMS 12.1, which allows users to call SOAP based web services using PLSQL!

English Writer in Residence Lia Purpura is scheduled to present readings from her new book It Shouldn’t Have Been Beautiful at Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts on Friday, April 10 at 8 p.m. The reading will be part of an event with the Poulenc Trio, a Baltimore-based wind trio that has been presenting virtuosic performances for over a decade.

Purpura, whose work frequently appears in New Yorker magazine, will pair excerpts from her forthcoming book with a new arrangement for the Trio of Alfred Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style. For more information on the event, click here.

Felipe Filomeno, an assistant professor of political science, has been awarded the Early Career Prize of the Economics & Politics Section of the Latin American Studies Association. The award comes in recognition of his article “Patterns of Rule-Making and Intellectual Property Regimes: Lessons from South American Soybean Agriculture”, published in the Journal of Comparative Politics in 2014. Below is a summary of Filomeno’s article:

Around 1980, states and corporations from core countries led by the U.S. government started to demand from other countries reforms that increased the scope and strength of private intellectual property rights. The resulting global upward ratchet of intellectual property protection has not developed uniformly across time and space. This study presents a theory of cross-national variation in intellectual property regimes based on a comparative-historical analysis of the making of intellectual property rules in South American soybean agriculture (Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay). It concludes that a corporatist pattern of rule-making is conducive to a weak intellectual property regime (Argentina), whereas pluralism (Brazil) and state capture and abstention (Paraguay) are more conducive to strong intellectual property regimes.