Fatah-Hamas conflicts suspend studies at Islamic University

A clash that erupted between students associated with the Fatah and Hamas groups has led administrators to suspend studies until further notice at Islamic University in Hebron.

The conflict broke out when Hamas students distributed leaflets accusing Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud-Abba’s forces of arresting four students of the Hamas-affiliated Islamic List.

However, sources close to Hamas have pointed fingers at Fatah, claiming that they initiated the fights by allowing the PA forces to interfere.

“They have been provoking our supporters on campus for a long time,” the sources said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post. “Members of the Islamic List were only trying to stage a peaceful protest against the arrest of their colleagues.”

The university administration, also accused of aggravating matters, said the Hamas students violated regulations that banned the distribution of “inflammatory” materials on campus.

A university official said studies would not resume until students from both the Hamas and Fatah groups apologized for the riot.

Abilene Christian University students to receive free iPhones next fall

Incoming freshmen at Abilene Christian University (ACU) will receive a welcome gift for their first year at college: free iPhones or iPod Touches.

Students will have to pay for their service plans through AT&T Corp., but the university will pay for the service bills of the faculty, who will also be receiving the free gadgets.

The change follows the university’s recent switch to Google Apps from Java as its e-mail administrator, according to eWeek, a computing business magazine.

The switch has saved the school at least $100,000 a year in salaries, licensing fees, storage and server maintenance costs, said Kevin Roberts, ACU’s chief information officer.

“It’s been a great decision for us,” he said.

More than 6,000 students and faculty used Google Apps for about a year, so adjusting students to Google Apps on their iPhones will take little effort, according to the eWeek article.

“A smart phone that doesn’t do e-mail or calendaring is pretty much a useless device,” Roberts said. “The fact that the iPhone is already optimized for Google is a huge win for us.”

Until autumn, students will continue to access the free Google Apps Education Edition from their laptops and school desktops.

Peru wants 40,000 Machu Picchu relics back from Yale

Peru’s National Institute of Culture wants a few things back from Yale University: more than 40,000 artifacts from the Incan citadel of Machu Picchu.

While it was agreed last year that Yale would return 4,000 relics to Peru, health minister Hernan Garrido Lecca said that the government-led commission actually found 40,000 artifacts from Machu Picchu, according to News Day, a Long Island newspaper.

Yale officials, however, have asserted that the disagreement over the number of unreturned relics stems from the method of counting.

Fragments from one object can be counted as one piece or more based on the number of fragments, Yale spokesman Tom Conroy said.

“The difference is how one chooses to count, not what Yale has in its collection from Machu Picchu,” he said. “We’re talking about the same inventory we shared with them last month.”

Peru initially loaned the artifacts to Yale when alumnus Hiram Bingham III rediscovered Machu Picchu in 1911, but the artifacts were never returned despite Peru’s demand for the collection in 2006.

[Reach columnist Kim Lee at news@thedaily.washington.edu.]