Georgetown Law Center professor David Cole and the Humanitarian Law Project will challenge a provision of the USA Patriot Act that bans providing “expert advice and assistance” to organizations that the government has deemed to have connections with terrorism.

Cole and Nancy Chang, senior attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, will represent four Tamil organizations and a Tamil-American doctor who said he hopes to improve the medical infrastructure of Sri Lanka’s war-torn countryside.

Tamils are an ethnic group that live in southern India and Sri Lanka and comprise about 18 percent of Sri Lanka’s population.

Andreas Jeninga/The Hoya Ra'anan Gissin denounced Yassir Arafat last Thursday in Gaston Hall.

Ra’anan Gissin, a senior adviser and spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, asserted Israel’s right to self-defense in the face of a recent wave of suicide bombings during a speech in Gaston Hall on Thursday.

Gissin said Israel would make a “decent, respectful offer” of statehood to Palestine but audience members ripped into Israel’s national security measures and ridiculed the notion that it was a “democracy” during a heated question and answer session.

Daniel Gourvitch/The Hoya

Students coming to Georgetown to play sports may do well on the court or the field, but don’t always cross the finish line of graduation.

According to a report released by the NCAA, graduation rates dropped by 13 percent for Georgetown University’s student athletes, declining from 90 to 77 percent for student athletes entering in 1996 and graduating by August 2002.

Georgetown’s rates for athletes remain 17 percent below the rates for the university’s non-athletes but are still 15 percent higher than the NCAA national average of 62 percent.

Aaron Terrazas/The Hoya Union organizers rallied outside the Georgetown Park Mall on Thursday night to bargain for increased rights for parking attendants at Colonial Parking.

Georgetown University Law Center Dean Judith Areen received the Equal Justice Works’ 2003 Outstanding Law School Dean Award for her efforts to promote public interest law in the school’s curriculum.

Areen, who will step down as dean and return to teaching at the end of this school year, has worked to make public interest law more prominent in and outside the classroom. She established the Office of Public Interest and Community Service and the Pro Bono Pledge, which asks each student to do 75 hours of pro bono work before graduation. She also revamped the Loan Repayment Assistance Program, which gives needy students the opportunity to attend Georgetown Law.

The School of Foreign Service and the Center for Strategic International Studies convened a panel on relations between South Korea and the United States which resulted in a 26-page report titled “Strengthening the U.S.-ROK Alliance: A Blueprint for the 21st Century.” SFS Dean Robert Gallucci and SFS professor Victor Cha, both of whom are experts on affairs in the peninsula, endorsed the report along with many other prominent South Korean academics.

South Korean Ambassador to the United States Sung-Joo Han spoke at Georgetown on Tuesday on the nuclear standoff between North and South Korea and its impact on the region.

Sung-Joo called the recent crisis “the most pressing issue on the Korean peninsula,” adding that it could completely disrupt regional stability.

Nonetheless, “the fundamentals between North and South Korea have not changed,” he said. This lack of change suggests a greater prospect for cooperation between the two regions even though North Korea’s acquisition of nuclear arms effectively breaks its pledge to not seek weapons under the 1994 Agreed Framework.

Francesca Seta/The Hoya Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid speaks about his experience covering the war in Iraq.

Washington Post foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid expressed skepticism of the U.S. occupation of Iraq in a speech on Thursday sponsored by the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.

The speech, entitled “Covering Iraq: the War and its Aftermath”, dealt with Iraq’s post-Saddam identity.

“[There is] difficulty reading the situation, but the new conflict has unleashed more forces than the U.S. thought,” Shadid said.