8 - The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, September 27, 2005 President Bush' asks Americans to conserve fuel NEWS WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush urged Americans yesterday to cut back on unnecessary travel to make up for fuel shortages caused by Hur- ricane Rita. Bush said the government was ready to release fuel from its emergency oil stockpile to alleviate high prices. And he suggested he would name a federal official to oversee the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast - after local officials first produce a vision for their rebuilt communities. The president spoke after he attended a meeting at the Energy Department in which officials told him they still were trying to assess the damage to oil production and refineries in Rita's path. Bush said he would get a personal report from local officials today when he visits the area around the refinery towns of Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas. Meanwhile, he encouraged motorists to con- serve energy and said he has directed federal agen- cies to do the same. "If it makes sense for the citizen out there to cur- tail nonessential travel, it darn sure makes sense for federal employees," Bush said. "We can encourage employees to.car pool or use mass transit, and we can shift peak electricity use to off-peak hours. There's ways for the federal government to lead when it comes to conservation." The White House also will be looking at ways to conserve, press secretary Scott McClellan said, although that doesn't include curtailing the presi- dent's plans to return to the region this week. Bush returned Sunday from a three-day trip in which he stopped in four cities that have been a base for government response to the storm. As he has in most of his previous trips to the areas hit by the hurricanes, Bush spent most of the time in meetings with state and local officials - many of them reporting by videoconference. On Saturday, in a visit to the U.S. Northern Command in Colorado Springs, Colo., some of Bush's briefers were linked from the White House situation room steps from the Oval Office. Still, McClellan said it is important that the president get a firsthand look at emergency opera- tions and lift the spirits of workers there. "I know the president's visit yesterday to the joint field office in Baton Rouge was very much During his visit to the Department of Energy yesterday, President Bush spoke about the nation's energy crisis. appreciated," McClellan said. "You saw the enthu- siasm from all those who have been working 24/7 to help the people of the region rebuild their lives and recover." Sixteen Texas oil refineries remained shut down after the storm, and crews found significant dam- age to at least one in the Port Arthur area, said Energy Department spokesman Craig Stevens. Bush said Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, who briefed him along with Interior Secretary Gale Norton, is working with Houston officials to help get trucks into that city to help refill sold-out gas stations. He said he also instructed Bodman to consider how the Strategic Petroleum Reserve can be used to help lower gas prices, with about two- thirds of Americans responding to recent polls saying high gas prices are causing them financial hardship. r I School defends teaching of intel design HARRISBURG, Pennsylvania (AP) - A school district went to court yes- terday to defend its policy of telling students that a higher power may have created life - an alternative to the evo- lution theory they are already learnin. Eight families are suing the Dover Area School District where the teen stu- dents are told about "intelligent design" before their regular biology lessons on evolution. The families allege the policy violates the constitutional separation of church and state. The intelligent design concept holds that Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection cannot fully explain the ori- gin of life or the emergence of highly complex life forms. It implies that life on Earth was the product of an uniden- tified intelligent force. Critics say intelligent design is merely creationism - a literal read- ing of the Bible's story of creation - camouflaged in scientific language, and it does not belong in a science curriculum. About 75 spectators crowded the courtroom of U.S. District Judge John E. Jones III for the start of the non-jury trial. But the scene outside the court- house was business as usual except for a lone woman reading the Bible. Eric Rothschild, an attorney rep- resenting the students' families, said at the start of the trial yesterday that school authorities "did everything ... to incorporate a religious point of view in science class and cared nothing about its scientific validity." But in his opening statement, the school district's attorney defended Dover's policy of requiring the stu- dents, who about 14 years old, to hear a brief statement about intelligent design before biology classes on evolution. "This case is about free inquiry in education, not about a religious agen- da," argued Patrick Gillen of the Thom- as More Law Center, which lobbies for the religious freedom of Christians and is defending the school district. "Dover's modest curriculum change embodies the essence of liberal educa- tion," Gillen said. The first witness called by the plain- tiffs, Brown University professor Ken- neth Miller, said pieces of the theory of evolution are subject to debate, such as where gender comes from, but told the court: "There is no controversy within science over the core proposition of evolutionary theory." On the other hand, he said, "Intelli- gent design is not a testable theory in any sense and as such it is not accepted by the scientific community." Miller also challenged the accuracy of "Of Pandas and People" and said it almost entirely omits any discussion of what causes extinction. If nearly all original species are extinct, he said, the intelligent design creator was not very intelligent. The clash goes far beyond this rural district. President George W. Bush has weighed in, saying schools should pres- ent both concepts when teaching about the origins of life. "The intelligent-design movement is an effort to introduce creationism into the schools under a different name," Rothschild has said. Litigation on the matter has a long history: in the famous 1925 Scopes Monkey trial, Tennessee biology teach- er John T. Scopes was fined $100 for violating a state law that forbade teach- ing evolution. The Tennessee Supreme Court then reversed his conviction - on the narrow ground that only a jury trial could impose a fine exceeding $50. The law was repealed in 1967. In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an Arkansas state law ban- ning the teaching of evolution. And in 1987, it ruled against balancing evolu- tion lessons by teaching creationism. Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law Center, said Dover's policy merely requires teachers to read a statement that says intelligent design differs from Darwin's view and refers students to an intelligent-design textbook, "Of Pan- das and People," for more information. "All the Dover school board did was allow students to get a glimpse of a controversy that is really boil- ing over in the scientific community," Thompson said. The Discovery Institute, a Seattle- based think tank that represents schol- ars who support intelligent design, opposes mandating it in public schools. Nevertheless, it considers the Dover lawsuit an attempt to squelch voluntary debates over evolution. "It's Scopes in reverse. 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