Ice withdrawal 'shatters record'

According to the BBC,

Arctic sea ice shrank
to the smallest area on record this year

Noble Warrior to the End

Reading, writing, and rebellion

By Tracy Jan, Boston Globe Staff | September 21, 2007

CAMBRIDGE - Jonathan Kozol appeared shrunken in his chair at Harvard's Memorial Church, his blazer tossed aside, the sleeves of his pinstriped shirt rolled up to the elbows to expose bony arms. His thin ankles, swathed in black socks, disappeared into his signature navy blue Keds.

Over the past 24 hours, he had consumed only half a bowl of frosted cornflakes, half a cheese sandwich, several glasses of grapefruit juice, and a French vanilla latte, a treat he granted himself before beginning his lecture this week to hundreds of teachers and education activists packed into the church pews.

Since early July, the 71-year-old education warrior of the 1960s has shed 29 pounds from his slender 5-foot-9-inch frame, subsisting on a mostly liquid diet. His point: to protest the federal No Child Left Behind Act now up for reauthorization. He said he will continue his partial fast until US Senator Edward M. Kennedy, who sponsored the original bill, agrees to drastically overhaul what Kozol called a punitive law that relegates urban schoolchildren to an inferior, stripped-down education and demoralizes teachers, who he believes are forced to teach to the test.

Despite his emaciated 132-pound figure, Kozol is anything but battle weary.

"I'm too old to bite my tongue," he said. "I don't care what happens to me now. I intend to keep on fighting this issue to my dying day."

Surrounded at this week's lecture by grizzled, longtime allies and idealistic college students who regard him as the high priest of public education, Kozol hoped to energize a new generation of teachers in his four-decade-long fight for equity. These are his people, the only family of sorts for a man who never had children and who lives alone in a Byfield cottage filled with books and fan mail.

"My goal is to connect the young teachers to the old, to reignite their sense of struggle," he said, urging audience members to sign up with his new Cambridge-based nonprofit, Education Action!

Kozol, a Newton native who rose to fame as one of the most prolific authors on urban education and social justice in America, spent the first part of the week in Washington, D.C. He met with reporters and members of Congress, and attended an evening rally for teachers to promote his new book, "Letters to a Young Teacher," inspired by his correspondence with a Boston first-grade teacher, in which he rails against standardized testing.

No Child Left Behind, Kozol believes, has plunged urban education back to the dark ages before desegregation. Under the law, schools whose test scores don't improve each year could eventually be shut down, a specter hanging over a disproportionate number of city schools that educate mostly poor, minority children.

"We have apartheid schools, and MCAS has unwittingly introduced an apartheid curriculum," said Kozol during an interview, likening inner-city classrooms to test prep factories. "I'm determined to mobilize teachers and parents to fight this bill aggressively and bombard Senator Kennedy with a very clear message: If he fails to introduce dramatic revisions to No Child Left Behind, it will be devastating to the enormous faith we've had in him all these years."

Kennedy, chairman of the Education Committee, said in a statement yesterday that he hopes to introduce the reauthorization bill to his panel later this month or in early October after he reviews the ideas and recommendations of parents, students, and educators, including Kozol.

"No Child Left Behind advanced the commitment first made during the Great Society, the promise that every child counts, regardless of race, background, or disability," Kennedy said. "We must renew our commitment to its noble purposes, but also make the common-sense changes needed to ensure that it works better for our students and our schools."

Kozol said he has considered Kennedy a friend for more than 40 years. As a young senator, Kennedy defended Kozol after he was fired from the Boston Public Schools in 1965 for "curriculum deviation" for teaching a Langston Hughes poem to his fourth-grade class. Kozol chronicled his harrowing year teaching under deplorable conditions in a mostly black Dorchester elementary school in his first book, "Death At An Early Age."

But, according to Kozol, the senator has thrown up a "cold, stone wall" to his repeated attempts to meet with him this summer about No Child Left Behind. Before the Senate recessed in July, Kozol said, Kennedy's staff offered to squeeze him in for a few minutes.

"At that point, I just threw up my hands, because there's no way of presenting a thoughtful argument in five to seven minutes," Kozol said.

During his lecture at Harvard this week, Kozol likened No Child Left Behind to a "shaming ritual" in which the federal government holds up "impossible demands without money to pay for it." Against this backdrop, it's no wonder that half of urban teachers quit within their first three years, he said.

"Wonderful teachers should never let themselves be drill sergeants for the state," he said, peering at the crowd through gold wire-rimmed glasses. "I don't want them to quit. I want them to stay. But I want them to stay and not lose their souls."

From their front-row seats, three elderly, African-American women nodded gravely.

They were Kozol's old friends, former Boston public school parents who staged a sit-in protesting his firing from a school where children were routinely lashed with a rattan whip in a basement that smelled of urine.

They worked with Kozol to start alternative schools in the South End and Roxbury for black parents shunning the inferior public education their children were subjected to.

"All we wanted was an education for our children," said Julia Walker, 74, as she waited in line to greet Kozol.

"You know what? Sometimes it sounds like we're right back at the beginning," said Joyce Johnson, 75.

"Exactly," Walker said.

"And sometimes it sounds like there's still hope," Johnson said. "My children have picked up the torch."

Read this almost one year old story
while eating my breakfast this morning -

One village's African boat trauma

Every day hundreds of African migrants cross the Atlantic Ocean to the Canary Islands in search of a better life. Debbie Woodmansey, who has lived in Gran Canaria for two-and-a-half years, describes the impact this has on her village.

Let me first tell you about our village. It is a small, friendly, ancient Canarian fishing village which is developing to incorporate the growing population.

Life here is hard, hot, but relaxed.

I became aware of the boats from Africa not long after I arrived. At first I would just see piles of battered boats in the corner of the harbour. People told me they had arrived carrying up to 100 people but I didn't believe them. It was beyond comprehension.

One day in the summer of 2005, I came home from work to find my daughter really distressed. She told me she had seen hundreds of African people sitting on the ground in the square looking sad and hungry.

Desperation

What was a shock then has now sadly become a regular sight. The sirens, the police, the desperation of the boat people. These are all commonplace, as is the feeling of helplessness experienced by the villagers who truly want to do something to help.

Boats now arrive most days, sometimes several in a day.

They hold around 100 men, women and children. They are now about 12 metres long but this doesn't mean they are safer.

I wouldn't take my daughter to the next village in one. These people cross an ocean in them, and a dangerous one at that.

We always know when a boat is about to arrive as the harbour fills up with tents, hospital beds and wheelchairs. When we see the helicopter arrive, we know that someone needs to get to hospital at great speed.

The sadness of this sight never fades.

The arrival of the boat people is normal conversation for us, here. We discuss how many arrived last week, what time the boat came in last night, how many didn't make it.

We are all affected emotionally by what we see and hear. We witness the plight of the African people every day.

Drain on resources

However, we can't help but notice the effect on our community.

We live on a very small island and this is a major drain on the resources here.

The navy boats, the coast guards, the civil guard and the Red Cross used to work together fighting the battle against drugs. Now it seems all their time and resources are spent working with the boat people.

What is happening now in the battle against drugs? This is something the islanders worry about.

The villagers are not angry with the people, they are angry about the drain on resources. It cannot be sustained.

The boat people cannot leave the island until they are fit. Because they arrive in such an appalling condition - they are too weak to walk or stand - this takes quite a while. Who foots the bill for their medical care?

Sahara dust

Early in September, we had the dust blowing over from the Sahara. There were many boats crossing at that time. The people were exposed to the punishing sun's intensified rays with little more than a glass of water a day and a bowl of rice.

Seeing them, it was hard to believe they had even had that much to eat and drink, and they were the lucky ones. Countless boats and bodies never make it.

While the dust was here and when the storms came, we silently hoped for the safety of the little boats we knew were making the crossing.

Bodies are sometimes brought in by the fishermen, as they sometimes catch them in their nets. I once heard of a fisherman finding a pregnant woman floating in the sea.

A few days ago, 220 people arrived in one day. When the authorities were cleaning one of the boats before it was destroyed, they found three dead bodies.

A woman had arrived with a one-week-old baby, and the baby had died. Her loving husband had sent them instead of himself.

The villagers have such sympathy for these desperate people. We sit silently as the convoy heads out of our village and up to the capital, Las Palmas, listening to the sirens and holding back our tears.

I had family visiting on one occasion, we were down by the beach. As our children swam happily in the sea, the boats arrived. The contrast was so sharp.

Story from BBC NEWS

"No, the great business of our time is this:
for one man to find himself in another one
who is on the other side of the world.
Only by such contacts can there be peace,
can the sacredness of life be preserved and developed
and the image of God manifest itself in the world."

Thomas Merton
(From a letter to Boris Pasternak, 10/23/1958)

“If mothers ruled the world, there would be no god-damned wars in the first place.”

So said Sally Field during her Emmy acceptance speech last night in Hollywood.

Let's see ... it is men who are violent, the wagers of war?

But what are we say to the countless children that suffer child abuse at the hands of women each year? Say of those mothers who rule the world of their young with violence?

What do we say of the leading democratic candidate for President, Hillary Clinton? A woman and a mother who voted to send young men and women to Iraq to die? A woman and mother who voted to kill the children of Iraqi mothers? A woman and mother who continues, to this very day, to defend that decision. A woman who has a stronger pro war stance than most of the other male democratic candidates?

Let's not forget our recent history, and the war waging woman and mother, Margaret Thatcher.

And what do we say to the countless loving men and fathers who, who along with countless good women and mothers, work each and everyday to create peace, and end war?

Enough of the false and empty cliches!

People who crave power, abuse power - and are regularly willing to sacrifice, with violence, anything and anybody, to achieve their ends.

Be they male or female, or any color under the sun!

Demonstrators placed a mock flag-draped coffin and combat boots in remembrance
of Marine Lance Corporal Alexander S. Arredondo of Randolph, Mass.,
in Lafayette Park in Washington.
(PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS)

In the first major antiwar demonstration in the nation's capital since January, several thousand protesters marched from the White House to the Capitol yesterday, carrying signs and chanting slogans demanding an end to the war and the impeachment of President Bush.
Tina Marie Macias, Los Angeles Times | September 16, 2007