Unemployment ahead?

5 Signs Your Job Is in Jeopardy

By Roberta Chinsky Matuson


Are you one of the many people who have their heads hidden behind their cubicles hoping the latest economic storm will blow over? If so, you have a lot of company. However, hope is not a strategy. It is better to be prepared than to get caught in a landslide.

Below are five signs your job is in jeopardy.

Mergers and Acquisitions

Mergers and acquisitions can mean only one thing to employees: duplication. In all likelihood, someone in the other company performs a similar job to the one you have in your company. In the end, only one of you will be left standing. Never assume that person will be you.

Jaguars Become Rabbits

A clear sign that your company has fallen on hard times is when the president trades in his posh Jaguar for a Volkswagen Rabbit. He may be telling everyone he is making the switch to conserve energy. Don't believe it. This is a drastic cost-cutting measure. Your job may be next.

People No Longer Seek Your Opinion

You used to be the "go to" person when people sought advice on critical projects. Now they seem to go to everyone else but you. Do they know something you don't know? Has your name been added to the layoff list?

You Are No Longer on the Invite List

Your calendar used to be filled to the brim with meetings. Now you have time on your hands. Yet, everyone around you seems to be constantly in meetings. If you've gone from being an "A Player" to barely being ranked, then it's a clear sign you are no longer indispensible. Why wait to be escorted out the door? Now is a good time to see what else is out there.

Your Competitors Are Slicing Their Workforces

Constant pruning by your competitors is a sign that your industry is in despair. Take the airline industry. Grounded flights, decreased services, and a reduction in the number of travelers can only mean one thing to employees in this industry. More layoffs on the horizon. It's only a matter of time before your company jumps on board.

Don't be caught waiting for the ax to fall. Be alert and notice the signs that your ties with your employer may soon be severed.


Roberta Chinsky Matuson is the president of Human Resource Solutions and has been helping companies align their people assets with their business goals. She writes a blog, "Generation Integration," and she can be reached at Roberta@yourhrexperts.com.

Copyright © 2007 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

Mr. Obama: A Lover of Books

January 19, 2009

From Books, New President Found Voice

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI, New York Times News Service

WASHINGTON — In college, as he was getting involved in protests against the apartheid government in South Africa, Barack Obama noticed, he has written, “that people had begun to listen to my opinions.” Words, the young Mr. Obama realized, had the power “to transform”: “with the right words everything could change -— South Africa, the lives of ghetto kids just a few miles away, my own tenuous place in the world.”

Much has been made of Mr. Obama’s eloquence — his ability to use words in his speeches to persuade and uplift and inspire. But his appreciation of the magic of language and his ardent love of reading have not only endowed him with a rare ability to communicate his ideas to millions of Americans while contextualizing complex ideas about race and religion, they have also shaped his sense of who he is and his apprehension of the world.

Mr. Obama’s first book, “Dreams From My Father” (which surely stands as the most evocative, lyrical and candid autobiography written by a future president), suggests that throughout his life he has turned to books as a way of acquiring insights and information from others — as a means of breaking out of the bubble of self-hood and, more recently, the bubble of power and fame. He recalls that he read James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright and W. E. B. Du Bois when he was an adolescent in an effort to come to terms with his racial identity and that later, during an ascetic phase in college, he immersed himself in the works of thinkers like Nietzsche and St. Augustine in a spiritual-intellectual search to figure out what he truly believed.

As a boy growing up in Indonesia, Mr. Obama learned about the American civil rights movement through books his mother gave him. Later, as a fledgling community organizer in Chicago, he found inspiration in “Parting the Waters,” the first installment of Taylor Branch’s multivolume biography of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

More recently, books have supplied Mr. Obama with some concrete ideas about governance: it’s been widely reported that “Team of Rivals,” Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book about Abraham Lincoln’s decision to include former opponents in his cabinet, informed Mr. Obama’s decision to name his chief Democratic rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as Secretary of State. In other cases, books about F. D. R.’s first hundred days in office and Steve Coll’s “Ghost Wars,“ about Afghanistan and the C.I.A., have provided useful background material on some of the myriad challenges Mr. Obama will face upon taking office.

Mr. Obama tends to take a magpie approach to reading — ruminating upon writers’ ideas and picking and choosing those that flesh out his vision of the world or open promising new avenues of inquiry.

His predecessor, George W. Bush, in contrast, tended to race through books in competitions with Karl Rove (who recently boasted that he beat the president by reading 110 books to Mr. Bush’s 95 in 2006), or passionately embrace an author’s thesis as an idée fixe. Mr. Bush and many of his aides favored prescriptive books — Natan Sharansky’s “Case for Democracy,” which pressed the case for promoting democracy around the world, say, or Eliot A. Cohen’s “Supreme Command,” which argued that political strategy should drive military strategy. Mr. Obama, on the other hand, has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility.

What’s more, Mr. Obama’s love of fiction and poetry — Shakespeare’s plays, Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick” and Marilynne Robinson‘s “Gilead” are mentioned on his Facebook page, along with the Bible, Lincoln’s collected writings and Emerson’s “Self Reliance“ — has not only given him a heightened awareness of language. It has also imbued him with a tragic sense of history and a sense of the ambiguities of the human condition quite unlike the Manichean view of the world so often invoked by Mr. Bush.

Mr. Obama has said that he wrote “very bad poetry” in college and his biographer David Mendell suggests that he once “harbored some thoughts of writing fiction as an avocation.” For that matter, “Dreams From My Father” evinces an instinctive storytelling talent (which would later serve the author well on the campaign trail) and that odd combination of empathy and detachment gifted novelists possess. In that memoir, Mr. Obama seamlessly managed to convey points of view different from his own (a harbinger, perhaps, of his promises to bridge partisan divides and his ability to channel voters’ hopes and dreams) while conjuring the many places he lived during his peripatetic childhood. He is at once the solitary outsider who learns to stop pressing his nose to the glass and the coolly omniscient observer providing us with a choral view of his past.

As Baldwin once observed, language is both “a political instrument, means, and proof of power,” and “the most vivid and crucial key to identity: it reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal identity.”

For Mr. Obama, whose improbable life story many voters regard as the embodiment of the American Dream, identity and the relationship between the personal and the public remain crucial issues. Indeed, “Dreams From My Father,” written before he entered politics, was both a searching bildungsroman and an autobiographical quest to understand his roots — a quest in which he cast himself as both a Telemachus in search of his father and an Odysseus in search of a home.

Like “Dreams From My Father,” many of the novels Mr. Obama reportedly admires deal with the question of identity: Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” concerns a man’s efforts to discover his origins and come to terms with his roots; Doris Lessing’s “Golden Notebook” recounts a woman’s struggles to articulate her own sense of self; and Ellison’s “Invisible Man” grapples with the difficulty of self-definition in a race-conscious America and the possibility of transcendence. The poems of Elizabeth Alexander, whom Mr. Obama chose as his inaugural poet, probe the intersection between the private and the political, time present and time past, while the verse of Derek Walcott (a copy of whose collected poems was recently glimpsed in Mr. Obama’s hands) explores what it means to be a “divided child,” caught on the margins of different cultures, dislocated and rootless perhaps, but free to invent a new self.

This notion of self-creation is a deeply American one — a founding principle of this country, and a trope addressed by such classic works as “The Great Gatsby” — and it seems to exert a strong hold on Mr. Obama’s imagination.

In a 2005 essay in Time magazine, he wrote of the humble beginnings that he and Lincoln shared, adding that the 16th president reminded him of “a larger, fundamental element of American life — the enduring belief that we can constantly remake ourselves to fit our larger dreams.”

Though some critics have taken Mr. Obama to task for self-consciously italicizing parallels between himself and Lincoln, there are in fact a host of uncanny correspondences between these two former Illinois state legislators who had short stints in Congress under their belts before coming to national prominence with speeches showcasing their eloquence: two cool, self-contained men, who managed to stay calm and graceful under pressure; two stoics embracing the virtues of moderation and balance; two relatively new politicians who were initially criticized for their lack of experience and for questioning an invasion of a country that, in Lincoln’s words, was “in no way molesting, or menacing the U.S.”

As Fred Kaplan’s illuminating new biography (“Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer”) makes clear, Lincoln, like Mr. Obama, was a lifelong lover of books, indelibly shaped by his reading — most notably, in his case, the Bible and Shakespeare — which honed his poetic sense of language and his philosophical view of the world. Both men employ a densely allusive prose, richly embedded with the fruit of their reading, and both use language as a tool by which to explore and define themselves. Eventually in Lincoln’s case, Mr. Kaplan notes, “the tool, the toolmaker, and the tool user became inseparably one. He became what his language made him.”

The incandescent power of Lincoln’s language, its resonance and rhythmic cadences, as well as his ability to shift gears between the magisterial and the down-to-earth, has been a model for Mr. Obama — who has said he frequently rereads Lincoln for inspiration — and so, too, have been the uses to which Lincoln put his superior language skills: to goad Americans to complete the unfinished work of the founders, and to galvanize a nation reeling from hard times with a new vision of reconciliation and hope.

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Palm Oil: Death to the Orangutans

Palm oil frenzy threatens to wipe out orangutans

By ROBIN MCDOWELL, Associated Press Writer

TANJUNG PUTING NATIONAL PARK, Indonesia – Hoping to unravel the mysteries of human origin, anthropologist Louis Leakey sent three young women to Africa and Asia to study our closest relatives: It was chimpanzees for Jane Goodall, mountain gorillas for Dian Fossey and the elusive, solitary orangutans for Birute Mary Galdikas.

Nearly four decades later, 62-year-old Galdikas, the least famous of his "angels," is the only one still at it. And the red apes she studies in Indonesia are on the verge of extinction because forests are being clear-cut and burned to make way for lucrative palm oil plantations.

Galdikas worries many questions may never be answered. How long do orangutans live in the wild? How far do the males roam? And how many mates do they have in their lifetime?

"I try not to get depressed, I try not to get burned out," says the Canadian scientist, pulling a wide-rimmed jungle hat over her shoulder-length gray hair in Tanjung Puting National Park. She gently leans over to pick up a tiny orangutan, orphaned when his mother was caught raiding crops.

"But when you get up in the air you start gasping in horror; there's nothing but palm oil in an area that used to be plush rain forest. Elsewhere, there's burned-out land, which now extends even within the borders of the park."

The demand for palm oil is rising in the U.S. and Europe because it is touted as a "clean" alternative to fuel. Indonesia is the world's top producer of palm oil, and prices have jumped by almost 70 percent in the last year.

But palm oil plantations devastate the forest and create a monoculture on the land, in which orangutans cannot survive. Over the years, Galdikas has fought off loggers, poachers and miners, but nothing has posed as great a threat to her "babies" as palm oil.

Only an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 orangutans are left in the wild, 90 percent of them in Indonesia, said Serge Wich, a scientist at the Great Ape Trust of Iowa. Most live in small, scattered populations that cannot take the onslaught on the forests much longer.

Trees are being cut at a rate of 300 football fields every hour. And massive land-clearing fires have turned the country into one of the top emitters of carbon.

Tanjung Puting, which has 1,600 square miles, clings precariously to the southern tip of Borneo island. Its 6,000 orangutans — one of the two largest populations on the planet, together with the nearby Sebangau National Park — are less vulnerable to diseases and fires.

That has allowed them, to a degree, to live and evolve as they have for millions of years.

"I am not an alarmist," says Galdikas, speaking calmly but deliberately, her brow slightly furrowed. "But I would say, if nothing is done, orangutan populations outside of national parks have less than 10 years left."

Even Tanjung Puting is not safe, in part because of a border dispute between the central government, which argues in favor of a 1996 map, and provincial officials, who are pushing for a much smaller 1977 map. If local officials win, the park could be slashed by up to 25 percent.

Galdikas, of Lithuanian descent, was an anthropology student at the University of California in Los Angeles when she approached Leakey, a visiting lecturer, in 1969. She follows on the heels of Goodall, who today devotes virtually all of her time to advocacy for chimps, and Fossey, who was brutally murdered in her Rwandan hut in
1985.

Galdikas and her then husband, Rod Brindamour, went to Tanjung Puting and settled into a primitive thatch hut in the heart of one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet, with millions of plant and animal species.

Twice featured on the cover of National Geographic Magazine, she wrote an autobiography, "Reflections of Eden," describing how she fell in love with the sound of cicadas, and marveled at the sudden shifts of light that in an instant transformed drab greens and browns into translucent shades of emerald.

Her first challenge was simply finding the well-camouflaged orangutans in 100-foot-high trees. But eventually she was able to track them, sometimes for several weeks at a time.

She discovered that female orangutans give birth when they are about 15 and then only once every eight or nine years, making them especially vulnerable to extinction. They also have one of the most intense maternal-offspring relationships of all mammals, remaining inseparable for the first seven or eight years.

While orangutans are at first very gregarious, as adults they live largely solitary lives, foraging for fruit or sleeping. Orangutan means "man of the forest."

One of Galdikas' main projects today is her rehabilitation center in a village outside Tanjung Puting, overflowing with more than 300 animals orphaned when their mothers were killed by palm oil plantation workers.

With forests disappearing, the red apes raid crops, grabbing freshly planted shoots from the fields.

"Many come in very badly wounded, suffering from malnutrition, psychological and emotional and even physical trauma," says Galdikas, as she watches members of her staff prepare six young orangutans for release one overcast Saturday afternoon.

It is a three-hour journey along bumpy roads to the release site. By the time they arrive, it is raining and the last gray light is feebly pushing its way through the deep canopy of trees.

After years of being cared for, fed and taught the ways of the woods, the young orangutans scramble nimbly to the tops of trees. Branches snap as they make their nests for the night.

"It is getting harder and harder to find good, safe forest in which to free them," says Galdikas, who today spends half her time in Indonesia and most of the rest teaching at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.

Forestry Minister Malem Kaban says the government is committed to protecting Indonesia's dense, primary forests and that no permit should be granted within a half-mile of a national park. Even so, one palm oil company has started clearing trees within Tanjung Puting's northern perimeter, leaving a wasteland of churned-up peat and charred trunks. Four others are seeking concessions along its eastern edge.

Derom Bangun, executive chairman of the Indonesian Palm Oil Association, says while his 300 members have vowed to stay clear of national parks, others have been known to operate within areas that should be off-limits. Sometimes it is not their fault, he notes, pointing to the need for better coordination between central and local government on border issues.

Galdikas, a passionate field researcher, says one of her great regrets is that she does not share Goodall's skills in raising awareness and funds for the great apes. But she is happy Tanjung Puting has over the years grown into a popular tourist destination. She says there's no better advertisement for conservation than being in a rain forest.

Some visitors are even lucky enough to come face to face with an orangutan on a slippery jungle trail.

"As he passes you, you nod and he nods back to you and continues on his way," she says, adding that looking in the eyes of a great ape, it instantly becomes clear that there is no separation between humans and nature.

"If they go extinct, we will have one less kin to call our own in this world," says Galdikas, who is also president of the Los Angeles-based Orangutan Foundation International. "And do we really want to be alone on this planet?"

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

'So that all children could fly'

On the Sunday before his inauguration President-elect Barack Obama and his family attended services at the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, D.C.

The congregation erupted in applause when Mr. Obama, his wife, Michelle, and their daughters Sasha and Malia walked in and sat in the second row, which had been reserved for them.

During the service, children sang and spoke selected readings that recalled the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

"Martin Luther King walked so that Barack Obama could run," said one boy.

Added another, standing a few feet away from the first African-American ever elected president, "Barack Obama ran so that all children could fly."

Barack Obama and the Voice of God

From Time Magazine


By Michael Kinsley

In the 1950s and '60s, God was a man named Alexander Scourby. He was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., of Greek immigrant parents and attended college in West Virginia, but he spoke in a "deep and resonant voice" and -- here is the key point -- with more than a touch of a British accent. Long after Britain had exhausted its resources in World War II and lost its empire, a British accent conveyed authority, dignity, power.

In Hollywood, an omniscient but unseen narrator is sometimes referred to as a VOG, short for voice of God. Scourby was the leading VOG of his day in documentaries such as "Victory at Sea" and numerous commercials. His was the voice in the first ever recording of the entire Bible, made in the 1940s. At that time, it was as natural to assume that God spoke with a British accent as it was to assume that He had a beard--or, for that matter, that He was a he.

Scourby died in 1985, after at least two complete recordings of the Bible and one of the Koran. Yes, in those days, even the Prophet Muhammad had a British accent. So who is God today? The answer is clear: he is James Earl Jones. Jones' voice is best known for five immortal syllables: "THIS [pause] is CNN." Jones is also the voice of Darth Vader in the Star Wars films. And his recording of the King James Version of the Bible has sold more than 400,000 copies. Jones' voice is even deeper and more resonant than Scourby's, but there is only a trace of a British accent. Jones is African American and sounds it.

The currently best-selling audio Bible, "Inspired by ... the Bible Experience," has an all-star cast including Angela Bassett, Cuba Gooding Jr., Samuel L. Jackson and Forest Whitaker--all African American. Meanwhile, Jones' only real competition for the role of God--at least until Denzel Washington gets a bit older--is Morgan Freeman. Jones is the Old Testament God, fierce and forbidding. Freeman is the New Testament version, all wise and all knowing, to be sure, but more approachable. He has done it twice in movies, has been the VOG in commercials for Listerine and Visa cards, among other products, and was the inevitable choice as narrator for that excruciatingly adorable movie about penguins. Freeman told an Associated Press reporter a few months ago that he is "tired of playing God." Who can blame him? At least as Freeman plays him, God is a bit hard to take: so full of tough love and wry wisdom that you long to wear a wire and catch him soliciting $8 million bribes to admit you into heaven.

Brits and pseudo-Brits, in sum, have lost this franchise. If you're a casting director looking for a voice whose very timbre communicates authority, dignity, power, you might even go to Queen Latifah before you resort to Jeremy Irons. The reasons aren't hard to speculate about. The roots of this development go back at least to the 1930s and Paul Robeson's singing "Ol' Man River" in "Showboat." The therapeutic notion that suffering confers dignity and authority has spread just as the suffering of African Americans over generations has become universally acknowledged. Above all, black American ministers have replaced British politicians, at least in perception, as the world's most eloquent public users of the English language. Our homegrown Martin Luther King Jr. has knocked Winston Churchill off his perch as the ideal.

What's most inspiring about this development is that it can't be faked. There is no element of affirmative action here. Sidney Poitier won't do. The point is not to be black but to sound black. And unlike the integration and near domination of African Americans in professional sports, this is not even a matter of genuine talent breaking down the floodgates. Plenty of white or white-sounding actors could say "THIS [pause] is CNN" as well as Jones. Most people who have heard that phrase a hundred times don't know whose voice it is and--unless the question is raised specifically--they aren't even consciously aware that the person is black. They relate to the voice on a subconscious level, and they associate it with power and authority.

Starting Jan. 20, the most powerful person in the world actually will be a black man. Although President Barack Obama is one of the greatest public speakers now practicing that art, he probably couldn't get hired as the anonymous voice-over spokesman for a brand of cereal because he doesn't sound black enough. Nevertheless, he is a beneficiary of this development. When God turned into an African American, it became less unthinkable that the President might be African American as well.

Copyright © 2009 Time Inc. All rights reserved.

'Re-segregation of public education'

Immigrants See Charter Schools as a Haven


Jan. 10, 2009 (New York Times News Service)

By SARA RIMER

MINNEAPOLIS — Fartun Warsame, a Somali immigrant, thought she was being a good mother when she transferred her five boys to a top elementary school in an affluent Minneapolis suburb. Besides its academic advantages, the school was close to her job as an ultrasound technician, so if the teachers called, she could get there right away.

“Immediately they changed,” Ms. Warsame said of her sons. “They wanted to wear shorts. They’d say, ‘Buy me this.’ I said, ‘Where did you guys get this idea you can control me?’”

Her sons informed her that this was the way things were in America. But not in this Somali mother’s house. She soon moved them back to the city, to the International Elementary School, a charter school of about 560 pupils in downtown Minneapolis founded by leaders of the city’s large East African community. The extra commuting time was worth the return to the old order: five well-behaved sons, and one all-powerful mother.

Charter schools, which are publicly financed but independently run, were conceived as a way to improve academic performance. But for immigrant families, they have also become havens where their children are shielded from the American youth culture that pervades large district schools.

The curriculum at the Twin Cities International Elementary School, and at its partner middle school and high school, is similar to that of other public schools with high academic goals. But at Twin Cities International the girls say they can freely wear head scarves without being teased, the lunchroom serves food that meets the dietary requirements of Muslims, and in every classroom there are East African teaching assistants who understand the needs of students who may have spent years in refugee camps. Twin Cities International students are from Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Sudan, with a small population from the Middle East.

Amid the wave of immigration that has been reshaping Minnesota for more than three decades, the International schools are among 30 of the state’s 138 charter schools that are focused mostly on students from specific immigrant or ethnic groups. To visit a half-dozen of these schools, to listen to teachers, administrators and parents — Somali immigrants who are relatively new to Minnesota, as well as the Hmong and Latinos who have been in the state for decades — is to understand that Ms. Warsame’s high educational aspirations for her children, and her fears, are universal.

“The good news is that immigrant kids are learning English better and faster than ever before in U.S. history,” said Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, the co-director of immigration studies at New York University and co-author of “Learning a New Land — Immigrant Students in American Society” (Harvard Press, 2008). “But they’re assimilating to a society that parents see as very threatening and frightening. It’s anti-authority, anti-studying. It’s materialistic.”

Some critics argue that these kinds of charter schools are contributing to a growing re-segregation of public education, and that they run counter to the long-held idea of public schools as the primary institution of the so-called “melting pot,” the engine that forges a common American identity among immigrants from many countries.

“One of the primary reasons that American society supports public schools is to give everyone a solid civic education,” said Diane Ravitch, an education historian, “the sort of education that comes from learning together with others from different backgrounds.”

But Dr. Suárez-Orozco says the reality is that most new immigrants become isolated in public schools, and that large numbers of them become alienated over time and fail to graduate.

A place like Minnesota, with its strong charter-school movement, offers immigrant parents, who have long been conflicted about their children becoming Americanized, a strong voice in their children’s education, Dr. Suárez-Orozco said, and shows their eagerness to participate in democracy.

“What the parents are saying,” he said, “is, We want our children to assimilate, we want them to acculturate, but we want to be proactively engaged in shaping that process.”

Ali Somo, a 70-year-old father of three children at the International Schools, put it this way: “We bring our children here because we want them close to us so they don’t get lost.”

It was a weekday morning, but Mr. Somo and Ms. Warsame and a group of other parents, some holding down double shifts as cabdrivers, hotel housekeepers, and parking lot attendants, were squeezing in a meeting in the school library, with its shelves lined with “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Red Badge of Courage,” “Little House on the Prairie” and other American classics.

Getting lost in America, Mr. Somo explained, means losing your culture, your language, your identity. It means acting like the teenagers the parents see on the street — wearing baggy jeans, smoking, using drugs, disrespecting elders.

“I have been in America, and I have observed,” Mr. Somo testified. “I have seen children with their pants falling off. I have seen them doing drugs.”

The parents around him nodded. Another father, Jelil Abdella, talked about how it saddened him that his two grown children, who had attended large district schools, did not know how to speak Somali. “They’re neither American, nor Somali,” Mr. Abdella said.

As a newcomer, he said, he was too busy going to school and earning a living — driving a taxi, cleaning floors, working in a factory, picking blueberries — to supervise their educations closely.

“I don’t want to make the same mistake with my younger children,” he said. “I want them to keep the good things we used to have back home — respecting their parents, helping each other, respecting their elders.”

Another father, Mahamaud Wardere, said: “It is important that they all know they’re American. It is equally important that they know they’re Somali.”

It is this dual identity that the International Schools work to encourage. There are lessons in snowshoeing and baseball, and field trips to the Mall of America, where instead of shopping, the students participate in another American ritual, the charity fund-raising walk. There are also teen-agers complaining that their parents worry too much.

“I can at least account for more than 200 lectures I’ve had from my mom and dad about American culture here,” said Omar Ahmed, a 14-year-old eighth grader. “My dad always says, ‘Back in Somalia, when I was 14, I could see myself running my own business, having my own children. You’re 14, you can’t get your studies done.’ ”

“Every time my mom sees something bad about teens in the news,” Omar said, “there’s another lecture on that subject.”

Perhaps nothing more vividly demonstrated the students’ enthusiasm for American democracy than a debate this fall in Elizabeth Veldman’s eighth-grade social studies class about the presidential race. The two teams of students had spent days preparing.

“Look at our history — look at what happened with the Vietnam War,” said Yaqub Ali, 13, a fervent supporter of Senator John McCain who arrived four years ago from a Somalian refugee camp in Kenya, knowing no English. “Do you want to lose a war?”

“Sit down, Yaqub!” commanded Ridwa Yakob, who describes herself as “a girl who loves to talk.” She argued that Senator Barack Obama would fix everything from education to the economy.

Yaqub, wearing a dark suit for the occasion, rose again. “John McCain is old,” he said. “It is better to be old.”

At the International school, where elders are revered, even Ridwa was silenced.

At their meeting, the parents talked of the importance of speaking English at school — and Somali or Oromo at home. At other charter schools, Hmong refugee and Latino parents expressed the same wish, the difference being that they want their children to speak Hmong, or Spanish, at home, the other difference being that many of their children are already so Americanized that they are learning their parents’ languages in school.

“The other day a spider fell from the roof and my son picked it up,” Mr. Somo said, referring to his 13-year-old, Hussein. “What do you call it in English, I asked him. He told me. How to say it in Oromo — I told him myself. How to say it in Arabic and Somali — he learned it himself. He was able to say the word for “spider” in four languages.”

With that kind of linguistic talent, Mr. Somo said of his son, “he can work for America anywhere in the world.”

Dr. Suárez-Orozco said: “What these parents are doing, in taking ownership of their children’s schools, is as American as apple pie. They’re doing what soccer moms and dads in Lexington, Mass., and Concord and Cambridge do day in and day out. They’re modeling for kids the story of acculturation and how it works.”

Unfortunate death

If you want to dress up and have fun, you better stay away from the booze.


Seattle police fatally shoot armed history buff

Saturday, Jan 3, 2009

A college student dressed in a vintage German military uniform who was fatally shot by police on New Year's Day was a harmless, eccentric history buff, his family and friends said Friday.

Miles Murphy, a University of Washington senior, was shot several times at his apartment early Thursday after police said he pointed a rifle affixed with a bayonet at officers and refused orders to drop the weapon.

Seattle police had converged on Murphy's apartment after receiving complaints that several men were firing rifle and shotgun rounds into the air. Murphy emerged from inside and pointed what was later identified as a World War II Kar 98 German infantry rifle at the officers, police said.

When he refused several orders to drop the weapon, two officers fired seven shots, police Officer Jeff Kappel said. Murphy was taken to Harborview Medical Center, where he died.

A witness told some officers at the scene that Murphy had been firing blanks that night.

Police searching the house found alcohol, live ammunition and a large collection of German, Russian and Nazi memorabilia including photographs and uniforms, Sgt. Sean Whitcomb said.

But Murphy "wasn't a Nazi," Hattie Taylor, a friend, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "He was just fascinated with the past... He liked to dress up and have fun."

Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske called the situation "truly sad" but stood by the officers' actions. "Right now, I don't see any other choice that they had," he said.

The two officers who fired at Murphy were placed on paid administrative leave, which is standard procedure.

Murphy, 22, was a senior Germanics major, university President Mark Emmert said in a statement Friday mourning his loss.

Murphy wanted to be a German literature professor and had a large collection of WWII memorabilia, said his friend Spencer Bray.

He was "a peaceful and loving young man," his mother, Dianne Murphy, told the local newspaper.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.