Wednesday 9/28 NY Times

There was another article in today’s Times about granting women’s rights. In Australia, women can now serve in front line combat roles. I was really affected by the quote by the Defense Minister, “your role in the defense force will be determined on your ability, not on the basis of your sex.” Between this article and the one from Monday about Saudi Arabian women getting the right to vote, I am just amazed at how ignorant I was to women’s rights in other countries. I guess I assumed that today in age women had the same equal rights as men. Well, I was wrong! At least other countries are stepping up to the plate and making way towards equality between the sexes.

The picture of the mug shots of two people on page A17 caught my eye. They abducted their 8 children who were placed in foster care, and lived in a van in Pennsylvania until police found them. I thought the reporter could have gone into a little more depth about the story and I hope that there is a follow up in next week’s paper. Although he got quotes from both sides of the story, it would have been really interesting to hear directly from the parents who abducted their kids, also, he didn’t even mention why the kids were in foster care in the first place!

NY Times 9/28

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Wow, what a sharp difference from Monday’s paper! Yesterday I was so intrigued by all of the stories but today I found the Times dry and not that interesting.

The picture of the girl with the headband that read “we will win for the blood of our martyrs” was powerful; mostly I think because of the expression on the girl’s face and because she appears to be only five or six years old, but I could not find the story anywhere that explained the picture! It was probably a follow up on the story about the revolts in Yemen last week, but I wanted to read more about it and that was sort of a disappointment.

The stories about the Pakistanis attack on the Americans in Afghanistan, the “deep recession”, and wasting of natural gas in North Dakota I felt simply spit out facts and barely got deep into the issue. The article about the Pakistani attacks on American state that the investigations of the ambush were kept “under wraps”.  Well, if the government has refused to talk about it for four years, why not switch the focus and talk about the families dealing with the pain of losing loved ones? Hopefully Wednesday’s Times will be better to read.

Monday Funday 9/26

NY Times Monday, Sept. 26

I really, really enjoyed the NY Times today! Every article I read was so interesting that I read it for over a half hour without even realizing it. The cover story about the Saudi Monarch granting women the right to vote was so informative! The journalist got quotes from the monarch as well as the Saudi Arabian women, and it was such a cultural shock to me to actually see how far behind women are socially compared to in the United States. It’s something as simple as that that I take for granted every day, and I forget that women everywhere do not have the right to vote, right to drive, or even own her own ID card! The right to vote is such a small but significant step for the empowerment of women in the Middle East.

The picture at the bottom of the page of the beautiful, high tech building also caught my eye immediately. This building, called the Via Verde, is set in the Bronx as a public housing unit that promotes health, well being and environmentally conscious decisions. Finally, a public housing unit that does not look like crap! I completely agree with the money spent towards making this building look good and exceptionally nice.

Grabber Lead 9/26

These stings were anything but bee stings.

The kids screaming and running out of the waters at Wallis Sands Beach in Rye were stung not by bees, but by a giant, dead jellyfish lurking in the waters.

Offices Move from Garrison Ave

Offices Move from Garrison Ave

9/26/2011

The buildings of offices and businesses on Garrison Avenue are torn down this fall in order to make room for the new Peter T. Paul Business College. These offices are still up and running, but had to move to other parts of campus.

            The Peter T. Paul Business College, a $53 million dollar project that “is vital to the success of our students and to the economic success of our state”, according to President Mark Huddleston’s statement in “Facts About the Funding of UNH’s New Business College”, forces people who work in Grant House, Schofield House, Verrette House, and Hershey House to relocate their offices and organizations.

            The recently finished renovations on the Wolff House and Smith Hall, polished with new carpets and cleanly painted walls, are the new homes to Sexual Harassment and Rape Prevention Program (SHARPP), Center for Academic Resources (CFAR), and the Admissions Office. SHARPP, previously in the Hershey House, is now in the Wolff House and employees could not be happier about the move. Mary Mayhew, program director of SHARPP, expresses her personal favor for the new location.

“Our goal is for SHARPP to be a warm and welcoming location where people feel safe and welcomed, Mayhew says. “In addition to the great interior space, the location is also excellent. We are located in front of Health Services and the UNH Police Department is just behind us. Both departments are important allies in the work we do.”

But the relocation causes room for concern about the community being able to find SHARPP. During the past ten years, SHARPP has moved four times and being open to the UNH community is vital to the organization’s existence. Slava Bruder, Office Manager of SHARPP, told of multiple instances this year when students walked into the Wolff House looking for CFAR, which used to be housed there. CFAR is now located in Smith Hall, along with Admissions. There has not been much advertisement about the new locations of these resources for students on campus. If students wander to where the Hershey House used to stand, they will find nothing but a pile of rubble and some construction workers.

However, Bruder says that just the opposite could happen. “People might have more knowledge about us because we’re in a more centralized location this year,” she says. Last Friday, SHARPP threw a block party in cooperation with Health Services and the UNH Police Department to educate students about the new location and show off the newly renovated Wolff House. Old school nineties hits blared from the speakers inside of the house, while students curiously stopped over at the purple tent outside to grab a free brownie and see what all the commotion was about. Bruder said that the turnout was great.

Kate Cameron, a junior at UNH, did not know about the relocation of offices.

“I knew that the new Business College was going up, but I had no idea where all the other offices moved,” she says. “I guess I just figured they were temporarily somewhere else.”

The new buildings are far from temporary. And with the addition of the state of the art Peter T. Paul Business College, students should be educated about the new whereabouts of places on campus.

Our Job Market Sucks. NY Times 9/22

I found the front page of the NY Times today to be really dull. The cover story about Mahmoud Abbas was too long and wordy; the delayed lead did not draw my attention and I lost interest fast. It would have been much more appealing to me for the writer to get right to the point that Palestinians are “pursuing a seat in the U.N.”

However, the story about young adults and the new health law really got my attention!  I don’t know if this story would have been appealing to older readers, but I’m sure the younger population of the Times was appreciative of this story. In the new law, a person can be covered as a dependent by their parents until they are 26, instead of 18 or 21. Awesome!  It’s too bad that this law had to come into effect, though, that our economy is SO BAD that there is not a lot of hope with finding jobs straight out of college and adults will still need to rely on their parents.

So right after I read that article, feeling down about the job industry, I read the article that informed me that applicants are up for graduate school but enrollment has dropped; most of these fields include business, education, and public administration. Nice! So can grad schools not fund all of these students? I want to be a teacher and have to attend graduate school in order to be a teacher in most states. Maybe I’ll move to a foreign country and be a teacher there. But in all seriousness…I was angered after reading the Times today. Our economy growing worse and worse each day.