Some articles
Jul. 1st, 2009 09:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on adding two Muslim holidays to the school calendar.
I understand the reasoning that you can't reasonably add EVERY possible holiday to the calendar, but it occurs to me that they get off all of July and August, plus part of June and September. They don't *actually* have to be off until the Tuesday after Labor Day, they really can start school the Thursday before if necessary to fit these extra holidays in.
Council Votes for Two Muslim School Holidays
By KIRK SEMPLE
Spurred by a broad coalition of religious, labor and immigrant groups, the City Council overwhelmingly passed a resolution on Tuesday to add two of the most important Muslim holy days to the public schools’ holiday calendar.
But the vote, which was nonbinding, put the Council in conflict with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has the final say to designate the days off and has said he is resolutely opposed to the idea.
The mayor told reporters before the vote that not all religions could be accommodated on the holiday schedule, only those with “a very large number of kids who practice.”
“If you close the schools for every single holiday, there won’t be any school,” he said. “Educating our kids requires time in the classroom, and that’s the most important thing to us.”
The current school calendar recognizes major Christian and Jewish holy days like Christmas and Yom Kippur, but no Muslim holy days.
Mr. Bloomberg’s stance has irritated advocates of the measure, and some said he risked alienating many in New York’s fast-growing Muslim population as he seeks re-election in the fall.
Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid, a leader of the campaign to add the holidays, said that if the mayor continued to oppose the move, the results for him at the voting booth could be “catastrophic” among the city’s roughly 600,000 Muslims.
“We really have confidence in the mayor’s intelligence,” said Imam Talib, head of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem. “It’s an election year.”
The proposal to add the two holy days — Id al-Fitr and Id al-Adha — has not drawn much visible public opposition. Some council members have expressed reservations about subtracting more classroom days from the school calendar, though only one, G. Oliver Koppell of the Bronx, voted against it.
After the vote, Mr. Koppell said the existing schedule of religious holidays might have to be reviewed and trimmed, lest other growing religions in New York start demanding their own days off. “Where are we going to end with this?” he asked.
The resolution’s advocates said that since about 12 percent, or more than 100,000, of the city’s public school students are Muslim, they deserved recognition. The two holidays have already been adopted by school districts including Dearborn, Mich., and several municipalities in New Jersey.
Supporters also say that since the Ids (pronounced eeds) are floating holidays whose timing is set by the lunar calendar, they often fall on other religious holidays, on weekends or during the summer. During the next decade, for instance, at least one of the two Ids each year is expected to coincide with summer recess or an existing school holiday, according to a report by the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University.
It was unclear on Tuesday whether Mr. Bloomberg would continue to have final say on the issue, because the State Legislature still has not passed a bill to extend his control over the schools. But some officials said that even if the bill did not pass, he would be able to exert indirect control through appointments to the Board of Education.
The Council resolution also urged the Legislature to pass two pending bills that would amend state education law to require the holidays in the city’s school calendar. That could allow the move without the mayor’s approval, said Councilman Robert Jackson of Manhattan, a co-sponsor of the resolution and a Muslim.
Id al-Fitr celebrates the end of Ramadan, the sacred month of fasting, and Id al-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice, marks the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Muslims traditionally observe these days by praying in the morning, then celebrating with family and friends, exchanging gifts and sharing a large meal.
The holy days have long posed a painful choice for Muslim students: Should they go to class in the interest of their grades and attendance record, or cut class to be with their families?
When Rebecca Chowdhury, 18, was young, she said, she generally skipped school. But as she grew older and faced more academic demands, she often had to forgo the celebrations.
“It created a great divide between myself and my family,” said Ms. Chowdhury, who graduated last week from Stuyvesant High School.
The campaign to recognize the two holy days has been coordinated by La Fuente, a grass-roots organizing group, and supported by a coalition; at its core are dozens of Muslim organizations.
Some leaders said the coalition’s successes reflected the political maturation of the city’s diverse Muslim population, which has at times seen its social and political ambitions hamstrung by schisms among competing groups.
“When there are issues of common concern and broad-based impact,” Imam Talib said, “the people put aside other differences and unite around a common cause.”
Members of the coalition said the current effort stems from a decision by the state in 2006 to schedule the Regents exam on Id al-Adha, which angered Muslims and spurred state legislators to pass a bill ordering the State Department of Education to make a “bona fide effort” to schedule mandated exams on days other than religious holidays.
While there have been scattered efforts for years to put the Id holy days on school calendars, the efforts finally coalesced into a formal campaign after the passage of the state bill.
An article on laws requiring electronics companies to safely dispose of electronics
A Green Way to Dump Low-Tech Electronics
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
This month, Edward Reilly, 35, finally let go of the television he had owned since his college days.
Although the Mitsubishi set was technologically outdated, it had sat for years in Mr. Reilly’s home in Portland, Me., because he did not know what else to do with it, given the environmental hazards involved in discarding it.
“It’s pretty well known that if it gets into the landfill, it gets into the groundwater,” he said. “Its chemicals pollute.”
But the day after the nationwide conversion to digital television signals took effect on June 12, Mr. Reilly decided to take advantage of a new wave of laws in Maine and elsewhere that require television and computer manufacturers to recycle their products free of charge. He dropped off his television at an electronic waste collection site near his home and, he said, immediately gained “peace of mind.”
Over the course of that day, 700 other Portland residents did the same.
Since 2004, 18 states and New York City have approved laws that make manufacturers responsible for recycling electronics, and similar statutes were introduced in 13 other states this year. The laws are intended to prevent a torrent of toxic and outdated electronic equipment — television sets, computers, monitors, printers, fax machines — from ending up in landfills where they can leach chemicals into groundwater and potentially pose a danger to public health.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates 99.1 million televisions sit unused in closets and basements across the country. Consumer response to recycling has been enormous in states where the laws have taken effect. Collection points in Washington State, for example, have been swamped by people like Babs Smith, 55, who recently drove to RE-PC, a designated electronics collection and repurposing center on the southern edge of Seattle.
Ms. Smith’s Subaru Outback was stuffed with three aged computer towers that had languished in her basement after being gutted by her teenage sons, who removed choice bits to build their own souped-up computers. “It’s what geeks do,” she said.
Since January, Washington State residents and small businesses have been allowed to drop off their televisions, computers and computer monitors free of charge to one of 200 collection points around the state. They have responded by dumping more than 15 million pounds of electronic waste, according to state collection data. If disposal continues at this rate, it will amount to more than five pounds for every man, woman and child per year.
Use of the drop-off points was so overwhelming at first that the Washington Materials Management and Financing Authority, which oversees the program, urged consumers to consider holding off until spring.
“We were getting 18 semi loads a day when the program first started,” said Craig Lorch, owner of Total Reclaim, a warehouse on the south edge of Seattle that is among the collection points.
Still, states that pioneered the electronic recycling laws report that consumer participation remains strong over time. Maine, which was one of the first to approve such a law, in 2004, says it collected nearly four pounds of waste per person last year.
“If you make it easy, they will recycle their stuff,” said Barbara Kyle, national coordinator of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco. If products are recycled rather than dumped, parts of the machines are refurbished for new use where possible; if not, they are disassembled, their glass and precious metals are recycled, and the plastics, which have no reuse market, are often shipped overseas to developing countries for disposal.
The laws vary significantly from state to state. But in most, manufacturers are responsible for the collection and recycling system, although some will pay states or counties to handle the pickup. The newest laws tend to require recycling of a broader range of items, including printers and fax machines.
Many laws, including those for New Jersey and Connecticut and New York City (none of which are yet in effect) specifically ban residents from dumping electronics into the regular trash.
Least thrilled with the patchwork of laws are electronics manufacturers. “Our hope is there will be a national law before there is a law in every state,” said Parker Brugge, vice president for environmental affairs and industry sustainability for the Consumer Electronics Association, an industry advocacy group.
Mr. Brugge said it was difficult for manufacturers to keep up with dozens of laws and rules, many of which they consider impractical. New York City, for example, is pressing manufacturers to agree to pick up at apartment buildings.
Manufacturers say a reasonable rate for collection and processing of waste is 25 to 30 cents a pound. Still it is more than they say they can recoup from reselling the metals they harvest, particularly for televisions.
Peter M. Fannon, the vice president for technology and government policy at Panasonic’s North American subsidiary, said his company would prefer a national law that would put local governments in charge of collection and the industry in charge of recycling.
“We think it is unreasonable that an individual industry be designated as trash collector,” Mr. Fannon said.
State lawmakers counter that they cannot afford to wait for a national bill. With constant upgrades in technological capability, they say, manufacturers build obsolescence into many of their designs, causing outdated electronics to become the bane of the waste system.
The E.P.A. estimates that 2.6 million tons of electronic waste were dropped into landfills in 2007, the most recent year for which data is available. Once buried, the waste leaches poisons like chlorinated solvents and heavy metals into soil and groundwater.
Recycling programs do not address the problem of electronics that are already leaching poison in landfills. Nor do they prevent the frequent shipment of plastic shells covered with chemical flame retardants overseas to poor and developing nations; once there, they are often incinerated, because they cannot be reused, and spew toxic chemicals into the air.
The Office of the Inspector General at the Justice Department has a continuing investigation into accusations that several federal prisons with electronics recycling contracts had used inmates to do the work without taking adequate safety precautions, exposing them to unhealthy levels of airborne particles.
Ultimately, said Ms. Kyle, coordinator of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, recycling does not eliminate the root problem: the vast amount of electronics generated in the first place and fated for disposal.
Carole A. Cifrino, the environmental specialist who manages Maine’s e-waste program, said she hoped the strict recycling would eventually prompt manufacturers to rethink their designs.
“Maybe since they have some responsibility for the cleanup,” Ms. Cifrino said, “it will motivate them to think about how you design for the environment and the commodity value at the end of the life.”
An article on how some societies have children who don't crawl. They're calling this research *new*, but as I've been referring people to these *very same studies* for years I wonder how new it can be.
I understand the reasoning that you can't reasonably add EVERY possible holiday to the calendar, but it occurs to me that they get off all of July and August, plus part of June and September. They don't *actually* have to be off until the Tuesday after Labor Day, they really can start school the Thursday before if necessary to fit these extra holidays in.
Council Votes for Two Muslim School Holidays
By KIRK SEMPLE
Spurred by a broad coalition of religious, labor and immigrant groups, the City Council overwhelmingly passed a resolution on Tuesday to add two of the most important Muslim holy days to the public schools’ holiday calendar.
But the vote, which was nonbinding, put the Council in conflict with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has the final say to designate the days off and has said he is resolutely opposed to the idea.
The mayor told reporters before the vote that not all religions could be accommodated on the holiday schedule, only those with “a very large number of kids who practice.”
“If you close the schools for every single holiday, there won’t be any school,” he said. “Educating our kids requires time in the classroom, and that’s the most important thing to us.”
The current school calendar recognizes major Christian and Jewish holy days like Christmas and Yom Kippur, but no Muslim holy days.
Mr. Bloomberg’s stance has irritated advocates of the measure, and some said he risked alienating many in New York’s fast-growing Muslim population as he seeks re-election in the fall.
Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid, a leader of the campaign to add the holidays, said that if the mayor continued to oppose the move, the results for him at the voting booth could be “catastrophic” among the city’s roughly 600,000 Muslims.
“We really have confidence in the mayor’s intelligence,” said Imam Talib, head of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in Harlem. “It’s an election year.”
The proposal to add the two holy days — Id al-Fitr and Id al-Adha — has not drawn much visible public opposition. Some council members have expressed reservations about subtracting more classroom days from the school calendar, though only one, G. Oliver Koppell of the Bronx, voted against it.
After the vote, Mr. Koppell said the existing schedule of religious holidays might have to be reviewed and trimmed, lest other growing religions in New York start demanding their own days off. “Where are we going to end with this?” he asked.
The resolution’s advocates said that since about 12 percent, or more than 100,000, of the city’s public school students are Muslim, they deserved recognition. The two holidays have already been adopted by school districts including Dearborn, Mich., and several municipalities in New Jersey.
Supporters also say that since the Ids (pronounced eeds) are floating holidays whose timing is set by the lunar calendar, they often fall on other religious holidays, on weekends or during the summer. During the next decade, for instance, at least one of the two Ids each year is expected to coincide with summer recess or an existing school holiday, according to a report by the Immigrant Rights Clinic at New York University.
It was unclear on Tuesday whether Mr. Bloomberg would continue to have final say on the issue, because the State Legislature still has not passed a bill to extend his control over the schools. But some officials said that even if the bill did not pass, he would be able to exert indirect control through appointments to the Board of Education.
The Council resolution also urged the Legislature to pass two pending bills that would amend state education law to require the holidays in the city’s school calendar. That could allow the move without the mayor’s approval, said Councilman Robert Jackson of Manhattan, a co-sponsor of the resolution and a Muslim.
Id al-Fitr celebrates the end of Ramadan, the sacred month of fasting, and Id al-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice, marks the end of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Muslims traditionally observe these days by praying in the morning, then celebrating with family and friends, exchanging gifts and sharing a large meal.
The holy days have long posed a painful choice for Muslim students: Should they go to class in the interest of their grades and attendance record, or cut class to be with their families?
When Rebecca Chowdhury, 18, was young, she said, she generally skipped school. But as she grew older and faced more academic demands, she often had to forgo the celebrations.
“It created a great divide between myself and my family,” said Ms. Chowdhury, who graduated last week from Stuyvesant High School.
The campaign to recognize the two holy days has been coordinated by La Fuente, a grass-roots organizing group, and supported by a coalition; at its core are dozens of Muslim organizations.
Some leaders said the coalition’s successes reflected the political maturation of the city’s diverse Muslim population, which has at times seen its social and political ambitions hamstrung by schisms among competing groups.
“When there are issues of common concern and broad-based impact,” Imam Talib said, “the people put aside other differences and unite around a common cause.”
Members of the coalition said the current effort stems from a decision by the state in 2006 to schedule the Regents exam on Id al-Adha, which angered Muslims and spurred state legislators to pass a bill ordering the State Department of Education to make a “bona fide effort” to schedule mandated exams on days other than religious holidays.
While there have been scattered efforts for years to put the Id holy days on school calendars, the efforts finally coalesced into a formal campaign after the passage of the state bill.
An article on laws requiring electronics companies to safely dispose of electronics
A Green Way to Dump Low-Tech Electronics
By LESLIE KAUFMAN
This month, Edward Reilly, 35, finally let go of the television he had owned since his college days.
Although the Mitsubishi set was technologically outdated, it had sat for years in Mr. Reilly’s home in Portland, Me., because he did not know what else to do with it, given the environmental hazards involved in discarding it.
“It’s pretty well known that if it gets into the landfill, it gets into the groundwater,” he said. “Its chemicals pollute.”
But the day after the nationwide conversion to digital television signals took effect on June 12, Mr. Reilly decided to take advantage of a new wave of laws in Maine and elsewhere that require television and computer manufacturers to recycle their products free of charge. He dropped off his television at an electronic waste collection site near his home and, he said, immediately gained “peace of mind.”
Over the course of that day, 700 other Portland residents did the same.
Since 2004, 18 states and New York City have approved laws that make manufacturers responsible for recycling electronics, and similar statutes were introduced in 13 other states this year. The laws are intended to prevent a torrent of toxic and outdated electronic equipment — television sets, computers, monitors, printers, fax machines — from ending up in landfills where they can leach chemicals into groundwater and potentially pose a danger to public health.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates 99.1 million televisions sit unused in closets and basements across the country. Consumer response to recycling has been enormous in states where the laws have taken effect. Collection points in Washington State, for example, have been swamped by people like Babs Smith, 55, who recently drove to RE-PC, a designated electronics collection and repurposing center on the southern edge of Seattle.
Ms. Smith’s Subaru Outback was stuffed with three aged computer towers that had languished in her basement after being gutted by her teenage sons, who removed choice bits to build their own souped-up computers. “It’s what geeks do,” she said.
Since January, Washington State residents and small businesses have been allowed to drop off their televisions, computers and computer monitors free of charge to one of 200 collection points around the state. They have responded by dumping more than 15 million pounds of electronic waste, according to state collection data. If disposal continues at this rate, it will amount to more than five pounds for every man, woman and child per year.
Use of the drop-off points was so overwhelming at first that the Washington Materials Management and Financing Authority, which oversees the program, urged consumers to consider holding off until spring.
“We were getting 18 semi loads a day when the program first started,” said Craig Lorch, owner of Total Reclaim, a warehouse on the south edge of Seattle that is among the collection points.
Still, states that pioneered the electronic recycling laws report that consumer participation remains strong over time. Maine, which was one of the first to approve such a law, in 2004, says it collected nearly four pounds of waste per person last year.
“If you make it easy, they will recycle their stuff,” said Barbara Kyle, national coordinator of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco. If products are recycled rather than dumped, parts of the machines are refurbished for new use where possible; if not, they are disassembled, their glass and precious metals are recycled, and the plastics, which have no reuse market, are often shipped overseas to developing countries for disposal.
The laws vary significantly from state to state. But in most, manufacturers are responsible for the collection and recycling system, although some will pay states or counties to handle the pickup. The newest laws tend to require recycling of a broader range of items, including printers and fax machines.
Many laws, including those for New Jersey and Connecticut and New York City (none of which are yet in effect) specifically ban residents from dumping electronics into the regular trash.
Least thrilled with the patchwork of laws are electronics manufacturers. “Our hope is there will be a national law before there is a law in every state,” said Parker Brugge, vice president for environmental affairs and industry sustainability for the Consumer Electronics Association, an industry advocacy group.
Mr. Brugge said it was difficult for manufacturers to keep up with dozens of laws and rules, many of which they consider impractical. New York City, for example, is pressing manufacturers to agree to pick up at apartment buildings.
Manufacturers say a reasonable rate for collection and processing of waste is 25 to 30 cents a pound. Still it is more than they say they can recoup from reselling the metals they harvest, particularly for televisions.
Peter M. Fannon, the vice president for technology and government policy at Panasonic’s North American subsidiary, said his company would prefer a national law that would put local governments in charge of collection and the industry in charge of recycling.
“We think it is unreasonable that an individual industry be designated as trash collector,” Mr. Fannon said.
State lawmakers counter that they cannot afford to wait for a national bill. With constant upgrades in technological capability, they say, manufacturers build obsolescence into many of their designs, causing outdated electronics to become the bane of the waste system.
The E.P.A. estimates that 2.6 million tons of electronic waste were dropped into landfills in 2007, the most recent year for which data is available. Once buried, the waste leaches poisons like chlorinated solvents and heavy metals into soil and groundwater.
Recycling programs do not address the problem of electronics that are already leaching poison in landfills. Nor do they prevent the frequent shipment of plastic shells covered with chemical flame retardants overseas to poor and developing nations; once there, they are often incinerated, because they cannot be reused, and spew toxic chemicals into the air.
The Office of the Inspector General at the Justice Department has a continuing investigation into accusations that several federal prisons with electronics recycling contracts had used inmates to do the work without taking adequate safety precautions, exposing them to unhealthy levels of airborne particles.
Ultimately, said Ms. Kyle, coordinator of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, recycling does not eliminate the root problem: the vast amount of electronics generated in the first place and fated for disposal.
Carole A. Cifrino, the environmental specialist who manages Maine’s e-waste program, said she hoped the strict recycling would eventually prompt manufacturers to rethink their designs.
“Maybe since they have some responsibility for the cleanup,” Ms. Cifrino said, “it will motivate them to think about how you design for the environment and the commodity value at the end of the life.”
An article on how some societies have children who don't crawl. They're calling this research *new*, but as I've been referring people to these *very same studies* for years I wonder how new it can be.
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no subject
Date: 2009-07-01 08:40 pm (UTC)I don't actually like time off for any religious holidays in secular schools, but really, it's more of a practical matter. If a large number of kids are going to be absent, it's not that helpful to keep the school open except as daycare. And since they do specifically close for some religious holidays, they've created this problem for themselves and they really don't have a good excuse to ignore 12% of their kids.
My college was adamant about not closing for any religious holidays (nor most secular ones for that matter) whatsoever. There was not a single holiday they'd stop classes for. But if you had a religious holiday, you could mention it to your professors and they would accommodate you. I think that works reasonably well.
Giving holidays for some religious holidays and not others is really nasty discrimination since there are laws requiring you to have no more than X number of absences per school year or be left back for the year (at least, last I heard). Since religion is not likely to affect how often you become ill or otherwise need to not attend school, forcing Islamic kids but not Jewish or Christian kids to use their sick days on holidays makes it more likely that it'll tilt the balance from passing for the year to failing if they are sickly or just get some bad luck. Unless, of course, the school fakes their attendance records for them and they know that this will happen. That's what my schools always did for me or else I'd never have gotten through school. In High School I was absent at least one day per week. Of course, if the kid doesn't know, you will get kids like a friend of mine who failed one year because he missed enough days to know that he could not pass, didn't know the school was probably lying about that and probably could have worked something out, so he stopped bothering with schoolwork for the year, since what was the point? This is why it's vital for kids to know that things like attendance rules are usually scare tactic lies or real rules with real ways to get around them that nobody wants to talk about because they're likely illegal, but hey, they'll do it anyway.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-01 10:36 pm (UTC)I don't actually like time off for any religious holidays in secular schools, but really, it's more of a practical matter. If a large number of kids are going to be absent, it's not that helpful to keep the school open except as daycare. And since they do specifically close for some religious holidays, they've created this problem for themselves and they really don't have a good excuse to ignore 12% of their kids.
Pretty much that. And groups generally don't ask to have days off until they have a good sized portion of the population of the public schools.
Of course, NYC is very big, and until high school you're mostly going in your neighborhood - which is often predominately one group or another. It'd make a lot of sense in SOME ways if the schools could pick and choose what religious holidays to observe.
But it'd cause chaos in the long run, I know.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-02 08:29 am (UTC)As far as I know, the Muslim calendar is, strictly speaking, not calculable in advance since the start of the month depends on a real person seeing the first sickle after the new moon, rather than on a calculation ("Thirty days hath September, April, June, and Ramadan" etc.), so you can only say that the month will probably start on one of two or three days.
There *are* calculated Muslim calendars (I've heard of one in Microsoft products that uses the so-called "Kuwaiti algorithm", supposedly derived from statistical data on when months started in Kuwait but according to other sources being a pure algorithmic calendar) but I don't know how official they are.