Sunday, April 25, 2010

“City High student keeps giving back - Arizona Daily Star” plus 2 more

“City High student keeps giving back - Arizona Daily Star” plus 2 more

City High student keeps giving back - Arizona Daily Star

Posted: 25 Apr 2010 12:14 AM PDT

School is Joey Cooper's top priority, but the high school senior dedicates most of his spare time to community service.

When he's not maintaining a 4.0 grade-point average at City High School, Cooper volunteers in the refugee community, practices Japanese on the bus with strangers, interns at the Arizona State Museum, sits on Every Voice in Action's Youth Crew, and participates in capoeira and break dancing.

Cooper, 18, is ready for his senior year to wrap up.

"It's good to almost be done with it. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel," he said.

That tunnel ends in Washington, D.C., where Cooper plans to attend George Washington University.

He likely will pursue a degree that will allow him to teach English as a second language.

His interest in teaching ESL developed through his work with refugees.

Cooper volunteers once a week with The Owl & Panther Project, where he works with refugee children affected by trauma.

Interactions involve literacy projects, arts and crafts, and other activities intended to help the children find a sense of community in Tucson, Cooper said.

"I like working with children," he said. "It's a family feeling. I feel protective of the kids."

His volunteer work also has him updating resource guides and maps for the local refugee community, and he works to improve communication between African refugees and refugee services.

City High math teacher Rosalynn Wolfe called Cooper an advocate for refugees and himself.

"He's so sympathetic to what they are going through, and he works with them to help better their lives," she said. "He takes what he learns and shares it with others."

Cooper was born in Tucson, but left in the sixth grade and moved frequently with his mother and siblings. Three years ago he decided to get on a bus and move back to Tucson to live with his father and grandparents.

"It was hard to move around a lot and get used to new places and adjust," he said. "I was shy because of it. I'm not so shy now, and I'm more open."

Cooper has no problem striking up a conversation with a Japanese speaker on the bus so he can practice what he learned in the Japanese courses he took at Pima Community College.

His escape from classroom work and volunteer commitments is capoeira - a Brazilian art form that combines martial arts, music and dance - and break dancing.

"Trying to balance everything is the hardest part," he said. "There's not a lot of free time, but I have things I love doing. It helps keep me going."

Contact reporter Andrea Rivera at arivera@azstarnet.com or 807-8430.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Birds of a feather: Wildlife lovers flock to sanctuary ... - Morris County Daily Record

Posted: 25 Apr 2010 12:57 AM PDT

The weekend of May 1-2 is a perfect time to introduce your family to the Scherman Hoffman Wildlife Sanctuary, the headquarters of the New Jersey Audubon Society in Bernardsville.

To celebrate the opening of its new education center and expanded Nature Store, the Audubon Society (named for wildlife pioneer John James Audubon (1785-1851) will have special activities for everyone, from music to crafts, hands-on nature activities and animal demonstrations.

One of the special attractions will be field demonstrations of radio telemetry. Kids will be able to track a toy animal with a radio implant on the sanctuary grounds.

The Nature Store will offer discounts during the weekend. Items for sale include bird food (seed and suet), bird feeders, field guides, other books, CDs and DVDs of bird song, clothing, toys, and binoculars for observing birds and butterflies. There also are shade-grown coffee from South America and fair trade chocolate. Photographs by Bill Dalton will be on display in the art gallery, and proceeds from their sale will help the sanctuary.

The store also offers free checklists of birds, reptiles, amphibians and mammals to look for on the site's 276 acres. Other freebees include county maps of birding and wildlife trails, guides to New Jersey conservation programs and the center's newsletter. You also can register for programs and join the Audubon Society there.

Michael Anderson, sanctuary director, said this will be a weekend for families to get better acquainted with all the facility has to offer, including the summer camp and the sanctuary's trails, fields and woods at the headlands of the Passaic River.

The Scherman Hoffman Wildlife Sanctuary comprises the former estates of Harry Scherman, founder of the Book of the Month Club, and G. Frederick Hoffman, founder of the Hoffman soft drink company. It sits next to Jockey Hollow National Park and Morris County's Lewis Morris Park, amid some of the most elegant and expensive homes in New Jersey. Even those who have a long drive to get there will find this a worthwhile daytrip.

The Audubon Society has chapters throughout New Jersey, including ones serving Middlesex, Monmouth, Morris, Ocean, Somerset and Sussex counties. Visit www.njaudubon.org.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

Web sites help navigate the unfriendly skies - Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

Posted: 20 Apr 2010 04:12 PM PDT

Business travel is a pain. It upsets your routine and digestion. It throws you into a mix of strange places and stranger people. Worst of all, you usually have to deal with the one industry that proves service is dead: the airlines.

While nothing except maybe a private jet can eliminate the suffering, there are ways to ease it a bit. Knowledge is key and here's how the Web can help.

It always pays to know your enemies, so we'll start with some airline industry insider sites.

Aircrewlayover.com is where flight crew members offer recommendations to each other on restaurants, nightlife, hotels and entertainment venues. Looking under LAX (yes, cities are listed by their three-letter airport code), the restaurant recommendations sort of explain the quality of airline food. Useful, if your company doesn't allow you to expense meals.

More frightening than the food is Crew Rumors, which has a number of bulletin boards where pilots, flight attendants and ground crew post questions, gossip and complaints.

Topics include stupid pax questions and the rudest pax. "Pax" are us, the passengers. If you upgrade, you'd better act it: "If I had to name a group of pax who tend to be on the rude side, it is the first-class upgrades -- definitely. Just because they are sitting in 1A does not mean they are a first-class pax, they are merely a pax with a first-class ticket."

Or pax drinks: "I was once asked for prune juice. Can you imagine the damage that that could cause on a 14-hour flight to NRT? Gross!!!"

Then there's the fight over jump seats between mechanics and pilots on one airline. That can't be good. Here and there between the juicy stuff are recommendations on travel sites and books.

Crew Rumors is part of CrewStart.com, which has tips on places to eat and stay, a currency converter, a language translator, clothing size conversions and a host of other things that any frequent flier, pax or crew, would find useful.

Airline pilots have their own Web site at www.airlinepilots.com. Before you fly read up on pilot fatigue and air safety. There are also chat rooms as opposed to bulletin boards. Hey, they've got to do something when the autopilot is on.

We of the pax persuasion have our own forum for tips and complaints at Airwise. Topics include air rage, passenger rights, and individual airlines and airports. Airwise's main page has news, flight schedules and airport guides.

An overwhelming and fascinating list of links is at JohnnyJet. Oh sure, you'd expect bargain flights, hotel and car bookings and individual airlines. But what about the best toilets? Or a group of links for "Bored in the Hotel Room." There are also travel guides, maps, links to the Sunday travel sections of major newspapers, consumer complaints and passenger rights. A section devoted to business travel includes links to best places to close a deal -- from Ontheroad.com, global business basics and drinking customs and toasts from around the world.

For more on global business customs and etiquette, try Executive Planet, which covers top U.S. trading partners. For each country, articles include things to know before making a deal, making appointments, gift giving, conversation, business dress and public behavior. For example, if you're in England, it is not a good idea in conversation to bring up Northern Ireland. But current events are fine, so keep mentioning those cow bonfires.

Business Travel News Online offers a more corporate look at travel. And we discovered hotel rates are dropping due to a dip in occupancy. There's good news in every downturn.

Even more corporate is the National Business Travel Association, a site aimed at corporate travel managers.

But all this corporate stuff is making us want to run, at least in place. FitforBusiness.com is a guide for travelers who don't want to miss a workout. The site includes best hotel gyms, where to find sports courts and healthy advice.

If you don't care about athletic facilities, but want to make sure the room is up to snuff, there's WorldExecutive.com with its searchable listing of first-class and business hotels. You can view the rooms, as well as make reservations.

To make sure your airline is as good as your hotel, try Skytrax, which rates airlines' quality based on product and service. There are no five-star airlines based in the United States. Cubana is the only one-star airline.

But who cares about quality when your life is at stake? Amigoingdown.com lets you plug in your departure and arrival cities, the airline, the type of jet if you know it and the month you're flying. Then you get the odds of making it there alive. For our L.A.-to-Paris flight they were 1 in 1,801,586 and "That's very good for this route."

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.
Posted by at

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)