Category: Sad

122,000 and counting.

Brits are going to be force-fed nearly 200 reality TV shows in 2005. If this was happening in America, 90% of them would be on Fox.

50,000 dead and counting. Or 56,000 according to Wikipedia (who’s taking their info from several news sources).

In case you’ve been in a hole the last 24 hours, a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami has taken the lives of 22,000 in Asia. While the major international outlets are covering this fairly well (the domestic coverage, at least on TV, was pretty crappy), there are a pile of bloggers and independent sources for a pile of great photos and news about this. So here are a few links I’ve spotted in the past 24 hours:

• A great animation of the tsunami’s path (the thing travelled 750 miles in 100 minutes). There’s also a 3D Quicktime Animation here (links via BB).
• Do something and donate to the International Red Cross.
• A ton of great coverage, linking to a crapload of places, on Wikipedia.
• A collection of first-person LiveJournal accounts of the incident.
• Some frontpages of some international newspapers’ coverage (link via NewsDesigner).
• A Video of the tsunami hitting Phuket beach (along with six minutes of raw flooding footage). Here’s a photo sequence of the flooding from the same resort.
• More photos here and here.
• A few eyewitness accounts.
• A Washington Post writer’s first-person account.

My hearts and prayers go out to everybody over there. I certainly hope this gets covered like it should here in the U.S., even if it isn’t on our soil, as international incidents have a tendency to disappear from our newspapers here far too fast.

I can understand Yahoo’s position on this, as someone who’s had their Yahoo! account hacked into before, but there are sometimes you should just bend the rules. (Let’s just ignore the fact that if they do it for one person, they’ll be opening a whole other can of worms, shall we?)

The family of a Marine killed in Iraq is pleading with Internet giant Yahoo! for access to his e-mail account, which the company says is off-limits under its privacy policy.

Lance Cpl. Justin M. Ellsworth, 20, was killed by a roadside bomb on November 13 during a foot patrol in Al Anbar province. The family wants the complete e-mail file that Justin maintained, including notes to and from others.

“I want to be able to remember him in his words. I know he thought he was doing what he needed to do. I want to have that for the future,” said John Ellsworth, Justin’s father. “It’s the last thing I have of my son.”

Thanks Barney for the link.

A nationwide telephone poll conducted by student researchers at Cornell University reports that nearly half the people questioned support limiting the rights of Muslim-Americans including the use of racial profiling and government infiltration of Muslim organizations. Researchers questioned 715 people and the poll had a margin of error of 3.6 percentage points. Support was highest among Republicans and the highly religious and lowest among Democrats and people who are less religious. Full Story. Link via SEB.

It probably wasn’t anything like this.

First off, a quick rant: I read about this story in the local daily paper this morning, and intended on blogging about it earlier, but their Web site doesn’t have the story. Anywhere. It wasn’t until I got a Google News Alert that the story had been picked up on the Associated Press wire that I could even point people to this story. OK, I’m a dork as the story is online locally , though it didn’t show up in my Google Alert, and Google News should’ve caught it, nor did I find it on their site easily the first time. My apologies, just the same.

Anyway, in yet another example of why our school system is a laughing stock, because of budget cuts in the district, there’s a shortage of janitors at some schools. At Sunriver’s Three Rivers elementary, kids are being asked to clean up:

The students are learning these skills because the fast-growing Bend-La Pine School District reduced its custodial staff in a budget-saving move. At the same time, the district added two new schools and several additions.

With fewer adult hands to clean the buildings, several elementary schools have asked kids to help with the chores.

The benefit, school officials said, is a chance to learn about responsibility while taking ownership in their school.

I wonder how OSHA would feel about this? I know the housekeeping department in our company has to abide by a pile of OSHA regulations, and if those kids are doing anything remotely janitorial (especially at their age — we won’t even get into child-labor stuff here), there’s a chance the school be shut down. Now that this story has hit the wire, it’s only going to be messier for the local school district.

Personally, any time that takes my kid away from learning what a teacher is there to teach them is wasted. If they’re not getting taught this kind of responsibility at home, then the kids have no hope anyway.