The Karen ethnic minority preserves its language through teaching

SANITSUDA EKACHAI

This year's summer holiday has had special meaning for 14-year-old school-girl Nojai Sali. It was when the ethnic Karen girl learned her ancestor's written language.

Like many indigenous Karen children in Thailand's Western Forest Complex, Nojai attends a Thai state school in town so she can enter mainstream Thai society after graduating. Although she still speaks Karen with their parents at home during summer holidays, before this year she didn't know how to read Karen script. Many young Karens express indifference to learning more about their culture as they consider their native language useless in the modern world.

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When the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the state Constitution's fundamental right to marry extends to couples of the same sex, it settled a legal question and opened some critical political ones.

With a proposed constitutional amendment that would overturn the court's decision likely to qualify for the November ballot, will a high turnout of social and religious traditionalists put usually Democratic California "into play" in the presidential election?Will the California court's ruling trigger the sort of national reaction that followed a similar ruling by Massachusetts' high court four years ago, a backlash that GOP strategist Karl Rove successfully fashioned into a wedge issue Republicans used to pry several key states into George W. Bush's column?

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal's reliably conservative editorial page predicted precisely that. "Just when the news was filling with stories about a Republican Party gasping for air," the paper gleefully wrote, "along comes the California Supreme Court's 4-3 decision yesterday legislating gay marriage. The GOP certainly hasn't done anything to deserve such luck."

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Speaker of the House of Representatives Delroy Chuck (right) greets Seragh Lakasingh. Looking on is Vishu Tolan, chairman of the The National Council for Indian Culture in Jamaica. The gentlemen were at the council's awards banquet and cultural presentation, at Mona Visitor's Lodge, UWI, Mona campus, last Friday.

It's no doubt that the arrival of the Indians in Jamaica has certainly enriched our culture.

The National Council for Indian Culture in Jamaica celebrated this fact at its annual awards and cultural presentation last Friday.

This year, the landmarks were twofold as not only was it the 163rd anniversary of the arrival of the Indians, but also the 10th anniversary of the council's formation. For the latter milestone, members of the Indian community who reside abroad were invited to celebrate with their local kinsfolk.

This year, five individuals (three in absentia) were rewarded for their contributions to the council and the Indian culture. Jeewan Chowtie and Moses Gallow were present to accept their awards, while Thaddeus Bessi, Janet Maragh and Adolphus Bacchus sent representatives.

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The world has been introduced to the true face of Julius Caesar with the discovery in a river in southern France of a bust that was sculpted in the lifetime of the Roman leader.

The marble sculpture, found in the bed of the Rhône in the town of Arles, has been authenticated as a realistic likeness of Caesar, wrinkled and balding in his fifties and probably modelled from life.

“It is the only known bust of the living Caesar, except for the Mask of Turin, which was made just before or after his death, said Luc Long, the Ministry of Culture archaeologist who found it along with other treasures last autumn. “Even in Rome, no one has found a portrait of the living Caesar,” he added.

The bust, which has a broken nose, dates from between 49 and 46BC, the period when Caesar founded the Roman colony of Arles, to thank the town for helping him to conquer the nearby port of Marseille. Caesar used Arles as a base for his campaign against Pompey, his rival.

Mr Long speculated that the bust may have been thrown into the river just after Caesar was assassinated by Brutus and fellow conspirators in 44BC “because it wouldn’t have been a good idea to show you were his supporter”. Experts agreed that the life-sized head matched the known official portrait of Caesar, which featured on coins struck in his lifetime.

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Prague is not merely a destination for stag or hen parties, nor is it just an alternative locale for American would-be novelists and English foreign language teachers. Rather, Prague is the home of culture, of Mozart, Kepler and the liberal arts and occult-loving Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. And later this month, Prague plays host to the musical and theatrical extravaganza of the city's seventh Fringe Festival.

Prague resident Steve Gove first mooted the idea of a Prague counterpart while working at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2000. Two years of networking later and the Prague Fringe Festival was born featuring 12 acts over five days with around 400 tickets sold for the 60 performances. Fringe Praha this year has 40 acts performing over eight days in nine spaces and Gove predicts last year's record of almost 5,000 tickets sold will be surpassed. An audience survey conducted in 2007 saw that 45% of the 226 respondents were visitors from abroad, indicating international interest in a relatively fledgling event, but one that has already spawned annual winter comedy nights.

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This unique event brings together people from around the world to celebrate their cultural background in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin, Germany. Traditional clothes from around the globe, exotic foods and music from different communities combine to make for a great party atmosphere.

Left: Thai performers participate in the annual Carnival of Cultures parade through the district of Kreuzberg on May 11, 2008 in Berlin, Germany.

Lo-Fi Culture Scene have been around for a little while now, and they're just about the release their new single 'Abstract' through KIDS. We catch up with Jocob (vocals) to see how everything's going...

How long has Lo-Fi Culture Scene been going for?
Together we've been playing for around 3 years, not always as a band but just playing songs - but we've been writing our own songs for maybe just over a year, probably a year and a half.

What bands influence you?
We're each influenced by different bits and pieces - but I say we all agree on Coldplay, Radiohead, Franz Ferdinand, and Bombay Bicycle Club - but I know that the others love Interpol and Editors, and i really like Foals, Grammatics & Cajun Dance Party - but it changes - our manager just got us to go out and buy a load of albums, I think my favourite of them is Broken Social Scene, they're wicked.

You’re signed to KIDS, but presumably you’ve been offered other deals, so why did you choose KIDS over any others?
Well, we chose KIDS because they have a similar way of thinking to us, and also because they are really nice guys, and great guys as we know they've worked with The Wombats & The Whip amongst others... - we'd been offered a few major deals, which were tempting, but we wanted to keep at least the first single really close to our fan base, and we really want to time everything well, and we want to keep the ball moving but we've got GCSE's coming up, and yeah everything just seemed to connect if we went with kids, so we did...

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Salmon don't hit the headlines as often out here on the West Coast as they did in the 1980s and '90s, when they were being overfished.

They ought to again, though, given what's now happening out in the Pacific Ocean and this region's rivers.

Chances are you probably haven't heard about it yet, but we're in another salmon crisis, one that's devastating the coast from California all the way up to Vancouver and beyond.
The fish simply aren't swimming back in the hoped-for numbers and the shortages are historic.

For the first time in 150 years, California and Oregon shut down the $300-million chinook salmon fishery. Washington state has all but followed suit. U.S. fishermen are now seeking disaster relief.

Off our own shores, things aren't much better. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has told 94 native bands that they will have to ration their catch of Fraser River sockeye this year, another first.

The commercial sockeye fishery won't likely happen this year on the Fraser, either.

Watching all of this with much trepidation is Alex Rose, a local writer who once worked in DFO as a communications strategist. He's just finished writing Who Killed the Grand Banks? (his answer is greedy East Coast fishermen, DFO mismanagement, botched science and the industrialized fishing fleet).

After two years of researching, talking to the world's fisheries experts, he believes the Pacific salmon fishery may very well go the way of the Grand Banks cod.

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Paul Erhahon was killed in east London after being set upon by youths armed with knives, baseball bats and a samurai sword.

What does the 14-year-old's death tell us about Britain's urban youth culture?

During the trial of Paul Erhahon's killers it became clear the attack on him was partly linked to something as seemingly trivial as postcodes - in this case E11 and E15.

The Old Bailey jury heard a rivalry existed in estates close to Leytonstone town centre.

There was never any suggestion Paul was part of a gang himself and he appeared to be an innocent victim of the feud.

Jurors heard Paul was talking to his friend in the foyer of a block of flats when he was summoned by a member of the gang - which quickly led to the mass assault involving teenagers armed with an array of weapons.

Paul and his friend were unarmed and stood no chance.

The violent flurry left Paul lifeless while his friend, who survived, was left "for dead".

Paul's mother fled the courtroom in tears as the jury heard her son was beaten as he lay on the ground.

At the Old Bailey, prosecutor Jonathan Turner QC said the teenager's death resulted from a "senseless acts of gratuitous violence".

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The average age of first-time mothers in the United States has been rising steadily over the past four decades up from 21.4 in 1970 to a little over 25 in 2005, the National Center for Health Statistics reports.

That was the age at which Emily Scruby met her future husband, Michael Boggs, during a Katrina relief effort in Pearlington, Miss. They'd been living together for seven months when she found out she was pregnant.

"We tried to use condoms and be responsible," she says. Laughing, she adds, "But I have a baby."

Their daughter, Ayda, is now about a year old. The family lives near Charlottesville, Va. More women like Scruby Boggs say they are putting off childbearing to attend college and launch careers. But some experts see a tension between that societal trend and reproductive realities. Biologically speaking, the longer women wait to get pregnant, the more difficult it is to conceive.

Fertility seems to peak at about age 22, says Marcel Cedars, director of reproductive endocrinology at the University of California, San Francisco. After that, it gradually declines, and past the age of 35, pregnancy is much harder to achieve.

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