Post #2

As i read further into The Whole Truth by David Baldacci, it has become quite apparent that Shaw is not going to be able to leave his job and marry Anna Fishcher. Frank, she man Shaw works for, says that the only way someone retires from what Shaw does is when they die. Anna confronts Frank and says that he is just angry because no one has ever really loved him. We also learn much more about Nicolas Creel's plan to start a was so his company can profit. He is going to attack somone, i have not yet foundout who, using Russian citizens to make it look like the russians are doing it. This goes back to how easily people can be decieved into believeing something that is an utter falsehood. Creel himself is an interesting person, someone that can be described as greedy, because he kills people to create wars that will earn his company money. Also, he is very demanding, and if things aren't done to his specifications, he get very angry. Shaw is also an interesting person, being an orphan with no family that he knows of. He has been a very large person all of his life, beating a child twice his age when he was in an orphanage. Anna Fischer is another interesting character, a semi genius that has published many books and works for an investigation company that Creel has recently taken an interest in. again, exactly 250 words, well it is now.

post numero uno

I am now on page 143 of The Whole Truth by David Baldacci, and it is quite interesting. I have found out that a billionaire named Nicolas Creel is the one trying to set up the Russian government to promote a war because he owns a company that invents new defense technologies. The way he is convincing world that the Russian government is guilty is by using the media to spread false news stories. This raieses interesting questions because many people do believe everything they hear in the media. Just because you hear something on CNN doesn't make it true. In this book, Nicolas Creel has just found an effective way of convincing the major news stations that the story is true, and by doing that, he lets the news outlets convince the rest of the world that the story is true. For many people, news stations is where they get many of their facts, and it is expected that the news they report is true. But what happens when they don't confirm their stories? People begin to regurgitate this false news and it is accepted as the truth. This is why the news outlets must be careful and do their research to make sure that the stories they report are true, and even if they aren't people are going to think that they are just because they heard it on TV or read it in the newspaper. I know i ususally believe whatever they print in the newspaper or on the news at night, but this book reminds me that even they are capable of being tricked and printing false stories. yeah 275 words.

Book Intro

The book i chose for my outside reading is The Whole Truth by David Baldacci(yes, i realize i read a lot of his books). I have read many of his books and they have all been pretty good. This book, so far, is about someone setting up the government of Russia to make it look like they have been killing some of their own citizens that were protesting the government. It is accepted by people all over the world, but they don't know that the Russian government really had nothing to do with these people and that many of the murders are fiction. I hope to find out what is really going on here.

Gender Roles

The article i read for this post was about the mistreatment of women that haven't been convicted of a violent crime. This study was done in Arizona detention centers on immigration officials that had been mistreated women that were being held there. Many women were in need of prenatal care, cancer treatment, ovarian cysts and other serious conditions. Some women also acquired injuries while they were being detained, even though the amount of forced used isn't always required because the women don't often present a threat. One woman that was abused in Africa was having bad abdominal pain and the prison wouldn't send her to a doctor, and when they finally did, doctors found a large ovarian cyst. The prisons say that they meet the federal standards, and that studies like this one are harmful to peoples understanding of immigration law enforcement; but hopefully studies like these will put pressure on the centers to change the conditions there.

Different Culture

The article i read for this post is about rice farmers in Africa and how they are very dependent on world food prices to decide how much money they will make. The problem is, that it costs them more to produce the rice because they do not get the government subsidies like many more developed countries. Prices now are fairly high, and rice farmers are taking advantage of that, but many of them borrowed a lot of money to be able to expand their production fields, and if prices don't stay high, they could all end up broke because they won't be able to pay off what they borrowed. The worry over world food supplies caused some countries to panic over food supplies because the price was rising, and their was no local production to replace the imports; so the government offered subsidized farming equipment, seed, and fertilizer to start local production. The higher prices also meant that the local farmers could now compete with the more efficient farms in Asia, allowing them to make a profit.

read the whole article here

Overcoming a struggle

Imagine if you lived in a remote part of Alaska, where many of the people didn't even have running water, and things at the store cost you twice as much as they cost here. This is the reality for the residents of Akiachak, Alaska. It is a small Eskimoe town of about 700 people that many issues that they must deal with. The cost of living in the town is very high because it is so remote, so it is more expensive to get the things you need, like food or gasoline. Also, some residents have been unable to vote because the ballots and polling stations don't have translations for the native language, Yup’ik, and have gone to court in a lawsuit to get the state to provide ballots that have Yup'ik translations on them. They recently had a rarity for the town; an Obama campaign member visited their town to shake hands and talk, which doesn't happen very often in the town.

Barry, Dan. "Remote and Struggling but Still a Bit of America." New York Times. 5 October
2008. 2 February 2009.

Earthquake

In early May of 2008 there was an earthquake that measured as an 8 on the richter scale and killed close to 70,000 people. Many chinese people believe that much could have been done to help prevent all the death and destruction that the quake caused, but chinese seimologist say that they still don't know how to predict natural disasters such as earthquakes. People that spread rumors over the internet have been arrested for saying that the government knows how to predict earthquakes and did know of this one. In the area that was effected, resiedents say there were warnings in the days befor the quake, such as the draining of ponds, frogs invading towns, and cows falling against their enclosures. This was one of the most devastating natural disasters of 2008, which was supposed to be a lucky year, and made many people in China wonder if their government really does know these things or if the simply do not care