The world is watching
Lee Kyong-hee in the Korea Herald, Seoul Last Saturday afternoon, the host of a popular radio news show in Seoul pleaded with Korean parents to keep their children from television. It was hours after a thousand Tomahawks had pounded Baghdad. Watching the city reduced to smoldering rubble and its skies ablaze with soaring columns of…
Image conscious
Since the beginning of the new Iraq war, the Qatari news network Al Jazeera has been showing corpses. For a few days, pickings were slim: Several bombing casualties from the first night’s selective strike, then a few more on the following evenings. The station hit paydirt late last Friday and throughout Saturday. Al Jazeera provided…
THE OTHER ELECTION
Springfield District 186 has won awards. But it also has ten schools on the state’s Early Warning List–schools with more than half the students failing to meet state standards two years in a row. It routinely wins grants for reading, technology, science, and math. Yet most of its black students perform below state standards, while…
Politics as usual
One way to gauge how very close this mayoral race is would be to look at the daily paper’s latest poll. Another would be to look at all the last-minute political maneuvering among City Council members. Last Tuesday night’s vote on an ordinance offering an early-retirement incentive program for city employees was surrounded by all…
War as tradition
My son’s leaving for Iraq this week. I wish him well. For years I’ve told him what his generation needed was a good war. It would be a wonderful character builder. See how it worked for mine? But I meant that more as irony, as paternal joshing, and not as wish. Whatever–Sean is going. And…
Your Turn 3-27-03
Park Board candidates forum The Springfield Parks Foundation will hold a forum for the eight candidates vying for the three positions on the parks board in next weekís election. The forum will be held on Thursday, March 27, at 7 p.m. in the Springfield City Council Chambers, third floor, 300 S. Seventh, Municipal Center West.…
A rough draft
The investigation that was going to take just three weeks and cost $15,000 is finally ready—almost ready, that is. Last Tuesday night, after spending 20 minutes discussing an early-retirement plan for city employees, the City Council spent 90 minutes in executive session listening to attorney Chris Nichols from the Peoria firm Husch & Eppenberger present…
