Aaron Moreno, the October featured fellow, is an accomplished chess player and wanted to bring his love of chess to the kids at public schools in Tucson, Arizona.

I read this short article tonight from The Washington Post: 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/01/AR2008090102754.html

This is an interesting tactic to take: boycotting underfunded public schools in order to get the state to put in more money into them.

The plight of American Indian communities, to average Americans, is usually either relegated to some distant past or outright ignored. If you're educated, maybe you'll remember reading about the Trail of Tears, or Wounded Knee (probably not Pine Ridge though).

But what about indigenous peoples today? They're largely broken, exiled to barren reservations, faced with an indifferent - or hostile - government, and casino-corrupted leaders.

This makes it all the more important that we sit up and take notice when they rise up and assert their collective rights, despite an almost total media blackout.

After a whirlwind two days of travel from Ireland to San Francisco (via London and New York layovers) followed by San Francisco to Phnom Penh (via Hong Kong), I have finally arrived in Cambodia. My friend Hemly Ordonez, who has been working at a number of NGOs since June, met me at the airport with Somol, one of the students from Friends Help Friends for Development who is now enrolled in university in the capital.

Being a person with a disability is difficult, but reading an article from Disaboom entitled “Top election issues for people with disabilities” by Kim Dority which was posted at http://denver.yourhub.com/DenverSouth/Stories/Sound-Off/Politics/Story~484899.aspx (viewed on 6/19/08) shocked me. The article pointed out that people with disabilities are the largest minority group in the world. I had never thought of people with disabilities as minorities.

A Culture of Oppression: Education, Deafness, and Blackness in America

The word ‘culture’ is so malleable, flexible, all
encompassing (at least from a cosmopolitan point of view) that I feel any
person wishing to deny a certain group the right to constitute themselves a
specific culture to entirely out of line. If any group of people can find
something in common with one another that allows them to feel safe, accepted,
and allows them to relate, I believe they should be able to label it their
culture. Subcultures, or cultures that do not necessarily find themselves in
the same social hierarchy as mainstream cultures, are still cultures regardless

Cradle to Prison Pipeline:
Children's Defense Fund

By
kYmberly Keeton

The
University of Houston Law School recently hosted the Children's Defense Fund
Cradle to Prison Pipeline® Texas Summit.
Marian Bright Edelman, President of the CDF, was the guest speaker.
Numerous workshops and panels were available to the community, academia, and
organizations.

Two seemingly unrelated pieces of news caught my eye this week. First, Stanford will be instituting a policy of waiving tuition for families making less than $100,000 per year in an effort to promote diversity. Meanwhile on the country's other coast, another one of the country's most elite schools is struggling with what exactly "promoting diversity" actually means.