who ganna do my summary after 8 hours from now

i want it  to look like 12,000 libraries summaried. he put underline under the subects plesase do like him and don’t foget the title. i want to look like the 3rd attach.

Gang of 40

By

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

In the 1970s, in its days of hard-line Communist isolation, China was ruled by the extremist “Gang of Four.” Drivers then were sometimes encouraged to proceed at red lights because red was the revolutionary color signifying advance — resulting in a chaos that was emblematic of the times.

In the United States, we always do things in a grand way, so it’s a tribute to American exceptionalism that we have far outperformed China in the field of extremist ideologues. We don’t have some pathetic little foursome, but an unrivaled “Gang of 40.”

That’s my name for the 40 hard-line Republican House members who have forced the shutdown of the federal government and are now flirting with a debt default that could spin the world into recession. In their purported effort to save America money, they’re costing us taxpayers billions of dollars.

Obviously, there are differences — our Gang of 40 disdain Mao suits — but there is a similar sense in which an entire nation is held hostage by a small group of unrepresentative figures who don’t have much of a clue about economics or about where they’re taking the country.

The Gang of 40’s government shutdown has been bad enough, cutting off

death benefits to families of service members

and ending federal

support for rape crisis centers

. It’s doubly painful that all this is happening while the House and Senate gyms remain open.

(Bravo to the Washington restaurant that is offering a 10 percent discount to some federal workers, while posting a 10 percent surcharge to members of Congress. Maybe members of the Gang of 40 should also be compelled to wash dishes?)

What’s most troubling about the mess is the way the extremists downplay the risks of running into the debt limit. Astonishingly, Representative Ted Yoho, a Florida veterinarian,

says that missing the debt ceiling deadline

“would bring stability to world markets.”

Or there’s Senator Rand Paul,

who said that not raising the debt limit could be reframed

as “a pretty reasonable idea.” Even Senator Tom Coburn says it wouldn’t be so bad to miss the debt-limit deadline and face a “

managed catastrophe

.”

There’s now a right-wing echo chamber, shaped by Fox News Channel and Web sites like RedState, that repeats such nonsense until it acquires a patina of plausibility — and thus makes a catastrophe more difficult to avoid.

A Pew Research Center poll this month found

that 54 percent of Republicans believe that the United States can miss the debt-limit deadline without major problems.

What makes our trajectory dangerous is that the hard-liners are getting positive feedback.

The most reliable Republican voters

are about twice as likely to say that Congressional Republicans have compromised too much as to say that they haven’t compromised enough.

Hang on to your hat. We may be in for a wild ride.

I’ve often been curious about the wretched political leadership in America in the 1840s and 1850s in the run-up to the Civil War: How could American politicians have been so stubborn as they inched toward cataclysm? Watching today’s obstreperousness, I’m gaining a better insight.

Two features strike me about this moment — and both are echoes of the mistakes in the run-up to the Civil War. One is the obliviousness of central players, especially the Gang of 40, to the risks ahead.

The second is the way politicians seek leverage by brazenly threatening deliberate harm to the nation unless they get their way. The House Republican hard-liners lost their battle against Obamacare in the democratic process, just as President Obama lost his battle for an assault-weapons ban. But instead of accepting their loss as Obama did, members of the Gang of 40 took hostages. Unless Obamacare is defunded, they’ll cause billions of dollars in damage to the American economy.

The G.O.P. claims to be the party particularly concerned by budget deficits. Yet its tantrum caused a government shutdown that

cost the country $1.6 billion last week alone

.

As for the debt limit, the costs of missing that deadline could be infinitely greater. Already,

interest rates are spiking for one-month Treasury bills

to their highest levels since the 2008 financial crisis.

The Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank,

calculates that the 2011 debt-ceiling confrontation

will, over a decade, cost American taxpayers an extra $18.9 billion.

And that was the price tag for a crisis in which the debt-limit deadline was eventually met. If this deadline is missed, the costs in higher interest rates in the years ahead will be billions more.

Members of the Gang of 40 are unwilling to pay for early childhood education, but they’re O.K. with paying untold billions for a government shutdown and debt-limit crisis? That’s not governance, but extremism.

Niloc Retseh

Professor Hester

ENG 102-0XX

Spring 2013 — Summary Paper

Changing Lives, One Book at a Time

In his 05 November 2011 article in The New York Times, “His Libraries, 12,000 So Far, Change Lives,” Nicholas Kristof tells the story of how John Wood has opened 12,000 libraries and 1,500 schools around the world. According to Kristof, Wood’s charity, Room to Read, has stocked those libraries and schools with over 10 million books. Kristof states that Room to Read
opens six new schools a day, or, Kristof points out, six times as many as the number of outlets McDonald’s opens.

Kristof writes that since Wood quit Microsoft and founded Room To Read in 2000, Wood has also self-published 591 children’s titles in a variety of remote and diverse languages. Kristof quotes Wood that some languages don’t have children’s books. Thus, Room To Read has ferreted out children’s authors in languages such as Xhosa, Chhattisgari and others. Kristof informs us that Wood is currently seeking “’…the Dr Suess of Cambodia.’”

Further, Wood, Kristof emphasizes, has changed the lives of 13,500 otherwise impoverished girls by keeping them in school. Kristof relates how he met one such girl, Le Thi My Duyen. Floods had forced her family to live “…in a shabby tent on a dike,” Kristof reports, and those floods had also forced Duyen to drop out of school. According to Kristof, Room to Read paid for Duyen to not only go back to school but to live in the dormitory and avoid a four-hour daily bicycle-and-boat commute, all at a cost of a mere $250 per year. This tiny amount, Kristof points out, dwarfs in comparison to the billions and billions we spend on missiles and troops for our foreign interventions and, as Kristof quotes Wood, that tiny amount“…can change a girl’s life forever….”

Kristof argues that Wood succeeds because of his hard-headed, business-like approach. Kristof explains that Wood utilizes his marketing background at Microsoft to spread the word to 53 Room To Read chapters around the globe. From these 53 chapters, Kristof proclaims, Wood attacks illiteracy “as if it were Netscape,” aiming for 100,000 libraries and relegating illiteracy to “…the scrapheap of history,” all within 20 years.

His Libraries, 12,000 So Far, Change Lives

By

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

CAI LEI, Vietnam

ONE of the legendary triumphs of philanthropy was Andrew Carnegie’s construction of more than 2,500 libraries around the world. It’s renowned as a stimulus to learning that can never be matched — except that, numerically, it has already been surpassed several times over by an American man you’ve probably never heard of.

I came here to Vietnam to see John Wood

hand out his 10 millionth book

at a library that his team founded in this village in the Mekong Delta — as hundreds of local children cheered and embraced the books he brought as if they were the rarest of treasures. Wood’s charity,

Room to Read

, has opened 12,000 of these libraries around the world, along with 1,500 schools.

Yes, you read that right. He has opened nearly five times as many libraries as Carnegie, even if his are mostly single-room affairs that look nothing like the grand Carnegie libraries. Room to Read is one of America’s fastest-growing charities and is now opening new libraries at an astonishing clip of six a day. In contrast, McDonald’s opens one new outlet every 1.08 days.

John Wood has opened 12,000 libraries and 1,500 schools around the world.

__________________________________________________________________________

_

It all began in 1998 when Wood, then a Microsoft marketing director, chanced upon a remote school in Nepal serving 450 children. Only one problem: It had no books to speak of.

Wood blithely offered to help and eventually delivered a mountain of books by a caravan of donkeys. The local children were deliriously happy, and Wood said he felt such exhilaration that he quit Microsoft, left his live-in girlfriend (who pretty much thought he had gone insane), and founded Room to Read in 2000.

He faced one challenge after another, not only in opening libraries but also in filling them with books that kids would want to read.

“There are no books for kids in some languages, so we had to become a self-publisher,” Wood explains. “We’re trying to find the Dr. Seuss of Cambodia.” Room to Read has, so far, published 591 titles in languages including Khmer, Nepalese, Zulu, Lao, Xhosa, Chhattisgarhi, Tharu, Tsonga, Garhwali and Bundeli.

Wood has also self-published 591 children’s titles in a variety of remote languages.

_____________________________________________________________________________

It also supports 13,500 impoverished girls who might otherwise drop out of school. In a remote nook of the Mekong Delta, reachable only by boat, I met one of these girls, a 10th grader named Le Thi My Duyen. Her family, displaced by flooding, lives in a shabby tent on a dike.

When Duyen was in seventh grade, she dropped out of school to help her family out. “I thought education was not so necessary for girls,” Duyen recalled.

Room to Read’s outreach workers trekked to her home and cajoled the family to send her back to class. They paid her school fees, bought her school uniforms and offered to put her up in a dormitory so that she wouldn’t have to commute two hours each way to school by boat and bicycle.

Now Duyen is back, a star in her class — and aiming for the moon.

“I would like to go to university,” she confessed, shyly.

The cost per girl for this program is $250 annually. To provide perspective, Kim Kardashian’s wedding is said to have cost $10 million; that sum could have supported an additional 40,000 girls in Room to Read.

So many American efforts to influence foreign countries have misfired — not least here in Vietnam a generation ago. We launch missiles, dispatch troops, rent foreign puppets and spend billions without accomplishing much. In contrast, schooling is cheap and revolutionary. The more money we spend on schools today, the less we’ll have to spend on missiles tomorrow.

Wood, 47, is tireless, enthusiastic and emotional: a motivational speaker with no off button. He teared up as girls described how Room to Read had transformed their lives.

“If you can change a girl’s life forever, and the cost is so low, then why are there so many girls still out of school?” he asked.

Wood has changed the lives of 13,500 otherwise impoverished girls by keeping them in school.

__________________________________________________________________________

The humanitarian world is mostly awful at messaging, and Room to Read’s success is partly a result of his professional background in marketing. Wood wrote

a terrific book

, “Leaving Microsoft to Change the World,” to spread the word, and Room to Read now has fund-raising chapters in 53 cities around the globe.

He also runs Room to Read with an aggressive businesslike efficiency that he learned at Microsoft, attacking illiteracy as if it were Netscape. He tells supporters that they aren’t donating to charity but making an investment: Where can you get more value for your dollar than starting a library for $5,000?

“I get frustrated that there are 793 million illiterate people, when the solution is so inexpensive,” Wood told me outside one of his libraries in the Mekong. “If we provide this, it’s no guarantee that every child will take advantage of it. But if we don’t provide it, we pretty much guarantee that we perpetuate poverty.”

“In 20 years,” Wood told me, “I’d like to have 100,000 libraries, reaching 50 million kids. Our 50-year goal is to reverse the notion that any child can be told ‘you were born in the wrong place at the wrong time and so you will not get educated.’ That idea belongs on the scrapheap of human history.”

Wood succeeds because of his hard-headed, business-like approach.