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Voice from the Back

Voice From the Back

The culture of competition

Buy low. Sell high. That’s what we're teaching our kids in school today. The Stock Market game has blasted its way into the classroom. Budding Buffets as young as eight can now learn what drives Wall Street—money and lots of it. "We can teach them that their main goal is to buy and sell stock," says Ted Young, the game's creator and maths teacher at Centralia Junior High School in Illinois. Students play the roles of 20 buyers, four brokers and a banker-policeman-tax collector. According to Young, the kids love the broker job as they get a kick out of seeing their friends profiting and their enemies losing. Stock prices are posted on computers and when the bell sounds, trading begins. "The kids will push and shove and run to get to make trades on hot stock," says Young. "That’s when the police officer comes in. Tempers can flare. Kids get in fights."

The culture of failure

Voice From the Back

The farce must go on

Executions continue while work is in progress at Huntsville Prison, Texas, in renovating the spectators' salon in front of the execution chamber. For reasons of economy, the prison authorities are having the work done by the inmates, who are engaged in making seating more comfortable and spacious for the spectators, and enhancing visibility. Le Monde, 19 September (translated).

Melt-down

Voice from the Back

The wasteland
Derelict land in England now covers an area equivalent to a city twice the size of Birmingham, according to the country's most detailed survey of vacant sites and buildings. The so-called national land use Data Base, due to be released shortly, finds that almost 130,000 acres are idle—in theory enough for 2.5 million medium-density homes. Guardian, 20 May.

How are the mighty?
The world's biggest personal computer maker was thrown into crisis today as two of its top chiefs dramatically quit following a dire profits warning and plummeting share price . . . Compaq stunned Wall Street two weeks ago by announcing its first-quarter earnings would be half of what analysts expected, leading to a 23 percent tumble in its shares. Evening Mail, 19 April.

Voice from the Back

Unnatural causes
In Ethiopia, people suffer from the natural disaster of drought. But Oxfam also works with poor people to help them combat a disaster more destructive than any natural calamity: poverty. Take Bangladesh: the world was shocked by the catastrophic cyclone and floods in 1991, in which 140,000 died. Yet the same number of children are killed by poverty in Bangladesh every 2 months. The main killers are common diseases, often spread by dirty water, like diarrhoea. Worldwide, a mother watches her child die of diarrhoea every 8 seconds. Oxfam begging letter, June.

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