kiddo belongs to dad

IRONY ON:

>From the Department of Pseudo-News (DPN):

(Pyon-Yang, DPN) The People's Supreme Judiciary Council of the People's
Democratic Republic of Korea has rejected the demands of 32-year old Latisha
Johnson, resident of Newark, NJ, that her 6-year-old daughter, Shameeca
Johnson be returned to the U.S. The Supreme Judiciary Council argues in its
decision that the social and economic conditions in the Johnsons'
neighborhood--commonly referred to as "the Hood"--are not suitable for the
proper development of a child. The Council points out that Johnson's father,
who is a GI stationed in "the southern occupied territories of our beloved 
motherland the imperialist powers call South Korea," is almost never present
in the family, and when he is there, he "exudes an air of violence
as a tool to resolve conflicts." The Council also refers to work by
sociologists of the American "underclass" who argue that inadequate
opportunities for work, chronic substandard pay, the pervasive racism of
U.S. society and the absence of collective strategies of exit cause an
endemic lack of opportunities for proper education, the infestation of large
urban areas with addictive drugs such as 'ka-rack' and produce a context in
which violence, particularly gang violence, rules. Shameeca has been 
enrolled
in Subsidiary Elementary School 29 of the Pyon-Yang University of Sciences.
In her Chinese-as-a-first-foreign-language class, she has already learned 
128
Chinese characters (more than four times as many characters as she could 
ever
hope to learn in her mother tongue if she was returned to her home country).
Our picture depicts Shameeca as leaving her violin class, in a hurry to a
lecture on probablity theory, organized by the youth pioneer league of her
school.

IRONY OFF

Listed by the Human Development Index (a combination of life expectancy at
birth, the adult literacy rate and the combined first-, second- and
third-level gross enrolment rate), Cuba is 85th among the world's 174 states
according to the Human Development Report 1998, the latest in the annual
compentia of global inequality published by the United Nations Development
Program. With that, Cuba ranks 18 places higher (!!!) than what one would
expect on the basis of its per capita GDP (estimated on a PPP basis).


Jozsef