AOW 11’s and directions
Learning Target:
1. Students will practice reading skills with non-fiction articles taken from current newspapers.
2. Students will develop a greater awareness of important local, national, and international current events.
Directions:
1. Mark your confusion.
2. Show evidence of a close reading. Mark up the text with questions and/or comments.
3. Write a one-page reflection on your own sheet of paper. Do not simply summarize the article, be sure to include your own thoughts on what you read.
Option 1
North Africa: The Next Afghanistan?
The terrorist group al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb has seized control of a swath of
North Africa. Is it a real threat?
Source: The Week 11/18/12
What are the group's goals?
Al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb is an independent offshoot of al Qaida that's fighting to implement an extremist version of Islamic rule across North Africa. Founded during the bitter Algerian civil war of the 1990s, the organization was once known as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat. But in the early 2000s, the Algerian government launched a highly effective amnesty program for former insurgents, throwing the outfit into disarray. Deprived of recruits, the group in 2006 boosted its profile by joining Osama bin Laden's global jihad and rebranding itself as al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb. (The Maghreb is the arid region that stretches across North Africa from Morocco to Libya). AQIM's ambitions seemed mostly local until last year, but Hillary Clinton recently declared the group "a threat to the entire region and to the world."
What changed?
The overthrow of Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi destabilized the region. Thousands of nomadic Tuareg tribesmen who had served as mercenaries in the dictator's army returned to northern Mali, bringing rebellion and a vast arsenal of weapons with them. Eager to establish their own ethnic homeland, the former mercenaries drove out the Malian army with the help of AQIM fighters and other radical Islamists from neighboring Algeria. But after that victory, AQIM turned on the mostly secular Tuaregs, chasing them off and seizing an area the size of Texas. "When [the West] started fighting in Libya, did you think of all the consequences in the region? No," said a senior Malian security official. Some 450,000 people have fled northern Mali, amid reports of the implementation of sharia law. Musicians have been threatened with amputation for playing instruments, and unmarried couples have been stoned to death for having sex.
Why does Mali matter to us?
Officials in Washington fear that the northern part of the country could soon resemble Afghanistan before 2001 — a wild tribal area where fundamentalist groups are free to train terrorists for operations abroad. Northern Mali is the perfect spot for a violent anti- Western group to set up headquarters. Its inhospitable Saharan dunes host some of the world's busiest drug- and gun-smuggling routes and provide strong natural defenses against any would-be invaders. There are already signs that AQIM is using its new home to spread chaos across North Africa. The head of U.S. Africa Command, Gen. Carter Ham, has warned that the outfit is training fighters from Nigeria's Boko Haram, an extreme Islamist group that has killed thousands of people in recent years. U.S. intelligence officials are also looking into whether AQIM is linked to the Sept. 11 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
Was AQIM involved in Benghazi?
That's still not entirely clear. U.S. intelligence officials believe that some members of Ansar al-Sharia — the Libyan Islamist group thought to have carried out the assault — have ties to AQIM. In the hours after the deadly raid, American spy agencies intercepted electronic communications from Ansar al-Sharia fighters bragging about their exploits to an AQIM operative. But intelligence officials still have no firm evidence that the attack was actually directed by AQIM, and some experts doubt that the group has the capability to organize such an assault. "AQIM has always been way more talk than action," said a former senior U.S. counterterrorism official.
How has Washington reacted?
The Obama administration has stepped up military aid to Mali's neighbors, and together with France — Mali's former colonial ruler — has offered to help train and finance an African intervention force. So far, the 15-nation alliance known as the Economic Community of West African States has agreed to provide 3,300 soldiers to bolster Mali's army and confront the Islamists. But no offensive is likely before March, said Anouar Boukhars, a Middle East scholar with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, because it will take months to turn Mali's ragtag army into an effective fighting force. In the meantime, said a senior U.S. counterterrorism official, the White House has begun considering the use of armed drones.
Can drones really help?
The U.S. is already using them to fly surveillance missions over northern Mali. But experts doubt that missile-armed drones would prove effective against AQIM. From a camera in the sky, it's almost impossible to distinguish friend from foe in the pickup trucks that race along the desert paths of the Sahara. And unlike in Pakistan and Yemen — where U.S. drones have killed hundreds of al Qaida militants — in Mali there is little human intelligence on the ground to confirm targets. "Making that distinction about who is who is something you probably cannot do from 10,000 feet up in the air," said French anti-terrorism consultant François Heisbourg. For now, the West can do nothing but hope that African troops are up to the job of clearing out an increasingly dangerous neighborhood.
The hostage economy
Since 2008, AQIM is estimated to have raised more than $80 million by seizing and ransoming off dozens of Western tourists, aid workers, and employees of multinational companies. But the group won't snatch just any Westerner. The terrorists prefer continental Europeans, said U.S. anti-terrorism official David Cohen, because "they understand that they will not receive ransoms" from the American and British governments. That selective strategy is paying off. Serge Daniel, author of AQIM: The Kidnapping Industry, says that Spain has handed over at least $11.5 million to free its citizens in recent years, while Germany and Austria have together paid up to $10.9 million. Such payments only encourage AQIM to seize more European hostages and demand more for them, said Cohen: The average ransom payment per hostage rose from $4.5 million in 2010 to $5.4 million a year later. Kidnapping for ransom, he said, has become "our most significant terrorist financing threat today."
Possible WN topics
• Choose a passage from the article and respond.
Option 2
Will Fact Checks Always Be Ignored By Politicians?
Dana Farrington/ npr.org, November 11, 2012
Just because there's more fact checking, doesn't mean there's more truth telling.
Given this, David Carr of The New York Times declared that journalistic efforts to set the record straight during "the most fact-checked [presidential] election in history" didn't work.
"Both campaigns seemed to live a life beyond consequence, correctly discerning that it was worth getting a scolding from the journalistic church ladies if a stretch or an elide or an outright prevarication did damage to the opposition," wrote Carr.
Bill Adair of PolitiFact says Carr "really misfired."
"Our mission is to inform readers, not change the behavior of politicians," wrote Adair, whose group occasionally partnered with NPR on election coverage.
Whether or not it's the mission, are there more effective ways fact checking could interrupt the politicians' narratives?
What if there were fact checks crawling on the TV screen during a debate or speech, for example? Adair responded to It's All Politics via email: "We already provide instant information during debates through our Twitter feed, which has 171,000 followers. And during debates, we post a Twitter widget on our site so people can get up-to-the-minute links to related fact-checks. In the future, we could easily do that on TV through a crawl on a screen.
"Would that have a stronger impact? Perhaps. But the candidates already know that they are going to be fact-checked, so I don't think the immediacy makes much difference.
"We are like cops on a highway with radar guns. The drivers know we are there and sometimes they decide to violate the speed limit anyway."
Of course, Adair said a Twitter-like stream on TV would work only with previously assessed claims. Still, he said PolitiFact is working on ways to shrink the gap between when people hear a claim and when they look up its trustworthiness.
"One way we're doing that is our Settle It! mobile app, which allows people to quickly search our database from their phone or tablet. Another way is the sound recognition technology that's been developed by the creators of the Super PAC App."
In his PressThink blog, New York University's Jay Rosen said journalists are in a "new phase" of reacting to misleading information since campaigns "seem able to override" fact checking. "So what's the next innovation?" he asks.
Adair, as mentioned above, doesn't believe stopping lies is the point. But here's what he sees in the future: "The fact-checking itself is really just old shoe-leather journalism. The next step is to harness technology to get it in front of more people when they need it."
But people might not always need it immediately, says Brendan Nyhan, assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College. Nyhan has advocated for "blind debate coverage," watching the debates without simultaneously monitoring Twitter. He has also written about fact checking for the Columbia Journalism Review.
Nyhan suggests an effective tactic might be to have a fact checker on TV right after the debate, "before immediate spinning of who won or lost." Or maybe split the debate into three segments with fact checking intermissions.
Real-time fact checking by moderators can be messy business. Nyhan says it would be difficult to get the candidates to agree to a format that integrates fact checking in the first place. Regardless, verifying candidates' claims is "hard to do on the fly," he says.
Adair says checking a new claim can take anywhere from an hour to several days. Plus, there's the nuance factor: one Pinocchio or four?
"If [the moderator] gets something wrong, it could make things worse," Nyhan says.
CNN's Candy Crowley wandered into fact checking territory during the presidential debate she moderated on Oct. 16. Mitt Romney said it took President Obama 14 days to call the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, an "ac of terror." Crowley told Romney that Obama had, in fact, called it an act of terror.
She added: "It did as well take two weeks or so for the whole idea of there being a riot out there about this tape to come out. You are correct about that."
As Politico reports, Crowley tried to further clarify her statement in later interviews, and her actions in the debate faced criticism from the right. On Fox News, National Review editor Rich Lowry said, "It's not the role of a moderator ever in these debates to be the fact checker."
Ironically, perhaps, the more adamant fact checkers are about their facts, the more partisan they may appear. Mother Jones' Washington bureau chief David Corn wrote in September:
"To judge credibility, the fact-checkers must be regarded as credible judges. But each time they are pulled into a scuffle with politicians, they can look more like political actors to the public — an assumption that especially benefits those politicians who lie with the greatest abandon."
Nyhan says he goes back and forth about the overall impact of fact checking. He says he believes the fact-checking movement is starting to shift journalism away from he-said-she-said stories. But that has a counterforce, he says: "The gaffe coverage might be dumber than ever before."
Possible WN topics
• How trustworthy do you find fact-checking groups like Politico?
• Reflect on why politicians bend the truth when they are aware of fact-checking
organizations.
• Choose a passage from the article and respond.
Option 3
The Hazards of Growing Up Painlessly
By JUSTIN HECKERT
Published: November 15, 2012
The girl who feels no pain was in the kitchen, stirring ramen noodles, when the spoon slipped from her hand and dropped into the pot of boiling water. It was a school night; the TV was on in the living room, and her mother was folding clothes on the couch. Without thinking, Ashlyn Blocker reached her right hand in to retrieve the spoon, then took her hand out of the water and stood looking at it under the oven light. She walked a few steps to the sink and ran cold water over all her faded white scars, then called to her mother, “I just put my fingers in!” Her mother, Tara Blocker, dropped the clothes and rushed to her daughter’s side. “Oh, my lord!” she said — after 13 years, that same old fear — and then she got some ice and gently pressed it against her daughter’s hand, relieved that the burn wasn’t worse.
“I showed her how to get another utensil and fish the spoon out,” Tara said with a weary laugh when she recounted the story to me two months later. “Another thing,” she said, “she’s starting to use flat irons for her hair, and those things get superhot.”