| Close vote expected on Salem senior center: Mayor Driscoll needs ...
SALEM - The proposal to move the senior center to the former St. Joseph Church site faces a close vote from a sharply divided City Council next week.
How the council will vote Wednesday night is still anyone's guess - some councilors remain undecided, even after months filled with debate from those on both sides of the plan.
"I don't have any final decision yet," Councilor-at-large Arthur Sargent said. "I don't really have a No. 1 factor. I just try to take an issue and get a piece of paper and write down the pros and cons."
Councilors like Sargent - the "undecideds" - will be the target audience when Mayor Kim Driscoll lays out her vision for the proposed Community Life Center on Wednesday at Bentley School. Later that night, councilors will decide whether to approve the plan to move the senior center from Broad Street into a proposed Community Life Center at the former church site.
No stopping now
After years of declining a friend's offer of nomination to the Ventura County Sports Hall of Fame, Ventura College women's basketball coach Ned Mircetic finally relented this year. For the first time, he is eligible to be inducted. The inductees will be announced later this month. .
My EnergyUtopia
As pointed out in last Thursday's The Statesman, while debates over energy technology are important, of equal importance is consumption patterns in wealthy nations and decisions in developing nations about how to make growth sustainable. Given that reducing energy consumption is inevitable in the West, let me, a person born, raised, acculturated and educated there, drift away to a world without my beloved DVD player, without my imported brewed coffee, without my new sports utility vehicle (built for 7 but with just me at the wheel and six lonely seats). In this world I find myself traveling to work atop some kind of human-powered two-wheeled machine. The streets are constantly filled with people. They are all either walking or cycling or in their wheelchairs - yes there is some engineless technology in use - but fortunately the whole place seems to have been designed according to some minimalist scheme, as if accommodating gas guzzlers was never part of the plan. So everyone can travel as far and as fast as they can peddle or push and I see nary an accident during my whole commute. A man and a woman are playing chess and debating politics, but I hear not a word of Kyoto or international protocols, not a hint on 25-tonne bombs falling on far-off lands. It turns out that they are talking about where to get the best haircut. "How can you talk of such trivia when there are important decisions to be made? I ask them. What about unemployment? War and peace? Healthcare? Poverty alleviation? How to meet our energy needs? All those things are taken care of, says the man. Starting with the last one you mentioned. It's a funny thing about cutting back on consumption its like dominos. Without all that burning of fuels and whatnot, the air gets cleaner, people get healthier. Then you focus more of your effort on health care instead of sick care you think about how we can all live healthy lifestyles the whole way through. Plus its a lot easier to exercise without so many cars in the way. And between war and peace, peace is the obvious choice, once you stop fighting over resources. No one has to borrow money to buy oil anymore, or pay interest on those loans, or meet the demands of someone else to get that loan in the first place.
Services Provided by College Disability Services Expand Nationwide
COLUMBIA, Mo. -- Universities across the country have seen an increase in students with a range of disabilities who are registering with the schools' disability services offices. At the University of Missouri-Columbia, 47 students registered with the Office of Disability Services (ODS) in July 1997. Today, the ODS maintains records on 1,934 students, of whom 1,126 are actively registered. New federal definitions of disability and an expansion of the services offered have contributed to this increase. The Americans with Disabilities Act, passed in 1990 and enacted in 1992, changed the way disability services offices at universities operated throughout the country. Before, the focus had been on physical disability. The ADA expanded the definition of disability to include those with learning disabilities, health issues and psychological problems.
Dominican Republic ratifies treaty to eliminate discrimination ...
In a ceremony held at the Organization of American States ( OAS ), the government of the Dominican Republic today formalized its ratification of the Inter-American Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Persons with Disabilities. Santo Domingo.- The Ambassador of the Dominican Republic to the OAS, Roberto Alvarez, deposited the instruments of ratification and reiterated his country's commitment to strengthen and promote human rights and in particular to help integrate people with disabilities into society. As we all know, the level of state commitment to the human rights of all of its citizens lies in the extent to which it provides help to the most vulnerable groups of society, and unfortunately the disabled have been one sector that traditionally has received little attention from our governments, Ambassador Alvarez said.
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