Texas has the most children in USA without
health insurances. Senator from Houston wants to over turn Houston's car towing
law and it wasn't on agenda, that's no problem in Texas. They moved everything
else to the side after all in Texas cars take precedent over sick children.
Really born a gain : A right wing crazy farmer
standing with bible in one hand and other hand empty where farm subsidy check
use to be says, "I voted for Bush, I feel betrayed." DUH!
Born again and betrayed: Houston has been
left out of rail money most will go to North East and California; blue states.
The sound of crackling explosions entered through the glassless window of
Maiza Madeira's home, a hollow-brick shanty wedged deep within the narrow,
twisting alleyways of this city's largest hillside slum.
She lifted her chin to acknowledge the noise, paused, then dismissed the sound
as quickly as it had come: "Fireworks," she said.
Each time she hears a rapid-fire noise like that, she said, the pause that
follows marks the instant in which she takes quick inventory of her children.
She has three, and she considers it her mission to steer them through childhood
safely. But they live in a favela -- a shantytown that doubles as a battlefield,
fought over by the neighborhood's ruling drug gangs, the police and, in some
cases, vigilante militias -- and safety is hardly guaranteed.
In this neighborhood, called Rocinha, almost everyone has a story about how
violence penetrated their homes. Many of the stories, like Madeira's, focus on
children as central characters, whether as victims of crimes or as perpetrators.
The favelas are statistically the most violent sections of Rio, a city where the
number of juvenile deaths attributed to violence far exceeds that of many war
zones. From 2002 through 2006, 729 Israeli and Palestinian minors were killed as
a result of the violence in Israel and the occupied territories, according to
B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights group. During the same period in Rio de
Janeiro, 1,857 minors were reported murdered, according to the Institute of
Public Security, a state research center.
In the past three months, several high-profile crimes have sparked renewed
national debate over children and violence. Brazil's Congress is considering
applying harsher sentences for crimes involving children, and possibly reducing
the minimum age for criminally prosecuting teenage offenders, which is now 18.
Residents here say they have plenty of cautionary tales involving their kids.
Madeira said it was three years ago when she learned to identify the sound of
fireworks so accurately. On the first night of Rio's annual Carnaval
celebration, she said, her 16-year-old son was out with friends at the favela's
dance hall. Celebratory fireworks had been popping all night, but one particular
eruption caused Madeira to sit up in bed.
"What was that?" she recalled asking her husband.
"Just fireworks," he had told her.
She slept uneasily until another sound -- someone insistently banging on the
aluminum door of their house -- woke her at 4 a.m. One of her four children had
been fatally shot by a raiding unit of military police.
Shocked Into Action
In February, two armed carjackers tried forcing a woman and her 6-year-old boy
out of their vehicle in Rio. The woman escaped, but the boy's foot got caught in
the seat-belt strap. He was dismembered as he was dragged alongside the car for
about four m
Bless those who challenge us to grow, to stretch, to move beyond the
knowable, to come back home to our elemental and essential nature. Bless those
who challenge us for they remind us of doors we have closed and doors we have
yet to open.