Readable, teachable news.
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Jan. 12 was a significant date for the people of Haiti. It was two years ago on that date that the country suffered a terrible earthquake.
More than a million people had their homes destroyed.
After two years, many people think that new homes, jobs and clean streets are not coming fast enough.
Haiti’s new President, Michel Martelly, is known as Sweet Mickey. He believes education is one of the most important things for the government to fix first.
India made history this month when it announced that there were no more cases of polio in the country.
The victory came after years of work by India’s public-health workers. They travelled to the most remote places and the poorest areas in the country. They gave vaccines—medicine that prevents diseases—to 172 million children.
Polio is a viral infection that can paralyze (stop movement in) the body, especially in people’s arms and legs. It can also make people’s breathing difficult is if they have very bad asthma. It can even be fatal.
There are two main political parties in the United States: the Republicans and the Democrats.
Right now, the Republicans have to choose someone to run for president against Democrat Barack Obama, in time for the presidential election on Nov. 6.
To pick a Republican candidate, every state in the U.S. holds an early election called a primary.
The front-runner in the Republican race is Mitt Romney, who was the Governor of Massachusetts and is now in business.
This year, the “euro” celebrates its tenth anniversary.
The euro is a unit of money (or “currency”) that is used by 17 countries in Europe.
It wasn’t always that way.
Before the euro, every country had its own currency.
For instance, France had the franc, Italy had the lira, Germany had the Deutschmark and so on.
The euro was created in 2002 when a group of European politicians and financial leaders decided it would be helpful if they had the same type of money.
The idea of the euro was to make it easier for countries to buy and sell more easily between themselves, because they would all be using the same currency.
Canada and the United States are working together to make it easier for people to travel across their common border.
This week, U.S. President Barack Obama and Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, agreed to a “cross-border plan” to make it easier and quicker for Canadians to travel to the U.S. It will also help companies in both countries to do business together.
Harper has agreed to a “common perimeter”–a type of border all around North America–so more careful checking can be done on who and what comes across the borders from Canada. Canada has also agreed to get more information about people when they come into Canada from other countries and to put in American-style bomb detection machines for checking luggage.
Recently, Vladimir Putin was elected President of Russia.
The official count of votes said he won with a clear majority of the votes (more than 50 per cent) but many people believe that his supporters stuffed the ballot boxes with false voting cards and that he really shouldn’t be President.
Almost a year later, the effects of Arab Spring are still being felt.
Last December, the people of North Africa started what is being called “Arab Spring.”
Arab Spring refers to a series of uprisings by the people in a number of Arab countries.
The citizens rebelled when they could no longer put up with dictators and their cruelty.
They forced the President of Tunisia to flee to Saudi Arabia and the President of Egypt to quit his job and move away.
For more than a month, the people of Occupy Toronto staged a peaceful protest on behalf of what they call “the 99 per cent.”
They built a tent village in St. James Park in downntown Toronto and camped there.
They set up a media centre, so TV news stations, newspapers and websites like Teaching Kids News could get information about them and their cause.
They used “social media” tools like Twitter and Facebook to communicate with each other.
This allowed them to talk to each other and let people know what was happening at all times.
Nat Atherton is a Canadian living and working in Thailand. He gave TKN a first-hand account of the day-to-day havoc this year’s floods have caused.
The flooding here has been horrible. It hasn’t yet come into the centre of the capital (Bangkok), where I live, but has affected many of the people I work with.
Many of the poorer Thais live in the surrounding areas, which are flooded chest deep (1.5 metres) in some places.
I know a great many people who have lost their houses.
Many others haven’t been able to go home to check on their homes since rivers of dirty water separate their work from their houses.
Many well-known tourist districts have also been affected, including the world’s largest outdoor market, Chatuchak.
A brand new political party, the Coalition pour l’avenir du Quebec (Coalition for the Future of Quebec), was launched last Monday.
A coalition is a group of people, often from different backgrounds, with the same goals.
This makes six registered political parties in the Province of Quebec, where the Liberals are in power and the Bloc Quebecois is in second place.
The leader of the the new party is Francois Legault.
He is known to Quebecers as a separatist, someone who would like to see Quebec separate from Canada to become its own country.
But last week Legault spoke as though separation was not as important to him as it once was.
