China-Mongolia and the Deaths of Race Horses in California

Many aspects of global life illustrate how connected the world is. As preposterous as a connection between China, Mongolia, and last year's deaths of 23 horses at California's Santa Anita racetrack  seems, it is a connection worthy of  investigation.

     On the books, China's Communist regime outlawed gambling when it took over in 1949. Efforts continue to purge online betting apps, and prison awaits those who challenge Chairman Xi's abhorrence of corruption. Nonetheless, local administrators of state-run lotteries manage to take their cuts, gamblers access online casino apps designed in Southeast Asia, illegal mah jong games hide from overhead drones in China's woods and mountains, and police even had to break up gambling at a cricket fighting tournament near Shanghai in August, 2019.

     Off shore, casinos dominate Macao, a former Portuguese island and now a Chinese Special Administrative Region. In 2017, New Zealand created a Jockey Club to attract Chinese  thoroughbred buyers and to cater to Chinese owners who want to train and race their horses in Australia and New Zealand. When Justify won the Kentucky Derby and the other two legs of the U.S. Triple Crown in 2018, owners from the China Horse Club just laughed after a reporter questioned how racing squared with China's ban on gambling.

     If there is a connection between China and the 23 race horses that died at Santa Anita, it runs through China's landlocked northern neighbor, Mongolia. The historic domain of Genghis Khan's horses and riders also is the current home of dusty courses where hundreds of children as young as five ride bareback in races to win a Russian-made car. When racing was legal in China, owners used to send their horses north to strengthen their bones by grazing in the nutrient-rich  pastures of Mongolia. Reporting on the fatal leg injury that caused the horse, Mongolian Groom, to be euthanized after the Breeders Cup Classic at Santa Anita in November, 2019, Billy Reed mentioned the need to reassess the calcium-building limestone content of the soil and water where many race horses graze in Kentucky.

     As a cause of last year's race horse deaths, in recent months the coronavirus is receiving more attention that the dietary value of Kentucky's pastures, Scientists suspected COVID-19 could pass between animals and humans after researchers discovered pig farmers died of coronavirus in Malaysia. Observers watched bats land on a tree and poop into a vat of pig slop. Tests found the bats carried COVID-19 and transmitted the disease to farmers who had contact with the pig slop.

     The coronavirus that affects humans and the equine enteric (gastrointestinal) coronavirus horses pass between each other are both among the large group of RNA messenger viruses. Since both forms of the virus in horses and humans lock onto cells using the same kind of spikes, transmission between  these species is highly probable. Lack of evidence showing horses and humans exchange COVID-19 at this time may be a function of a lack of testing fecal samples of thoroughbred race horses and the failure to test personnel at Mongolian Stable, who may have shown little or no initial symptoms of the virus.

     In August, 2019, the San Diego Tribune ran a photo showing Enebish Ganbat, a Mongolian who trains horses at Mongolian Stable, kissing Mongolian Groom's face. Such gestures, not unusual among those who love and care for horses, provide ample opportunity for humans and horses to transmit coronavirus to each other. Horses contract equine enteric coronavirus by contact with surfaces exposed to the manure of infected horses or by consuming some of their manure. Therefore,  to prevent contracting coronavirus from a horse, people need to wash their hands whenever they touch anything, such as a shovel or pitchfork, that may have been in contact with an infected horse's manure. Unless humans who have or may not yet show symptoms of COVID-19 wear masks, they may spread coronavirus to horses.

     Before racing resumes at Santa Anita this summer, last year's fate of Mongolian Groom is reason to test the nutrient value of Kentucky's pastures and to test for the presence of coronavirus in the horses that race there.

             

Plan A Global Menu

McDonald's rotating menu of region-specific food items at its Chicago headquarters reminded me to incorporate foreign dishes, even if only rice and pasta, with domestic favorites, at home. As a tribute to the company's worldwide presence, McDonald's goes a bit further, according to trendwatching.com.

      At headquarters, a lighted map shows which countries' food items are on the menu that day. Trendwatching gives examples of the following food McDonald's serves and replaces with new items every two months: Chinese purple taro burgers, Australian curried noodles, Latin American desserts.

     In the Northern Hemisphere, when most students have a couple of school-free months, a library visit can find a cookbook offering foreign foods a family can cook together for any dinner or a special international feast. Outdoors and in, students can plant a variety of herbs used by cooks around the world.

Students Share Foreign Experiences without Leaving Home

A mother in India, who only completed the 7th grade, said her daughter and son were in school, because she could embroider pillows to make money to send them to elementary school. How different that is, I thought, from most of the mothers in the United States who are well educated and do not have to pay to send their children to school. Yet, their children probably have similar experiences learning to read, to add and subtract, and to join playmates in games at recess.

     In the picture book, Mirror, by Jeanne Baker, city boys in Australia and farm boys in Morocco learn their lives are both similar and different. The earlier post, "Getting to Know You," tells how "Arthur," on his PBS show, learned a boy in Turkey did not live in a tent and ride to school on a camel. They both did a lot of the same things.

     It would be interesting and fun to ask students of all ages to describe the lives of children in France and China. How do they dress? What do they eat? How do they get to school? What games do they play? Then, it would be a challenge to find out if their ideas were correct. One resource that might help is epals.com.

     Once teachers sign up on epals.com, they can select countries, the ages of interested students from 3 to 19, what language to use, and even the size of classes. Their students can connect with classrooms in other countries to work on shared projects and begin pen pal exchanges.

     Contacts with foreign students prevent mistakes like a student of mine once made, when she asked a student from South Africa, if she had ever used a computer. 

February's International Film Festival

One of the most pleasant ways to learn about a country is to go to a movie made in or about somewhere you don't live. When Oscar nominations for short and feature films are announced, it's time to start looking for theatres that show them, because many of these potential Academy Award winners have an international connection.

     This year, in the animated shorts category, South Africa presents Revolting Rhymes based on Ronald Dahl's dark spin on fairy tales. One French short, Negative Space, shows a sad relationship between father and son can exist in any culture, and, in another French short, two amphibians explore a deserted mansion. These shorts are shown together with two U.S. films: the Pixar short, Lou, that ran before Cars and Kobe Bryant's retirement letter, Dear Basketball.

     Since the live action shorts nominated for Oscars often portray news events, they can be a pleasant way to see both uplifting and unpleasant aspects of a country. Watu Wote (All of Us) shows how Muslims risked their lives to protect the Christians riding on a bus with them, when Islamic terrorists attacked in Kenya. The British short, The Silent Child, introduces the social worker who taught a deaf 4-year-old girl the sign language that enabled her to come out of the shadows and be included in family conversations. Two U.S. entries cover a school shooting in Atlanta titled DeKalb Elementary and My Nephew Emmett based on the 1955 racist murder of Emmett Till. Australian humor is on display in The Eleven O'Clock, a short about an appointment between a psychiatrist and patient that try to treat each other.

     Families already may have seen the animated feature, Coco, which has a Mexican theme depicting how a death in the family shouldn't end memories of a relative. Loving Vincent probably won't have wide distribution, but if young people have a chance to see this Polish-British feature, it might be their only time to see a movie where each frame about Vincent Van Gogh is made by an oil painting. Since Angelina Jolie produced The Breadwinner, this animated feature likely has wider distribution. It shows how an 11-year-old girl disguised herself as a boy to grow up with more opportunities under the Taliban in Afghanistan.

     Although too advanced to be appropriate or understood by young people, the live action foreign language films nominated for Academy Awards provide adults with points of view from Chile (A Fantastic Woman), Lebanon (The Insult), Russia (Loveless), Hungary (On Body and Soul), and Sweden (The Square).

     Oscar winners will be announced on Sunday, March 4, 2018.

     

   

How to Meet the Clean Air Challenge

Similar to the process of producing clean water, one method China uses to attempt to reduce chronic smog pollution moves dirty air through a filtration system.

     In Beijing, a Dutch invention cleans air using a 23-foot, cylindrical filtration tower powered by electricity from a coal-fired power plant. A 300-foot tower surrounded by coated greenhouses in Xian, Shaanxi province, is experimenting with a more complex process. In daylight hours, solar radiation heats polluted air in the greenhouses before it rises in the tower through a series of purifying filters and is released into a 3.86 square mile area. Thus far, the Xian tower, when treating severely polluted air, especially in winter when coal provides heat in the area, shows only a 15% reduction in the fine small particles most hazardous to health. Yet, Xian's developers have an ambitious plan to construct 1,640-foot anti-pollution towers, each surrounded by 11.6 square miles of greenhouses, in other Chinese cities.

     Based on the Australian study mentioned in the earlier post, "Priority: Eliminate generating electricity from fossil fuels," coal-fueled power plants are the major source of pollution. These air filtration towers would seem to do the most good, if they were located in the vicinity of power plants.

     Startups and traditional automakers throughout the world race to produce the electric cars that promise to eliminate a source of pollution, the fossil fuels that power today's cars and trucks. The challenge to up the percentage of electric passenger cars from less than 1% on the world's roads today to at least 33% by 2040 involves financing, designing, engineering, manufacturing, charging stations, searching for the lithium used in batteries, and marketing. China is the industry's acknowledged leader with Tesla in the U.S. and European automakers also in the hunt.

     Although China is expected to continue to import lithium from South America's Argentina-Chile-Bolivia Belt (See the earlier post, "Technology's Hard Sell and the Public's Role in the Lithium-ion Battery Industry."), it has its own domestic supply. In the cold, thin air high in China's mountains between the Tibet Autonomous Region and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, mining in Chaerhan Salt Lake is on track to supply a plant that will produce 30,000 tons of lithium carbonate by 2020 or 2021 and eventually plants that produce 200,000 tons annually.

     China also has ideas for creating charging methods to keep electric cars on the road away from home. When driving long distances, drivers could visit automated swap stations to switch their dying batteries for new ones in three minutes, or they could call mobile vans to come and recharge their dying batteries in ten minutes. (I cannot help but recall the toxic nano particles a high school student found, when her summer intern project at the University of Wisconsin studied the effects of decomposing lithium batteries. See the earlier post, "The Challenge of New Technologies: Prepare to Think.") By requiring foreign auto dealers to sell only electric cars and to provide charging options, China is in a position to restrict entry into the world's biggest market.

   

     

Priority: Eliminate generating electricity from fossil fuels

Not only Disneyland and China design model cities for the future, schoolgirls and young boys also use cereal boxes, LEGOs, and every other sort of building toy to create their own visions of home. What the Visions and Pathways 2040 project at the University of Melbourne did, that was a bit different, was design a greener, cleaner city AND a path to get there from here.

A group of 250 experts from various disciplines collaborated to determine how to reach the year 2040 with cities that cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 80%. They realized they could work with many technologies, such as bladeless wind turbines, solar panels on skyscrapers, and roof and vertical gardens, that already exist. But future suburbs might look very different with less privacy because of clustered townhouses with solar roofs. At the same time, indiscriminate land clearing outside cities and for housing developments would be replaced by forest preservation and regeneration of shade trees used to capture and store carbon dioxide. Urban dwellers would get around through local forests by electric transport, bike trails, and walkways. A CSIRO-developed Australian Stocks and Flows Framework helped model these new cities and the path to them.

The Melbourne project also identified the direct and indirect emissions cities would need to reduce or eliminate. Transport, landfill waste, and buildings caused about 16% of direct carbon dioxide emissions in cities. While the energy used by the heavy industry and agricultural production needed to supply cities also caused indirect emissions, the need for electricity generated almost half of a city's indirect carbon footprint. That meant replacing the fossil fuel burned by power stations with clean technologies was a priority.

Experts saw the transition to ecocities initiated by: 1) city governments that used sanctions to discourage businesses and organizations from carbon-producing activities or 2) citizen movements that foster cooperatives and engage in cultural, political, and economic decisions. By visiting visionsandpathways.com/, you can get the entire Visions and Pathways 2040 report. The challenges it presents are something to think and talk about during the holidays and before making a New Year's Resolution to help your community create a positive climate change.

Technology's Hard Sell and the Public's Role in the Lithium-Ion Battery Industry

New technologies require public acceptance and industry risk takers. What if consumers had refused to bring nuclear-powered microwaves into their homes or to let doctors use lasers to cure diseases? I've gained new respect for the physics teacher I had who assigned students to weekly reports on journal articles describing break-through scientific advances. Unless a country enters the world's economy late or a hurricane or earthquake destroys infrastructure, it is an uphill slog for a new technology to compete with entrenched technologies.

     Top executives recognize the challenge of creating a corporate culture, much less a public culture, attuned to welcoming technological change. At a recent conference, CEOs of 100 leading companies in 17 different industries concluded it is easier to incorporate rapidly changing technology into an existing system than it is to create a corporate culture willing to embrace technological changes.

     Consider the introduction of lithium-ion batteries. In the United States, electric cars using these batteries need to compete with existing cars, and they require charging stations to replace gas stations. As a clean energy source, huge lithium-ion battery packs that provide power to electricity grids need to compete with coal and natural gas. When a leak at California's Aliso Canyon natural gas facility forced the San Diego Gas & Electric company and Southern California Edison to try to provide Los Angeles and San Diego with electricity from grid-scale batteries, AES Energy Storage built a lithium-ion battery installation in under six months, compared to the years it takes to obtain permits to construct polluting power plants near heavily populated urban areas.

     Logic suggests car manufacturers and electric companies avoid "marketing myopia" by seeing themselves with a wide lens that positions them in transportation and energy industries that need to invest in up-and-coming alternatives. Companies are beginning to do just that. AES and Siemens now have a joint venture. California Edison is working with Tesla, known for manufacturing electric cars, and Mercedes-Benz and BMW also are involved in stationary power storage projects with utilities.

     Nonetheless, reliance on private investment limits the development and use of lithium-ion battery technology. Again, there is a role for teachers and students who take a realistic view of what fosters technological advances. Denying the effect of fossil fuels on climate change does nothing to encourage government investment in clean energy from lithium-ion batteries or tax relief for battery manufacturers. And how about government support for lithium exploration (top producers are Australia, Chile, Argentina, and China) and safe disposal of used lithium or, better yet, support for efforts to "mine" recycled lithium?

     In fact, Elon Musk claims all the nickel used in his Tesla electric car batteries is reusable at the end of a battery's life. If true, that is good news, because nickel mining, mainly in Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Russia, and the Philippines, kicks up sulphur dioxide and pollutes rivers with oxidized nickel waste. Dr. David Santillo at Greenpeace's research laboratories reports crushing and transporting nickel produces dust containing copper, cobalt, and chromium, as well as nickel, that causes respiratory problems and cancer. Rather than continue to mine poorer and poorer strains of nickel, Santillo suggests an effort to recover and reuse nickel already extracted.

     Wise young people need to focus on the new career opportunities new technologies present.

World Energy Attitude Shifts

According to a report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), in 2016 the global economy grew and carbon dioxide emissions from energy production did not. In fact, the IEA found worldwide carbon dioxide emissions have remained the same for three years.

Progress is uneven but promising. China reduced emissions 1% last year, and India just passed tougher auto emissions standards in March, 2017. Where lower priced alternatives to coal have encouraged countries to switch to natural gas, renewable power sources, and nuclear energy. carbon dioxide output has declined or stabilized. In every country, improved energy efficiency has helped the environment in terms of carbon dioxide reduction and less deforestation. In Malawi, for example, rural and urban consumers have been willing to consider replacing traditional three-stone fires with an investment in clay, metal, or thermoelectric stoves that burn charcoal more efficiently than charcoal and much more efficiently than wood.

The growing concern about climate change has stimulated the search for green energy alternatives. In Norway, the Ocean Sun company is working on solar farms that can float on the ocean and transmit power back to crowded urban areas. Others are looking into technology for floating wind turbines, for generating power from hydrogen, and for using the hydropower of waves, tides, and rivers.

 At its gold mines in Suriname and Burkina Faso, Toronto-based IAMGOLD is using solar energy to reduce the use of diesel oil that generates greenhouse gases. The company sees the hybrid diesel solar photovoltaic engine, built by the Finnish group Wartsila at its gold mine in Burkina Faso, not only as a way to make an environmental contribution to the world but also as a way to reduce energy costs, protect against fuel price volatility, and increase local employment.

Efforts to convert the power of Atlantic Ocean waves into energy in the Orkney Islands north of the Scottish mainland and at the Wave Hub facility in Cornwell off the far southwest coast of England have been less successful. Besides the prohibitive cost, tricky engineering problems and the need to develop new materials capable of withstanding storm stresses and corrosive salt water require solutions. A device needs to handle the variety of pounding storms and normal waves, up and down motions, and wave speeds. Navigation needs to avoid these devices. And biologists view the moving parts of underwater turbines as a threat to sea mammals, fish, and diving birds. Yet, the UK's European Marine Energy Centre in the Orkneys attracts tests by Wave-tricity's Ocean Wave Rover and Finland's Wello Oy Penguin. Australia's Carnegie company has been financing CETO's Wave Energy Technology which has placed giant buoys off the coast of Cornwell in an attempt to produce emission-free energy and desalinated freshwater.  

Chinese Culture Creep

The Chinese Year of the Rooster is fast approaching on Saturday, January 28, 2017. After the antics of the Year of the Monkey, the rooster wakes us up to prepare for fresh challenges that require a quick wit, practical solutions, and persistence.

     With theme parks and film, savvy showmen Qiaoling Huang and Wang Jianlin are providing entertainment and spreading Chinese culture at the same time. Huang's Songcheng Group is making its first overseas investment in the $600 million Australia Legend Kingdom. On Australia's Gold Coast, local visitors, the 1.2 million Chinese tourists who spend $8000 per trip, and other international tourists will be able to visit a theme park that features an aboriginal Australian village and the "Mystic Orient," which showcases Chinese and Southeast Asian culture.

     Chinese investors have acquired AMC movie theaters and the Legendary Entertainment movie studio in the United States. Wang Jianlin, chairman of the (Dalian) Wanda Group/Wanda Cultural Industry Group, is in the process of developing a state-of-the-art Movie Metropolis Complex and offering up to 40% of production costs to attract filmmakers to Qingdao. China's censorship State Administration of Press Publication, Radio, Film and Television is therefore positioned to counter Western values and to introduce China's core socialist values into films and to influence the culture of global moviegoers.

     China's attempt to buy into World-Cup-class soccer (football) suffered an initial setback. According to TIME magazine (Jan. 16, 2017), Christiano Ronaldo, a Real Madrid star, turned down a $314 million offer from a Chinese Super League club. But by 2018, Alibaba had a sports channel streaming soccer. China's HNA Group was one of  the sponsors at the French Open tennis tournament May 22 - June 11, 2017.

     Chinese culture has no trouble being represented on dinner tables around the world. Begin the Year of the Rooster by dining at a local Chinese restaurant or, with an adult's help, try this recipe at home.

                                                         Pineapple Chicken Stir-Fry
Servings: 4

1 Tbsp. vegetable oil
3 boneless, skinless Chicken breast halves, cut in strips
1/2 green or red pepper, thinly sliced
1 can (15.25 oz.) pineapple chunks in their own juice
3/4 cup sauce (1/2 cup soy sauce, 1/4 cup honey, 1/2 tsp ginger)
Hot cooked rice
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Heat oil in large skillet over medium-high heat. Add chicken and green pepper, cook and stir 5 to 6 minutes or until chicken is done (no longer pink).
2. Drain pineapple and reserve 2 tablespoons of juice. Combine reserved juice and sauce.
3. Add pineapple chunks and sauce mixture to skillet. Cover and cook 2 minutes or until heated through. Serve over rice.




    

Gone Fishin'

Whether fishing with a worm or a fly in a lake or a stream, finding the perfect fishing 'hole''' and coming home with a catch is a day well spent by any child anywhere in the world.

     Efforts are being made to insure fish continue to thrive in the world's waters. To prevent fish and other marine life from becoming hopelessly trapped in the plastic six-pack rings that hold beer and soda cans, some rings are being made from biodegradable materials. Florida's Saltwater Brewery has used wheat and barley waste from its beer-making process to construct packaging that begins to disintegrate two hours after hitting the ocean or the beach.

     Bycatch is another problem fish face. To catch sushi-grade tuna, fishing boats bait thousands of hooks on a single line that can be 25 miles long. Along with tuna, longlining unintentionally catches other fish, including sharks, stingrays, and turtles. Although some of the unwanted fish are safely released, others perish from the stress of being caught and the dead fish upset the marine ecosystem balance already threatened by climate change from warming water and pollution. Experiments using circular, rather than J-shaped fishing hooks, and fish instead of squid bait have shown there are ways to reduce bycatch.

     The ocean's plastic garbage could outweigh fish by 2050, according to a study cited by the UN's Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres. Tons of plastic and other floating debris already are turning beaches, marina areas, lakes, rivers, and oceans into garbage dumps. Trash causes fish. surfers, and the wealthy to suffer. In the July, 2018 issue of VOGUE, Helena Dunn, the designer of Tuulikki eco-conscious surfwear, reports, "As surfers, we have a front-row seat on environmenta lissues." Especially during storms, plastic bags, bottles, wrappers, and other debris run off from land. Large growths of seagrass add to the problems caused by debris that can clog cooling-water intakes and cause engine damage on the most expensive yachts and ships.

    Modest and major efforts are being made to keep plastics out of the world's waters. The Dell computer company has begun to use plastic collected on beaches in Haiti as its packaging material. Hewlett Packard urges computer printer users to go to hp.com/recycle to find where they can take their used ink cartridges for recycling.  When Dutch student, Boyan Slat, was 17, he founded the Ocean Cleanup Foundation for the purpose of removing the estimated 8 million tons of discarded fishing nets, water bottles, and assorted plastic debris that end up swirling in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch between California and Hawaii. Since the north Pacific Gyre, or current, funnels the plastic into the center, the foundation designed a long floating plastic boom that can be anchored across the flow of the Pacific Gyre. At this collection point, the waste can be lifted onto ships and taken to recycling centers on land.

     Australian surfers, Peter Ceglinski and Andrew Turton, are developing a Seabin to collect and remove trash around marinas. Their Seabin is a submerged cylinder open on top just below the water surface. An electric pump pulls water and floating trash into a bag filter that collects the trash and allows water and small marine life, like fish eggs, to pass through. Seabins can hang from docks, where electricity is available, and maintenance employees can empty the filter bags on a regular schedule. A solar powered model could be attached to channel marker buoys in shipping lanes. The French company, Poralu Marine, is manufacturing a prototype that is being tested at Le Grande Motte, a large Mediterranean harbor near Montpelier, France.

     Of course the best pollution solution is to refrain from throwing things in the water in the first place.

International Flight Fatalities

When Egyptian Air Flight MS804 from Paris to Cairo went down in the Mediterranean Sea on May 19, 2016, efforts to find the lost passengers and plane required a coordinated international search reminiscent of the continuing search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in the Indian Ocean.

     What comparisons could a student make? The main countries studying Flight MS804's crash are Egypt, Greece, France, England, and the United States. The search for Flight 370 has involved up to 26 countries.

     Using an Atlas of the Bible and a World Atlas, I see this might be a good season to look for debris in the Mediterranean. According to the missionary travels of St. Paul, the safe sailing season, when the Mediterranean is free of storms, is from May 27 to September 14. The sea was rough during the first few days of the search, but the black box voice and flight data recorder finally was recovered on June 16. Thus far, although the recorder revealed smoke detectors went off in a toilet and under the cockpit just before the crash, whether fire was caused by a mechanical problem or a bomb is not known.

     The World Atlas showed the water where Flight MS804 went down is roughly 5,000 to 10,000 feet deep. It was dark when Flight 840 disappeared off radar around 2:30 am, and no eye witnesses in the normally busy eastern Mediterranean immediately came forward with information. Neither have any terrorists groups taken credit for downing the plane. The lack of a sighting may indicate navigation instruments were compromised by a smoldering fire rather than by the flash of a bomb.

     In the Indian Ocean west of Australia, where Flight 370 disappeared, the water is 20,000 or more feet deep. Currents off Australia move in a counterclockwise motion toward Africa, while the Mediterranean's currents flow south and easterly. Very little debris from Flight 370 has been found off east Africa's coast. and all searches for the missing plane were discontinued January 17, 2017. Flight MS804 was located in the Mediterranean east of the crash site and north of Alexandria, but no agreement about the cause of the crash has been reached.

Australian Report Links Indonesian Pilots to Islamic Militants

A recent Australian report about Indonesian pilots with ISIS ties raises questions about a possible relationship to the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March, 2014.
(See earlier post, "Who Needs International Expertise?")

     According to the Australian report, Ridwan Agustin was a proud Indonesian pilot who flew AirAsia flights to Hong Kong and Singapore prior to September, 2014. Thereafter, he changed his name to Ridwan Ahmad Indonesty and began expressing support for ISIS. AirAsia stated the company no longer employed Ridwan Agustin and his wife, Diah Suci Wulandari, a flight attendant, but refused to provide details of the flight routes they flew.

      By March, 2015, the Australian Federal Police reported Ridwan listed his location as Raqqa, Syria. Since 2012, an estimated 500 people have traveled from Indonesia to the Middle East, including Iraq and Syria, to join terrorist groups estimated to now total 800 ISIS radicals in Indonesia. A weekly report for March 3-10, 2015 from the National Counter Terrorism Center mentioned Malaysians and Indonesians had formed a joint weapons training unit, Majmu'ah al'Arkhabiliy, commanded by ISIS in Raqqa, Syria.

     Access to and knowledge of aviation security and safety makes radicalized pilots a serious threat. Some 300 pilots, flight attendants, flight instructors, radar and air traffic controllers, and ground crew from Indonesia, Australia, Malaysia, Switzerland, Germany, France, the Middle East, UK, and USA exchange information on Instagram and Facebook.

     There are five known ISIS recruiting centers in Indonesia, one of which was responsible for killing 202 people in the 2002 Bali bombing. Another attack in Bali occurred in 2005. Reports are pending for a crash by AirAsia Airbus 320 en route to Singapore that killed 155 plus the crew in December, 2014 and for an Indonesian military airplane crash in July, 2015 that killed at least 135.

     An Indonesian military-trained pilot, Tommy Hendratno (also known as Tomi Aby Alfatih), who had known connections to Ridwan Agustin and who expressed concern for the plight of Muslims and support for ISIS, flew private charter and commercial flights to Bali, Malaysia, and Dubai for Premiair before he quit the company on June 1, 2015. He had attended three training sessions (the last one in February, 2015) in the US at Flight Safety International in St. Louis, Missouri.

   

   

Travel the World with Summer Reading

When school's out, most children no longer have to spend their summers working on a farm. There is plenty of time to read on rainy days, in the shade of a tree, and during the hour wait before swimming after lunch. To do some reading that has a global dimension, with or without the help of adults, kids can dive into the following books.

• Among the 31 stories in The White Sail, youngsters who are learning to read will find Viking and sea adventures.
• By reading The Curse of Captain LaFook,  children in middle school can return to the time when the Caribbean teamed with pirates, buried treasure, and a curse.
• The Open Ocean by Francesco Pittau takes kids under the sea for a guessing game and education about marine life.
• With Madeline, young girls can visit Paris in Madeline and the Old House in Paris.
• In We All Went on Safari by Laurie Krebs, animals in Tanzania's Serengeti Plain help children 5 to 8 years old count to ten and learn some Swahili. Youngsters who read this book also will learn about Tanzania and the Masai people who live there.
• Like We All Went on Safari, The Rumor has wonderful illustrations that will appeal to younger children. Storytellers in the Sahyadri Mountains of India's Western Ghats repeat tall tales like the one Anushka Ravishankar tells in The Rumor.
• In Kids in Kabul: Living Bravely Through a Never-Ending War, Reborah Ellis introduces kids in grades 5 through 12 to young women who want to be educated in Afghanistan. An older woman tells how she once brought an electric bill, instead of her doctor's prescription, to a pharmacy, because she never learned to read.
• Kids in Afghanistan go from a carefree childhood to tragedy in The Kite Runner, which also is a movie.
• Crossing the Wire introduces young people to immigration concerns when 15-year-old Victor Flores attempts to flee Mexico in an effort to support his family by finding a job in the United States.
• On a bright summer day, older children may be ready to deal with some of the world's upheavals by reading The Diary of Anne Frank or Red Scarf Girl, Ji Li Jiang's account of growing up during China's Cultural Revolution.
• Students can travel the world in Lonely Planet's Not for Parents Travel Book, a collection of short descriptions of places in North and South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Lonely Planet also publishes separate Not for Parents books on London, Paris, Rome, China, Australia, and Great Britain.
• Reading can lead to action with the help of A Kids' Guide to Climate Change and Global Warming. Besides presenting facts about climate change, this book suggests service projects kids can do to improve the world's environment.
• With the help of illustrations by Anne Wilson, Dawn Casey couples stories from around the world with related activities in The Barefoot Book of Earth Tales. Besides becoming familiar with stories told in places such as Australia, Nigeria, and Wales, children will come away from this book knowing how to grow tomatoes and how to make a pine cone bird feeder, corn husk doll, and other items.
• Every year there is a new World Almanac for Kids that provides page after page of interesting facts about animals, movies, sports, science, and other fascinating subjects. 

This is just the beginning of a summer reading list. Your local library has lots of other suggestions.
At scholastic.com/summer, Scholastic invites teachers and parents to help kids log in their number of summer reading minutes in order to win digital prizes. If a school sets a record for the most reading minutes in the world, its name will be published in the 2014 Scholastic Book of World Records.