First smiles

Lucas started smiling a couple of weeks ago. He seems to be a happy child as he interacts quite a lot. I'll be posting some pictures and comments about Lucas from time to time, so that you can follow his growth and development.

;¬ ]

The king's English won't rule forever

For most of their history, Americans have not had to bother themselves with learning a language other than English. With a few exceptions, foreigners' encounters with Americans meant that the burden of learning the other's language fell on the non-English speaker. As it turns out, that wasn't necessarily a good thing. In a world of rapidly expanding communications and global markets, Americans might find themselves at a disadvantage as the number of multilingual speakers is accelerating in other large and growing economies.

Yet, recent surveys show that learning a foreign language remains a low priority for American students and at the schools and universities that teach them. According to the U.S. Department of Education, fewer than 8 percent of undergraduates take a foreign language class each year, and only 1 percent of undergraduate degrees conferred in a given year are in a foreign language.

Many of today's college students graduate without a working knowledge of a language other than English. That might be fine for now, but many experts caution that the global usage of English will gradually decline. Speaking English is becoming less of an advantage and more of a "near-universal basic skill," concluded a report released earlier this year by the British Council, an international English educational organization. For this reason, those who speak only English, "face a bleak economic future," the report concluded.

Around the world, people are studying languages such as Spanish and Mandarin. In Portuguese-speaking Brazil, for instance, a 2005 law now requires all high schools to offer Spanish courses as an alternative to learning English. The Chinese government predicts that within a few years, the number of people studying Mandarin will rise to 100 million. And more and more international students are choosing to study at non-English speaking schools over English ones.

Although many people speak English today, it is foolish to assume that English language skills alone will be sufficient to thrive. We need to learn other languages if we want to maintain a competitive advantage in the global marketplace. The British Council estimates that the number of English speakers in the world will peak at two billion in a decade or so and then decline. American students who choose not to learn a second language will find themselves falling behind multilingual speakers.

But besides economic benefits, learning another's language helps us understand each other better. As a society that celebrates cultural diversity, we should realize the value of learning another language or two to better appreciate and contribute to the colorful world we live in.

From: EDITORIAL BOARD from Statesman (Texas)

Google promises more privacy

Google Inc. is adopting new privacy measures to make it more difficult to connect online search requests with the people making them -- a thorny issue that provoked a showdown with the U.S. government last year.

Under revisions announced late Wednesday, Google promised to wrap a cloak of anonymity around the vast amounts of information that the Mountain View-based company regularly collects about its millions of users around the world.

Google believes it can provide more assurances of privacy by removing key pieces of identifying information from its system every 18 to 24 months. The timetable is designed to comply with a hodgepodge of laws around the world that dictate how long search engines are supposed to retain user information.

Authorities still could demand to review personal information before Google purges it or take legal action seeking to force the company to keep the data beyond the new time limits.

From http://www.cnn.com/

Click on the heading to read more!

Brazilian Politician Indicted in New York in Kickback Scheme

The New York prosecutors accused Mr. Maluf, the former mayor of São Paulo and currently the leader of a rightist party in Brazil’s Congress, of taking part in a scheme to submit inflated and false invoices to contractors involved in building Avenida Agua Espraiada, a giant highway in São Paulo.

Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, said that after the inflated invoices were paid by the municipal agency supervising the highway project, the contractors generated kickbacks to Mr. Maluf, his son, Flávio Maluf, and others.

Some of the money was moved to a New York bank account and then to other locations, including Jersey, one of British Channel Islands, Mr. Morgenthau said.

The indictment accuses Mr. Maluf and four co-conspirators of stealing more than $11.6 million, the amount that prosecutors said could be directly traced to the kickback scheme. But Mr. Morgenthau said that Mr. Maluf was believed to have stolen more, and that bank records showed that from November 1997 to May 1999, $140 million passed through an account secretly controlled by Mr. Maluf at Safra National Bank in New York.

Click on the heading to read more!