A ray of hope for the new Justice Center...
A recent Department of Justice report shows that for the first half of 2003, the number of people imprisoned in the United States skyrocketed. According to a Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics as of June 30, 2003, there were 2,087,570 people jailed in the US, a 57,000-person increase from the year before.

While Attorney General John Ashcroft responded to the report saying it shows law enforcement is successfully taking "hard core criminals" off the street, many prison reform groups attribute the rise in prison population to mandatory minimum sentencing laws. These measures, say prison activists, are leading to the prolonged incarceration of hundreds of thousands of low-level offenders, people who have committed relatively minor crimes, such as drug possession. The only declining prison population for the year between June 30, 2002 and June 30, 2003 was inmates under 18 years of age.

Sevastopol Kids Rule... the world
Congrats to the Sevastopol World Champs and their coach Jeannie Fritschka - that's twice now that her teams have taken the world on and won. Perhaps her son Trevin - who was entrusted with building a tiny structure of super-light balsa wood that had to support a maximum load of 1,205 pounds - practiced his design theory at the sodaplay Web site. Go there to play with the sodaconstructor... UW Madison students are using it to learn physics, biomechanics and biology by designing virtual creatures in sodaconstructor, a free Internet construction game.

On Feb. 12, 2000 Jane Finley wrote the following, "I moved all remaining stuff into the hall, then to my truck to take to storage. Good friend Charles McDade helped me many times. I can't believe it is finally over. It has taken me two years to sell my co-op (apartment) and almost everything I own. Looking back I don't know how I ever did it. I AM EXHAUSTED! And ready to travel!"

From that day on she moved into a tiny camper truck and travels the US preaching for peace... a move she made after hearing a Unitarian Minister explain that "We have less than 1,000 months to live."

Jane documents her travels at her Web site: WANDERINGS: Living the Ordinary Extraordinarily (Stories from the Road)

Gertrude Bell died in 1926... Born in 1868, she was a homeschooler who went on to study in London and then to Oxford to read history. At the age of twenty and after only two years study, she left with a first-class degree. But from the turn of the century onwards, her life was governed by a love of the Arab peoples, inspired, it seems, by a visit to friends in Jerusalem in 1899-1900. Eventually her studies and knowledge of the Arabian culture led the British government to recruit her as an aid in the first World War. Following the war when Britain and France divided the remnants of the Ottoman Empire she became a Political Officer, and then Oriental Secretary to the High Commissioner in Baghdad. She helped to create and shape the new nation of Iraq...

William Beeman is director of Middle East studies at Brown University and has studied the extensive writings of Gertrude Bell from the 1920s in which she details the British struggles in Iraq. He has written a paper that describes our current affairs as a replay of the same mistakes made by the British over seventy years ago.

"It should be obvious that the Iraqis are now revolting against the United States in a manner similar to the way that they revolted against Great Britain in 1920 and again in 1958, when the British were removed once and for all."

The U.S.-Shi'ite Relationship in a New Iraq: Better than the British? by William Beeman in Strategic Insights, Volume III, Issue 5 (May 2004).