Wise Monkey News is here to provide young people an opportunity to discuss the issues that affect their lives. We hope that, through your participation, this website serves as a forum for the development, exchange, and expression of ideas that will prepare us to assume our positions as the leaders of tomorrow's world. Have something to say?
Are the two Koreas ready to shake hands?
by: Boo Yoo - printed on 10-18-2000
Korea is the only country that is divided into two different governments, economic systems, cultures, and militaries. It was portioned along the 38th parallel, with the Soviet Union occupying the north area and American troops occupying the south area ever since it was independent from Japan in 1945. The North and South fought a fierce war from 1950 to 1953 and have never singed a permanent peace treaty.
Spain struggles to close economic gap in a changing Europe
by: Hank Smith - printed on 01-31-2001
The final descent of my flight from Atlanta to Madrid was an amazing stress reliever. Gone were the common annoyances of any flight: the crying babies, the tiny seats, the airplane food. In their place grew my excitement for what was to come. Finally I had arrived in the land of Don Quixote, of bullfighting, the land of passion described by Hemingway. I stared out my window at the land below. Olive trees!
I spent my first week in Madrid with friends in Moncloa, a trendy, university-dominated neighborhood, experiencing the young, exuberant culture of a country catching up after 40 years of a repressive dictatorship.
Killing fields leave permanent scars
by: Jill Suart - printed on 02-14-2001
The pictures of emaciated faces and broken souls from the death camps in Nazi Europe are sadly familiar to most North Americans. And the history of Vietnam’s Communist takeover is still widely studied and discussed today. Yet there is a blank area in many of our minds where history is vague and images are few. That area is just east of Vietnam and two decades past the holocaust, at the Killing Fields of Cambodia.
Visiting The Bird Parliament
by: Mono Vergara - printed on 09-25-2002
Fellow sailors, It was in an island a few minutes from Portland, the city we fail to leave because we are scared to give up our comforts and the way fake paintings look over the scars of the walls. I thought I could share this with you. You are probably used to my political columns, but this is more political than what you think...
A quick fix denied
by: Meghan Molenda - printed on 04-24-2002
Last Thursday the U.S. Senate voted against opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to drilling for oil and gas. It was a victory for both Democratic Senators and Americans Environmentalists, but for President Bush and the Oil lobbyists the defeat was a blow to their hopes of including this proposal in future energy legislation.
Forty-two years ago, President Dwight Eisenhower established the 1.
Dear Chairman Arafat and Prime Minister Barak,
by: Hank Smith - printed on 11-03-2000
122 people dead…over 2,000 injured…three weeks. By the time achieve any peace whatsoever is robbing people of their hope. What is the point of haggling over minute details of resolutions that will never lead to permanent peace when, in the meantime, people are dying? You are, as U.S. Ambassador Martin Indyk put it, “condemned to live together.” Instead, you are dying together.
There are clear differences, even uninfringeable differences, between your two cultures.