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?

Finding the Columbia River

by: Dr. Frank Fromherz - printed on 01-23-2002

"I've known rivers, ancient, dusky rivers, my soul has grown deep like the rivers." The great Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes wrote these lines while aboard a train. He was on his way to Mexico to visit his dad. The poet, who had just finished high school, "grew deep like the rivers" as he crossed the Mississippi, and thought about a people whose memories stretched across the Nile, the Congo, and the Euphrates.

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Following the sunset: A call to travel

by: Andrew Noethe - printed on 03-27-2002

I find myself living in a world of sunsets. Each day ends under the long shadows of an Indian sun that steadily stretches past majestic forts, palaces of former maharajas, ancient temples, and the sleepy desert hills of Western India. As the distant red sun falls behind the horizon, life comes to a halt, thus granting me a few precious moments to appreciate my life in India and the life I have left behind.

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El Salvador: A Country of Beauty

by: Emilio Lopez - printed on 11-15-2000

Lying in the southwest corner of Central American, bordering Guatemala and Honduras, rests a country not commonly know by many people. It is a small hidden paradise about less than half the size of the State of Oregon. With a population of about 7 million people, El Salvador is the smallest and second most populated country in Central America.

Unfortunately, many of the few things people have ever heard about this country are related to war.

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Illness, coverup at Umatilla Chapter one of five: setting the stage-- workers fall ill and questions arise.

by: Jim McCandlish, J.D. - printed on 11-03-2000

Congratulations. You live 175 miles west of where 12% of our nation’s stockpile of chemical weaponry is stored at the Umatilla Chemical Depot near Hermiston in northeastern Oregon.

A deadly nerve gas called "sarin" (injuring 5500 and killing 12 in the 1995 Tokyo subway attack) and a blister agent called "mustard" (popularized by the Germans in WW I) are stored in an area known as "K Block"--89 earth-bermed igloos (also called "bunkers") in a geometric configuration worthy of thegarden at Versailles.

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Remembering time for Ramadan

by: Melody Sheybani - printed on 11-28-2001

Just a week ago, I was in one of my late afternoon classes when one of my class-mates made a comment about the accuracy and the completeness of my religion. This made me feel sad inside about the lack of knowledge we have here on our campus about other religions and the fact that we sometimes make comments and become judgmental toward things without knowing the actual reasons behind some rituals and practices.

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Coal plant threatens lives in Thailand

by: Meghan Molenda - printed on 04-10-2002

Progression and invention are two of those highly valued American ideas that permeate our culture, right up there with wealth and power. We are always looking for better ways of doing whatever it is that we are doing, and therefore we are suckers for anything new because "new and improved" signals progression, which is valued. With this in mind, it would seem that our old methods of doing things would become outdated and not even put into question, much less practice.

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