Article Last Updated: Friday, May 16, 2003 - 9:02:24 AM PST
Red Bluff Daily News
By CHERYL BRINKLEY-DN Staff Writer
Fri May 16 09:05:05 2003 -- Many small towns have a Rotary club, but Red Bluff has two.
Sunrise Rotary meets at 7 a.m. every Friday at the Red Rock Cafe, while Red Bluff Rotary meets at noon on Tuesdays at the Elks Lodge.
As one of the oldest international service organizations, Rotary was started in 1905 in Chicago by a man named Paul Harris.
He began Rotary for "humanitarian service and peace in the world" by business and professional persons. The Rotary motto is: "He profits most who serves most."
Cathy Patterson of Northwest Training Institute is the president, by default, of Sunrise Rotary and will continue in the position for the following year.
Don Jones of Morgan Stanley is the president of Red Bluff Rotary.
Red Bluff Rotary was established May 13, 1924. It currently has 94 members. Red Bluff Rotary helped establish the morning club, which at this time has 17 members.
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"When you are a Rotarian, you belong to all clubs worldwide," Patterson said. "The organization really pushes for 100 percent attendance and all members to be involved."
As many organizations that began in the early 1900s, Rotary has only allowed women to be members since 1989.
As an international service organization, Rotary members are involved in good causes - worldwide and local.
Local youth benefit with scholarships to assist with furthering their education. This year, the Sunrise Rotary will hand out five $500 scholarships, while Red Bluff Rotary will present 14 graduating teens with $1,000 scholarships. Funding for the scholarships comes from fund-raisers such as the February crab feed, and this year for the first time, a soup and salad event that is coming up.
"We are working with a potter who is making bowls that can be taken home as souvenirs," Patterson said. "A family of four can get a complete set."
Red Bluff Rotary holds internal fund-raisers as well as the Halloween party at the community center, and the beer booths at the Red Bluff Round-Up Rodeo.
"What most people don't know is that Red Bluff Rotary is the owner of the Cone and Kimball Plaza," Jones said. "We got tired of looking at that fence and got together with the Historic Red Bluff Association to see what we could do. We collect and distribute the money collected in conjunction with HRBA. They have been a huge help in putting things together for reconstruction."
A major project for Rotary International is the eradication of polio worldwide in conjunction with the World Health Organization.
"Polio has been eradicated in approximately 98 percent of the world," Jones said. "Reaching the more remote areas of the world is very expensive. Red Bluff has already raised more than $9,000 specifically for this purpose."
The organization now has a three-year program to finish the eradication of polio.
Sunrise Rotary is involved with a literacy program each year.
"Last year, we made sure every third-grader had a personal dictionary," Patterson said.
Proceeds from this year's Roving Jail during Round-Up Week went to the wheelchair foundation "to make sure that all those who had a need could receive a wheelchair."
They sponsor a youth service club at Red Bluff Union High School called Interact, and they sponsor foreign exchange students. During an international project last year, Sunrise Rotary drilled a well in Venezuela for a community that had no water.
They are also involved with a group called Roto-plast. Members of Rotary who are plastic surgeons go into Third World countries and perform plastic surgery, especially facial disfigurements.
Two leadership-type camps are held for youth. They are called Camp Venture and Camp Royale.
Red Bluff Rotary works with the Tehama County Special Olympics with funding and manpower.
"We served almost 500 athletes and their helpers with lunch this year," Jones said.
The club also provides manpower for the Community Career Day and help judge at the annual 4-H Field Day, as well as sponsoring one of Red Bluff's Boy Scout troops.
Another source of funding for scholarships for the club is the annual Chili Cook-off where they sell tasting kits for the People's Choice chili contest. The advertising signs at the Pauline Davis Pavilion at the Tehama District Fairground, in conjunction with the Tehama County Fair Board, are sold by Rotary and they collect the money.
"Ninety percent of the proceeds go into a Pauline Davis Pavilion improvement fund," Jones said.
Red Bluff Rotary members sponsor foreign exchange students from UC Davis for four days each year. The students stay with Rotarian families and are shown rural living.
"We take them on trips to Mt. Lassen, for rides on the river in the Sheriff's boats, a tour a Bell Carter Olives and Pactiv, as well as showing them the different types of agriculture we have in Tehama County," Jones said.
Barbecues are held and there is a lot of community involvement, Jones added.
Susan Chan knows how a language barrier can affect one’s station in life.
Her late father, who was raised in China and brought his family to the United States in 1964, held two master’s degrees and worked as a senior scientist for a major pharmaceutical firm.
But he couldn’t bust through the corporate “glass ceiling.”
“He would come home pretty frustrated at times about how he felt he was being overlooked,” Chan said. “Younger and younger people were supervising him, and that was hard to take. Language was definitely an obstacle.”
Remembering her parents’ struggles with English, Chan began volunteering in the English as a second language program at the District 191 School for Adults.
This spring her efforts were rewarded with a 2003 Volunteer Leadership Award from the Minnesota Literacy Council. Chan is one of five Minnesotans to earn the award and one of four in the last decade from the District 191 School for Adults.
One day a week she can be found helping teacher Dorothy Stockwell with her class of fifth-level advanced English-language students.
“I love it,” said Chan, who started volunteering three years ago at the Adult Basic Education site in Savage and now is at Diamondhead Education Center in Burnsville. “I feel like I’m making a difference. As trite as that sounds, it’s true.”
Born in Taiwan
Chan was born in Taiwan in 1959 after her parents had fled China fearing persecution by the communist government.
“When my younger brothers or I misbehaved or didn’t eat our dinner, our parents said, ‘We’ll send you back to China. Then you’ll know what hardship really means,’” Chan said. “We can laugh about it now.”
The family settled in New Jersey. Chan grew up speaking and learning English, as did her two brothers, who today have little mastery of Chinese.
Their parents had a tougher time.
“I do remember having to help my parents write letters and go over certain correspondence,” Chan said. “It wasn’t a big deal for me, but looking back on it I realize it was difficult for them.”
She and her husband, William, moved from New York to Burnsville in 1990. William is part-owner of Aerosin Technologies, a Burnsville company that creates software for pilot training.
Susan began volunteering at Hidden Valley Elementary School in Savage, which the couple’s daughter, Kelley, attended.
Chan worked with English-language learners, the gifted and talented program and the Bucket Brigade. She found fewer school volunteer opportunities when Kelly went to junior high and took a part-time job. Unsatisfied with that, she found the School for Adults.
“I saw how my parents struggled,” Chan said. “I felt that I could really relate. I remember asking myself, what could I do to make a difference?”
She started volunteering with beginning ESL students at in Savage.
“It was a fun way for me to use my Chinese, because some of the students there spoke Chinese,” said Chan, whose family moved to Apple Valley last year. “Out of my brothers and I, I’m the only one who’s retained much Chinese, much to my parents’ chagrin.”
At Diamondhead, she works with the more advanced students in the five-level ESL program.
“I’ve never been a teacher,” Chan said. But she is a tutor and classroom assistant whose duties include helping small groups of students learn to read, write and speak.
“Susan’s warm, friendly personality and her obvious interest in the students makes her most welcome in the classroom setting by both instructor and the students,” wrote School for Adults volunteer coordinator Sharon Heikkila, who nominated Chan for the Literacy Council award. “Although not trained as a teacher, she seems to be a natural, picking up on individual needs, and finding ways to help students in a clear, supportive manner.”
A highlight of Chan’s volunteer service was her work last year with a study group of advanced students, women who needed more help with life and cultural skills before leaping into a job or post-secondary education.
The students’ countries of origin included France, the Czech Republic, Mexico, Russia, South Korea, Venezuela and Cameroon.
“When it comes down to it, we were all just people and wanted to get to know each other better,” said Chan, who volunteers with Prince of Peace Lutheran Church and Community Action Council in addition to helping ESL students.
“It’s great to see them progress, but it’s sad to say goodbye,” she said. “Even though we know it’s for the best that they move on.”
May 16, 2003
The Transportation Security Administration claims all of its 55,600 screeners have been checked out properly. (AP)
In early May, the government announced plans to eliminate 3,000 more airport screening jobs by the end of September.
TSA head James Loy (AP)
(CBS) The push to put federal screeners at airport gates and metal detectors led to botched background checks on some workers who were then given security passes, a newspaper reported Friday.
Among the foul-ups were questionnaires that were lost and fingerprints that were never checked against a national crime database.
Because of the problems, several major airports plan to recheck the screeners the Los Angeles Times reports. New York City area airports began that process last month, and LAX plans to start soon.
The problems came to light after several screeners were fired for having criminal records. The Transportation Security Administration said it had conducted sufficient checks on all of its 55,600 screeners. But a congressional office told the Times that thousands of workers had not been vetted.
"The legal mandate required them to hire a full complement of screeners, and they couldn't meet the deadline and also run with background checks," the official told The Times.
The background checks are one of several growing pains now afflicting the agency created in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks
In early May, the government announced plans to eliminate 3,000 more airport screening jobs by the end of September. The cuts, coupled with 3,000 others announced in March, amount to about 11 percent of the 55,600 screeners employed. The moves will save the TSA an estimated $280 million, director James Loy said.
The job cuts address critics in Congress, mainly Republicans, who believe the TSA grew too large too fast. To get around a congressionally mandated cap of 45,000 full-time screeners the TSA hired 9,000 "temporary" workers, most of whom were given five-year contracts.
Airline security advocate Paul Hudson said the job cuts would compromise airport security unless the TSA improves other parts of the system. For example, he said, buying more van-sized bomb-detection machines would mean fewer screeners would be needed to operate the labor-intensive wands that detect traces of explosives.
"These labor cutbacks — unless they're coupled with some other measures to compensate to improve the system further — they will result in an overall reduction in security," said Hudson, executive director of the Aviation Consumer Action Project.
TSA uses a four-part process to verify that its employees are not security risks. The third step in the process is a background probe conducted by a private firm, ChoicePoint.
A federal office then double checks the information that applicants gave ChoicePoint.
A TSA spokesman tells the Times the fourth step is the only part that is not yet complete.
However, some screeners tell the Times that ChoicePoint did not contact them until they had worked at airports for months. Some workers had to re-submit prints because, they say they were told, they had been lost.
ChoicePoint last year settled a lawsuit brought by the NAACP over the actions of a subsidiary, Database Technologies, which was accused of wrongly purging thousands of voters from the rolls in Florida ahead of the tight 200 presidential election. ChoicePoint acquired Database Technologies after the initial list of purged voters was prepared.
ChoicePoint currently is contracted to provide information on residents of 10 Latin American countries to the federal government.
The company says it buys the files from subcontractors in Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua. But it refuses to name the sellers or say where those parties obtained the data.
Privacy experts in Latin America question whether the sales of national citizen registries have been legal. They say government data are often sold clandestinely by individual government employees.
Russia and Venezuela share common positions on key international issues, Russian foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said in the wake of the talks with his Venezuelan counterpart, Roy Chaderton.
"Russia and Venezuela are closely cooperating on the international arena in dealing with all the key issues, our positions coincide totally or partially," Ivanov emphasized.
Chaderton, too, confirmed his Russian counterpart's statement. "I try to recall at least one issue on which we do not see eye to eye, but I fail," he admitted.
According to Ivanov, the sides discussed the Iraq and Middle East situation as seen through the prism of a stronger UN role, stressing the importance of international problems' settlement on the basis of due respect for international law.
According to the minister, Moscow is interested in the enhancement of economic cooperation with Venezuela. "In this connection, we attach additional importance to the upcoming September sitting of the Enlarged Commission for Trade and Economic Issues," Ivanov said.
Chaderton, in turn, told the media people that Caracas is looking forward to the Venezuelan energy minister's visit to Moscow slated for June. "We have a scope of common goals and interests with Russia in this sphere," he stressed. Venezuela's vice president is also due to visit Moscow in September.
Chaderton emphasized that Moscow and Caracas "have every reason to look into the future considering the commonality of interests." "This is my third visit to Russia, and I would like to plan the fourth, the fifth and even the sixth today," Chaderton joked.
(2003 capital flows still well below average for previous decade, IIF says)
By Bruce Odessey
Washington File Staff Writer
15 May 2003
Washington - A group representing hundreds of private banks and other financial institutions forecasts that net investment flows to developing countries will rise in 2003 but remain at a historically low level.
At a May 15 New York press conference that was telecast, the Institute of International Finance (IIF) issued a report forecasting that private capital flows to emerging markets, dominated by direct foreign investment, would increase to about $139,000 million in 2003 from about $110,000 million in 2002, well below the annual average $186,000 million of the past 10 years.
Charles Dallara, IIF managing director, said the level of private capital flows to developing countries was last this low during the 1980s debt crisis.
"This situation remains quite weak," Dallara said. "The level of flows is nothing to be overly confident about."
He offered a few reasons for why investment flows have not picked up significantly since the Asian crisis in the late 1990s: lack of corporate profitability in wealthier countries that is hindering domestic and foreign investments, a slowdown in privatization by developing countries, and questions about whether emerging markets, especially Argentina, would respect rule of law and sanctity of contracts.
At the same press conference William Rhodes, senior vice chairman of Citigroup, expressed concern about a surge of international demand for emerging market sovereign bonds. He warned that investors should look not only at high interest rates but also at economic policies and performance in countries issuing the bonds.
"We have to be careful that we don't go chasing yields again, as we have done several times in the past, at the risk of not exercising prudent credit judgment," Rhodes said.
He said that part of the higher demand could be attributed to "solid policy performance" in Mexico and Brazil.
The IIF projects "somewhat" improved economic prospects for the United States in the second half of 2003 as a result of the brevity of the Iraq war and the fall in oil prices although it cautions that the level of U.S. corporate investment is expected to remain "tepid." It says the outlook for the European Union (EU) and Japan remains weak.
Dallara said that Argentina's new leaders would have to achieve comprehensive restructuring of the country's banking system in order to regain access to global capital markets. Rhodes said Argentina would have to reaffirm its commitment to private contracts and improve its fiscal policy, especially in making provincial governments more responsible for their financial obligations.
IIF forecasts net capital flows to Latin America reaching about $34,000 million in 2003, up from $14,000 million in 2002, reflecting an expectation of recovery for nearly all big economies there except Venezuela.
It forecasts net capital flows in 2003 to Europe's emerging markets to stay at about the $31,000 million 2002 level, up from $14,000 million in 2001.
In Iraq, Dallara said, the highest financial priorities are stabilizing the currency and restructuring the banking system.