1 US auto sales improve (Gulf News) US factory
activity expanded at a healthy pace in June as new orders, output and exports
rose, new industry data showed, providing another sign that US economic growth
was regaining its footing after weakness early this year.
Automakers reported higher June sales amid strong
demand for pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles, but on an annualised
basis, the June industry selling rate came in at 16.66 million units, well
below May’s sales pace of 17.45 million.
Ford Motor Co and Fiat Chrysler reported June sales
gains of 6.4 per cent and 6.5 per cent, but General Motors, Toyota Motor Corp
and Volkswagen all sold fewer vehicles. Some analysts say that industry sales
may have peaked in 2015 at 17.45 million units, but GM chief economist Mustafa
Mohatarem still held out hope for another record year.
“Positive economic indicators like historically low
interest rates, stable fuel prices, rising wages and near-full employment
provide the environment for strong auto sales to continue in the second half of
the year,” Mohatarem said in a statement.
2 Berlin school turns teaching upside down (Philip
Oltermann in The Guardian) Anton Oberländer is a persuasive speaker. Last year,
when he and a group of friends were short of cash for a camping trip to
Cornwall, he managed to talk Germany’s national rail operator into handing them
some free tickets. So impressed was the management with his chutzpah that they
invited him back to give a motivational speech to 200 of their employees.
Anton, it should be pointed out, is 14 years old. The
Berlin teenager’s self-confidence is largely the product of a unique
educational institution that has turned the conventions of traditional teaching
radically upside down. At Oberländer’s school, there are no grades until
students turn 15, no timetables and no lecture-style instructions. The pupils
decide which subjects they want to study for each lesson and when they want to
take an exam.
The school’s syllabus reads like any helicopter
parent’s nightmare. Set subjects are limited to math, German, English and
social studies, supplemented by more abstract courses such as “responsibility”
and “challenge”. For challenge, students aged 12 to 14 are given €150 (£115)
and sent on an adventure that they have to plan entirely by themselves. Some go
kayaking; others work on a farm. Anton went trekking along England’s south
coast.
The philosophy behind these innovations is simple:
as the requirements of the labour market are changing, and smartphones and the
internet are transforming the ways in which young people process information,
the school’s headteacher, Margret Rasfeld, argues, the most important skill a school
can pass down to its students is the ability to motivate themselves.
The Evangelical School Berlin Centre (ESBC) is
trying to do nothing less than “reinvent what a school is”, she says. “The
mission of a progressive school should be to prepare young people to cope with
change, or better still, to make them look forward to change. In the 21st
century, schools should see it as their job to develop strong personalities.”
Oberländer, who had never been away from home for
three weeks until he embarked on his challenge in Cornwall, said he learned
more English on his trip than he had in several years of learning the language
at school. Germany’s federalised education structure, in which each of the 16
states plans its own education system, has traditionally allowed “free
learning” models to flourish.
3 Nobel winner, holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel no
more (San Francisco Chronicle) Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, the Romanian-born
Holocaust survivor whose classic "Night" became a landmark testament
to the Nazis' crimes and launched Wiesel's long career as one of the world's
foremost witnesses and humanitarians, has died at age 87.
The short, sad-eyed Wiesel, his face an ongoing
reminder of one man's endurance of a shattering past, summed up his mission in
1986 when accepting the Nobel Peace Prize: "Whenever and wherever human
beings endure suffering and humiliation, take sides. Neutrality helps the
oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the
tormented."
Wiesel's wife, Marion, described her husband as
"a fighter". "He fought for the memory of the six million Jews
who perished in the Holocaust, and he fought for Israel," she said.
"He waged countless battles for innocent victims regardless of ethnicity
or creed."
"'Night' is the most devastating account of the
Holocaust that I have ever read," wrote Ruth Franklin, a literary critic
and author of "A Thousand Darknesses," a study of Holocaust
literature that was published in 2010.
"There are no epiphanies in 'Night. There is no
extraneous detail, no analysis, no speculation. There is only a story:
Eliezer's account of what happened, spoken in his voice." In one
especially haunting passage, Wiesel sums up his feelings upon arrival in
Auschwitz:
"Never shall I forget that night, the first
night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed
and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget
the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke
beneath a silent blue sky. ... Never shall I forget these things, even if I am
condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."
His more than 40 books overall of fiction and
nonfiction, emerged from the helplessness of a teenager deported from Hungary,
which had annexed his native Romanian town of Sighet, to Auschwitz. Tattooed
with the number A-7713, he was freed in 1945 — but only after his mother,
father and one sister had all died in Nazi camps. Two other sisters survived.
Wiesel became a US citizen in 1963. Six years later,
he married Marion Rose, a fellow Holocaust survivor who translated some of his
books into English. They had a son, Shlomo.
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