And The Response Is... (Fourth Response)

     A big focus that Mr. Miller wanted my class and I to do was look at the news everyday. Journalism is made up of news things along with other things, but news is the majority of what journalism covers. Every week, we take those infamous current events quizzes (and one-question quizzes depending on if we finished a lecture). There are ten questions and all you have to do is get five correct answers to get the "A." Simple, right? Not so much. You really do have to look up the local, national, and worldwide news on the web, because all of this news is included.

    This six weeks I was most interested in probably three major events that happened: the Bradley Manning trial, the cruel civil war in Syria, and most recently the attack in Nairobi, Kenya at the Westgate Mall.

     The Manning trial is about an American spy who fled the country and went to Russia, giving the Russian government all of the information about the American government. He is currently in Russia, earning citizenship there. Manning would like to come back to America, but the problem is he does not know what reaction and how severe the punishments would be if he returned.

     The civil war in Syria is like deja vu for the United States again. Our troops just came back from Iraq and now just a few months later we want to send them back to Syria and fight against them? This is not the answer. Obama spoke a few weeks ago and said that President Putin of Russia, which is allies with Syria, has developed a plan where Syria will give up their chemical weapons and peacefully hand them over without conflict. All I know is this; chemical weapons are unacceptable. They should be extinct and be 1000% illegal to use. Using gas to kill people was bad enough during the Holocaust, and now we are going to let Syria use them? I agree with Obama. We have to do something, but military combat and violence is not the answer.

     What many people are calling a "terrorist attack" in Kenya has now just recently ended, as there are a confirmed 67 deaths and over 70 people still missing in the Westgate Mall shooting. This is a tragedy. There is not much we can do about it now. Believe me, security levels have greatly improved around the world since al-Queda attacked the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001. But the fact of the matter is that there is just true evil in this world. Religious beliefs and traditional customs are not an acceptable human behavior in this world. People are shooting people just to start violence. It's terrible, but there's not much we can do about it except trying to stop it as best as we can.