Parton sends books to Rotherham

A reading scheme developed by the US country singer Dolly Parton is a proving a big hit in the UK

Elizabeth Smith was in hospital having had her first child when she learned about the free books. The nurses gave her the form as part of an information pack and six weeks later a book – a Peter Rabbit story – addressed to her son, Aaron, slipped through the letterbox of her Rotherham home. The following month, another book arrived for Aaron and another the next month, until the little boy became used to the sight of the postman delivering a fresh title every month.

"He calls it 'Aaron post' and he knows the books are for him," says his mother. "When the postman comes Aaron runs to check, and if there is a book he wants me to open it straight away. The books have been a wonderful way to bond, and reading the stories before bedtime has become part of his routine." Aaron is now 22 months and he will go on receiving a new book a month until his fifth birthday. He is one of 13,000 children in Rotherham, aged under five, who are sent a book every month because of a woman the children refer to as 'The Book Lady', but who is better known as Dolly Parton.

Parton is one of the all-time great country singer–songwriters, but for the past 15 years she has also been spearheading a campaign to get children reading. Her Imagination Library started in her home town of Sevier County in Tennessee where she had grown up in a two-room wooden shack with her 11 siblings. When I met Parton in Dollywood, the theme park she co-owns in eastern Tennessee, she explained why she started the library. "Many of my own relatives didn't get a chance to go to school or get an education," she told me, "and my dad didn't learn to read and write because he was born into a very large family and they had to go out and work in the fields to make money. My dad felt crippled by that – so I thought this book scheme would be a wonderful tribute to him."

Parents at the Coleridge children’s centre in Rotherham said the Imagination Library scheme had inspired them to read more, as well as enthusing their children. Photograph:

From those modest beginnings the Imagination Library has grown. "In 1999, the library was mailing books to 2,300 children every month", says David Dotson, president of the Dollywood Foundation, which looks after the administration of the scheme. "Today, it is mailing to just under 700,000 children every month in the US, Canada and, since 2008, Britain. The scheme was launched with a visit by Parton to Rotherham in December 2007."

I met some of those children, along with their mothers, at the Coleridge children's centre, which offers family learning programmes that look at the benefit of sharing books and the importance of reading out loud to children. One woman told me that reading to her baby had inspired her to start reading more herself, to set a good example; while an Asian woman said that the books were helping illiterate parents to learn to read English – the children were reading to their parents."Rotherham borough council was the first to sign up and we started registering children at the start of 2008", explains Alison Lilburn, project manager for the scheme in the town, "and since then we have registered over 18,000 children and we are sending out books to just over 13,000 children each month – which is 85% of the population under five years old."

Rotherham's council leader, Roger Stone, heard about the Imagination Library while on a visit to the US. Convinced the book scheme could raise literacy standards in Rotherham, he set about trying to bring it to the UK. Following Rotherham's lead, Sheffield, Luton, Sheerness, Nottingham, Wigan and two communities in London have joined in, and recently the Scottish Book Trust announced that it would be adopting the scheme for "looked after" children across the whole of Scotland, funded by the Scottish government.

There are, of course, other book schemes operating in Britain – Bookstart, for example, offers free books to children before they start school and the NationalLiteracy Trust has many reading schemes. "The Imagination Library complements other book-gifting programmes", says Natalie Turnbull, the UK director of the scheme, "simply by the volume of the books we send – one a month – and also the fact that the books are being delivered by post to the home, so there is a guarantee that the book is going to reach that child."

The fact that the scheme carries Parton's name has led some to think that Parton herself funds the library; in fact, while her Dollywood Foundation pays for all the administration costs in maintaining the database, it does not pay for the actual books. It is, however, able to ensure that the books are bought at a hugely discounted rate: Penguin, which supplies all the books, sells them to the scheme for an average price of £2, which is up to a quarter of their usual cost.

In Rotherham the cost of the scheme is met through donations from the Chamber of Commerce, the NHS and, this year, the local authority. In Luton, the scheme is being paid for by the Wates group and it is anticipated that around 24,000 books will be sent out each year.

While the scheme is undoubtedly laudable, is there any need to spend money giving families free books when they can easily visit their local library? "Not everybody is that way inclined", says Lilburn. "The difference with this scheme is that the book is addressed to the child and, based on all the parental feedback we get, the children are really excited when that book comes through the door."

Rotherham is now trying to measure the impact of the Imagination Library. "Because we have other initiatives to assist reading, it isn't easy to measure how much the Imagination Library has helped," says Lilburn. "But we do know that year on year Rotherham has improved in terms of its education, language and literacy development and we are now the same level nationally, when in previous years we have been way below the national average."

By the time children start school they are coming to the end of their eligibility for the Imagination Library, but schools in Rotherham are, Lilburn says, increasingly recognising the part that the book-gifting scheme can play in developing reading. "What we are getting back from teachers is that where they use Imagination Library books, the response from children is really positive," she says. "There is a commonality among kids because they know each other has had the book, and they are familiar with the books."

Aaron has not yet started school, but he has already started putting sentences together from books he has read with his mother. She believes the Imagination Library should be expanded so that every child has the opportunity that her son has. "I don't think it is just schools' job to encourage reading," she says. "What is so great about the Imagination Library is that it is not means-tested. When things are means-tested it means that there can be a stigma to being part of the scheme, but with the Imagination Library every child has the opportunity to allow their imagination to grow."

Sources:

Dolly foundation : from wikipedia

Country Music Legend Dolly Parton’s New Role: ‘Book Lady’

"D. B. Tuber" robs an armored car guard at the Bank of America in Monroe on September 30, 2008.

On September 30, 2008, in one of the more unique bank robberies in Washington state history -- one that makes the national news -- an armored car guard is robbed outside of a Bank of America branch in Monroe (Snohomish County).  The robber posts a Craigslist ad several days before the robbery, seeking workers for a phony job in Monroe; the workers are instructed to wear the same work outfit. Those answering the ad receive emailed instructions telling them to meet near the bank at 11 a.m. on September 30, and about a dozen men show up at the prearranged hour. At the same time the robber, similarly attired as his decoys, assaults the armored car guard outside of the bank and flees with $400,000. The robber escapes by floating away in a yellow innertube on nearby Woods Creek, earning him the nickname "D. B. Tuber." A 28-year-old man, Anthony Curcio, is later convicted of the crime.

The ad went up on Craigslist late in September: "Laborers with landscaping experience wanted for a job in Monroe." Those who answered got an email back telling them to meet at 11 a.m. on September 30 in Monroe at two different spots -- an Albertson's parking lot and Eagle Park -- located near the intersection of Old Owen Road and Highway 2, and both right by a Bank of America branch. The ad also instructed the workers to wear safety glasses or equivalent eye protection, ventilator mask, yellow safety vest, and a long-sleeved shirt; follow-up emails instructed them to wear a blue shirt if possible, and to wait for the project manager once they arrived.  About a dozen men arrived at the two locations at the appointed hour and waited patiently outside in the mild morning for a job supervisor who never showed up. 

By 11:15, the men were beginning to realize they'd been scammed. Then they found out how badly.  While they were waiting for their ghost employer, another man nearby, similarly clad as his decoys in a mask and long-sleeved shirt, watched as an armored car guard, carrying canvas bags filled with cash, walked out of the bank and up to his armored vehicle parked nearby. At about 11:04 a.m. the robber raced up to the guard, sprayed him in the face with pepper spray, and snatched a bag of money from the guard.  He then turned and raced 100 yards across Old Owen Road and through some underbrush to Woods Creek, shedding his accessories as he ran. Two men who witnessed the robbery tried to chase the yegg down, but he leapt into the creek and vanished.

Floating to a Fleeting Freedom

There were conflicting reports as to just how the crook got away. People couldn’t really believe that he used an innertube (one witness said he swam away), but it was true. The thief hopped aboard a yellow innertube that he had stashed in the creek and floated to his escape; the innertube was later found about 200 yards away. The sheer audacity of the heist and subsequent escape quickly earned the robber the moniker "D. B. Tuber" in a nod to the infamous 1971 case involving the airplane-hijacking, parachute-escaping robber D. B. Cooper.

The Seattle P-I reported that a similar ploy with look-alike decoys was used in a 1999 movie, The Thomas Crown Affair, in which an art thief escapes with a masterpiece from a museum while security guards are distracted by several nearby look-alikes hired by the crook. Perhaps this gave the Tubed One the idea for the extras in the Monroe robbery, though the police responding to the real-life crime were not fooled by the decoys. But the Craigslist ad was an added touch, and the innertube getaway was all original; Seattle FBI spokeswoman Roberta Burroughs told The Herald (Everett) that she had never heard of a similar tactic in 15 years of investigating bank holdups.

The amount of money taken was initially not disclosed, but was later learned to be about $400,000. The armored-car guard was treated at the scene for exposure to pepper spray and released. The national media quickly picked up the story, giving the city of Monroe its 15 minutes of fame in the early autumn of 2008. But although the crime had been well planned, the felonious floater had left a clue or two, and thanks to a tip from a citizen and a DNA sample from the mask dropped by the robber as he fled, police arrested Anthony Curcio, 28, of Lake Stevens (Snohomish County) on November 3, 2008. In July 2009, Curcio was sentenced to six years in federal prison for the crime.

Curcio was released in 2013 and moved to Woodinville in King County. In 2014, he was reported to be living quietly as a stay-at-home father to his two children. In an interview with The Seattle Times that September, Curcio acknowledged his mistakes and said that since his release he had spoken at area schools in Washington and Oregon on the dangers of drug addiction, which he said led him into a spiral that eventually culminated in the robbery.

Sources:

Bankrobber recruited Craigslist decoys to confuse police

Wash. Man Pulls Off Robbery Using Craigslist, Pepper Spray

The Second San Fernando Massacre

Narco gangster reveals the underworld
Cartels have taken cruelty up a notch, says one drug trafficker: kidnapping bus passengers for gladiatorlike fights to the death

On Mexican Federal Highway 101 bus-loads of Mexican citizens and tourists alike were vanishing without a trace. No ransom demands or otherwise were ever made and the authorities were beginning to doubt their original theory of kidnappings. Then they discovered a truth far more grisly and even more surreal than simple kidnappings. Welcome to San Fernando...

San Fernando, a town of 57,000 people and roughly 100 miles from the US border, is no stranger to mass killings and massacres. Only one year before in 2010 the city was famous for another massacre wherein the mass murder of 72 undocumented immigrants took place, this was the first San Fernando Massacre. The Mexican state of Tamaulipas was at the time home to the Los Zetas drug cartel whose headquarters was believed to be in the small village of El Huizachal on the outskirts of San Fernando. It was this group that was responsible for both San Fernando Massacres.

In the first massacre, the killings were the result of a conflict between the immigrants and the cartel, the cartel had bigger guns and won, simple as that. However, in the second San Fernando massacre the Los Zetas were being truly creative in their efforts to resolve an imposing threat from neighbouring drug clans.

The bus loads of people were being abducted for the very specific purpose of training them as assassins. Once abducted the women would be sequestered to make-shift barracks where they would be repeatedly raped for the pleasure of the Los Zetas soldiers. This would happen day in and day out until they had eventually gone insane, or the cartel decided that they were for some other reason no longer usable at which point they would be executed.
The men, on the other hand, were chained in a large garage structure that provided little shelter from the elements. Each day they would be put into pairs and given ordinary tools such as hammers, sickles, or even regular wood saws. These tools were meant as weapons for the male captives to use when led into a pit and forced to fight to the death (like the gladiators of ancient Rome). After several rounds of one-on-one gladiator battles to the death, the survivors would be rewarded with their first meal and informed of their new purpose in life as assassins for the Los Zetas drug cartel.

This practice was being a carried out in San Fernando for the better part of six months with little intervention from the authorities. The townspeople knew what was happening, but fearing for their lives they never spoke out against the cartel, even when they’re own family members were amongst the “new recruits”. 

In a 2012 article in the El Universal, several anonymous residents gave testimony of the events in Tamaulipas. One elderly woman stated: "We could not do anything. We were fighting for our lives and watched helplessly as they were being taken. The abduction of the buses were in full daylight, even outside the bus station. But we could not say anything, we remained silent. We have family, we have children and we cannot leave here." More chilling are the words of her granddaughter: “My mom always reminds us before we leave: if they come for you don’t be trapped alive. So at least we'll have your body and know where you are and lay our flowers.”

Despite the shroud of silence, there are only so many people, especially tourists that can go missing in a six month period before the authorities take notice. In august of 2011 six hundred and fifty Mexican soldiers flooded the streets of San Fernando forcibly removing the local police force and beginning a massive hunt for the Los Zetas base. What they found during their search were the unmarked graves of 193 female victims of rape, torture, and murder, and the male victims forced to fight as gladiators.

The known members of the Los Zetas drug cartel involved in the massacre were arrested in short time, but it is likely that many were never found. There were far more deaths than initially thought, when Édgar Huerta Montiel, a high-ranking boss in Los Zetas was interrogated he told Mexican federal authorities that there were approximately six hundred victims, roughly one hundred per month. Today Mexican Federal Highway 101 is known as 'The Highway of Death', although it is now relatively safe, it was in 2011 described as "burned vehicles, bullet-shot trucks on the side of the road, and dead bodies, often decapitated, that the cartels would leave behind."

References:

Mexican crook: Gangsters arrange fights to death for entertainment

The 'Second Massacre of San Fernando' (2011)