CNN Student News - Oct 10, 2011

It's Columbus Day, and CNN Student News commemorates the occasion by exploring the history of this holiday. We also consider how the U.S. economy might impact next year's presidential election. We offer some students' thoughts on how to stop bullying. And we meet a runner whose personal goal is more than 200,000 miles away.

Transcription downloadable here.

Daughter of ‘Dirty War,’ Raised by Man Who Killed Her Parents

Victoria Montenegro was abducted as a newborn by a military colonel. She testified last spring in the trial over baby thefts. This is a report taken from The New York Times on October 8, 2011 by Alexei Barrionuevo. The article makes reference to the Oscar-winning Argentine film "The Official Story," which we post after the article with subtitles in English (as released in the USA in 2004)

BUENOS AIRES — Victoria Montenegro recalls a childhood filled with chilling dinnertime discussions. Lt. Col. Hernán Tetzlaff, the head of the family, would recount military operations he had taken part in where “subversives” had been tortured or killed. The discussions often ended with his “slamming his gun on the table,” she said.

It took an incessant search by a human rights group, a DNA match and almost a decade of overcoming denial for Ms. Montenegro, 35, to realize that Colonel Tetzlaff was, in fact, not her father — nor the hero he portrayed himself to be.

Instead, he was the man responsible for murdering her real parents and illegally taking her as his own child, she said.

He confessed to her what he had done in 2000, Ms. Montenegro said. But it was not until she testified at a trial here last spring that she finally came to grips with her past, shedding once and for all the name that Colonel Tetzlaff and his wife had given her — María Sol — after falsifying her birth records.

The trial, in the final phase of hearing testimony, could prove for the first time that the nation’s top military leaders engaged in a systematic plan to steal babies from perceived enemies of the government.

Jorge Rafael Videla, who led the military during Argentina’s dictatorship, stands accused of leading the effort to take babies from mothers in clandestine detention centers and give them to military or security officials, or even to third parties, on the condition that the new parents hide the true identities. Mr. Videla is one of 11 officials on trial for 35 acts of illegal appropriation of minors.

The trial is also revealing the complicity of civilians, including judges and officials of the Roman Catholic Church.

The abduction of an estimated 500 babies was one of the most traumatic chapters of the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. The frantic effort by mothers and grandmothers to locate their missing children has never let up. It was the one issue that civilian presidents elected after 1983 did not excuse the military for, even as amnesty was granted for other “dirty war” crimes.

“Even the many Argentines who considered the amnesty a necessary evil were unwilling to forgive the military for this,” said José Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director for Human Rights Watch.

In Latin America, the baby thefts were largely unique to Argentina’s dictatorship, Mr. Vivanco said. There was no such effort in neighboring Chile’s 17-year dictatorship.

One notable difference was the role of the Catholic Church. In Argentina the church largely supported the military government, while in Chile it confronted the government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet and sought to expose its human rights crimes, Mr. Vivanco said.

Priests and bishops in Argentina justified their support of the government on national security concerns, and defended the taking of children as a way to ensure they were not “contaminated” by leftist enemies of the military, said Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, a Nobel Prize-winning human rights advocate who has investigated dozens of disappearances and testified at the trial last month.

Ms. Montenegro contended: “They thought they were doing something Christian to baptize us and give us the chance to be better people than our parents. They thought and felt they were saving our lives.”

Church officials in Argentina and at the Vatican declined to answer questions about their knowledge of or involvement in the covert adoptions.

For many years, the search for the missing children was largely futile. But that has changed in the past decade thanks to more government support, advanced forensic technology and a growing genetic data bank from years of testing. The latest adoptee to recover her real identity, Laura Reinhold Siver, brought the total number of recoveries to 105 in August.

Still, the process of accepting the truth can be long and tortuous. For years, Ms. Montenegro rejected efforts by officials and advocates to discover her true identity. From a young age, she received a “strong ideological education” from Colonel Tetzlaff, an army officer at a secret detention center.

If she picked up a flier from leftists on the street, “he would sit me down for hours to tell me what the subversives had done to Argentina,” she said.

He took her along to a detention center where he spent hours discussing military operations with his fellow officers, “how they had killed people, tortured them,” she said.

“I grew up thinking that in Argentina there had been a war, and that our soldiers had gone to war to guarantee the democracy,” she said. “And that there were no disappeared people, that it was all a lie.”

She said he did not allow her to see movies about the “dirty war,” including “The Official Story,” the 1985 film about an upper-middle-class couple raising a girl taken from a family that was disappeared.

In 1992, when she was 15, Colonel Tetzlaff was detained briefly on suspicion of baby stealing. Five years later, a court informed Ms. Montenegro that she was not the biological child of Colonel Tetzlaff and his wife, she said.

“I was still convinced it was all a lie,” she said.

By 2000, Ms. Montenegro still believed her mission was to keep Colonel Tetzlaff out of prison. But she relented and gave a DNA sample. A judge then delivered jarring news: the test confirmed that she was the biological child of Hilda and Roque Montenegro, who had been active in the resistance. She learned that she and the Montenegros had been kidnapped when she was 13 days old.

At a restaurant over dinner, Colonel Tetzlaff confessed to Ms. Montenegro and her husband: He had headed the operation in which the Montenegros were tortured and killed, and had taken her in May 1976, when she was 4 months old.

“I can’t bear to say any more,” she said, choking up at the memory of the dinner.

A court convicted Colonel Tetzlaff in 2001 of illegally appropriating Ms. Montenegro. He went to prison, and Ms. Montenegro, still believing his actions during the dictatorship had been justified, visited him weekly until his death in 2003.

Slowly, she got to know her biological parents’ family.

“This was a process; it wasn’t one moment or one day when you erase everything and begin again,” she said. “You are not a machine that can be reset and restarted.”

It fell to her to tell her three sons that Colonel Tetzlaff was not the man they thought he was.

“He told them that their grandfather was a brave soldier, and I had to tell them that their grandfather was a murderer,” she said.

When she testified at the trial, she used her original name, Victoria, for the first time. “It was very liberating,” she said.

She says she still does not hate the Tetzlaffs. But “the heart doesn’t kidnap you, it doesn’t hide you, it doesn’t hurt you, it doesn’t lie to you all of your life,” she said. “Love is something else.”

Travel Industry Still Adjusting To Post 9/11 World

From airlines to buses, trains and cruise ships, one of the biggest changes in the wake of September 11th was the the way we travel.
Transcription downloadable here!

9/11 Tragedy Spans Film Genres

9/11 Tragedy Spans Film Genres

In the 10 years since the World Trade Center attacks, artists of every medium have tried to make sense of the tragedy in their own ways, including film.

NY1 takes a look back at how the September 11th attacks have been portrayed on film.

Transcription Downloadable here.

International News - August 16, 2011

From the Middle East to the Midwest, and from Fukushima, Japan to Fairfax, Virginia, CNN Student News brings you stories from around the globe. Catch up on events in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Egypt. Find out how the 2012 U.S. presidential election field is shaping up. And discover how the U.S. State Department is using sports to connect with some Japanese youth.

Transcription downloadable here.

Ethical Shopping in the UK

Are you after value for money when you're shopping for fashion; or fashion that's made with values? Listen and find out more.

Hello and welcome to Trend UK, your shortcut to popular culture from the British Council. In the next few minutes we’re going to be asking whether you’re after value for money when you’re shopping for fashion; or fashion that’s made with values. We’re all after a bargain on the high street. But how often do you stop to consider how some stores seem to stock low-cost/high fashion items quicker and more cheaply than others? Fulfilling our needs for fast fashion means increased production and competition in clothing made in countries with low-wage economies. Our reporter Mark has been to the high street to find out more.

Here in a typical British high street there are plenty of bargains to be had. Handbags at £3.99, T-shirts for a fiver and shoes for under a tenner - all roughly equivalent to the price of an everyday meal. But how many of the people shopping in this high street have stopped to think about how it’s possible to sell clothes so cheaply? Is it because some companies are turning a blind eye to the exploitation in the countries where these items are made? Ruth Rothelson is an expert on ethical shopping from the Ethical Consumer Research Association, who amongst other things produced the magazine ‘Ethical Consumer’.

Ruth, just tell us what the Ethical Consumer Research Association is.

OK, well the Ethical Consumer Research Association exists to provide information for shoppers, letting them know what the companies are doing behind the brands that they see on the shelves.

So what makes an ethical shopper?

Very broadly speaking, people who are concerned about ethical issues want to know that the product they’re buying hasn’t been made at the expense of the people who are producing it, whether it’s in this country or abroad. They might also be concerned with other kinds of issues: whether the company is involved in armaments, or whether they’re donating money to certain political parties. And that as a shopper, you might not want to give your money to that party so therefore you might not want to buy a product from a company who is supporting a political party that you don’t agree with.

And is there any kind of rule of thumb? Is something that’s more expensive, for example, likely to be more ethical?

Unfortunately it isn’t always the case that the more expensive something is, the more ethical it is. We can buy very cheap products and it’s very likely that when products are cheap, something has suffered in order to get it to us. Whether it’s the person making it or the animals or the environment. Quality however, is often a good indicator whether something, especially with clothes, has been made well. And unfortunately a lot of ethical products will cost more because they reflect the real cost of bringing that thing into the shops. So something that has been made in a factory where the workers have been paid a proper wage will cost you more to buy, simply because the people making it are getting paid enough to live on.

Do you have to be well off then to be an ethical shopper?

It really depends. You don’t have to be rich to be an ethical shopper. One way of thinking about ethical shopping is thinking about buying less. Sometimes we buy an awful lot more than we need. We buy more items of clothing than we need. So being an ethical shopper really means thinking a bit before you go and spend your money in the shops. Some things may cost a little bit more in the short-run, but be worth it in the long-run. If you are paying for quality, something will last you longer and then save you money. And sometimes you can buy things second-hand. There’s a lot of charity shops on the high street to buy good clothes. Sometimes you can look a lot better than someone who’s just bought off the high street because you can have quite a unique look, and the quality that you find in most second-hand shops is really very good these days. So it’s about thinking before you shop.

Thanks Ruth. Now among the shoppers here I’ve got Lauren and Bella. Starting with you Bella, would you consider shopping ethically?

Definitely for food. And clothing, well, when I buy clothes I wouldn’t want to think of them being made in a sweat shop.

Lauren you do shop ethically. But you’ve got a slightly different take on it haven’t you.

Yeah I suppose I shop ethically but my original thing for that was that I like to wear clothes that are different from everyone else. So I would start shopping for vintage clothes. So ethically, obviously they’re second-hand so…also I buy a lot of clothes from market stalls, from fashion students maybe. So they’re all made here, so they would be made ethically as well.

Thanks Lauren, thanks Bella. Well it’s an interesting debate, and I’ll certainly be doing my clothes shopping with a little bit more care in future.

Manners

Did you know that manners are all about a reduction of violence between people? If you don't believe it , have a listen to this.

In the next few minutes we’re going to be talking about modern manners. It’s an argument that, on the face of it, has been going on between the generations, for hundreds of generations. Older people can often be heard saying the youth of today lack the basics in good behaviour and with newspapers and the media focusing on the anti-social activities of a minority of young people, it’s easy for them to be branded with a negative stereotype. So are British manners really getting worse? Our reporter Mark went to find out. Listen to the report by clicking here (you can download it)

Well, I’ve come to a typical UK high street on a weekday to talk to the young mums and dads, business people, elderly people and students that are out doing their shopping. So we should get an interesting mix of views. Let’s go see what people think.

-Excuse me, sir, would you say that manners are getting better or worse in the UK?

"I actually think they’re getting worse. I think that the standards are declining generally. "
"I think they are getting worse but not terribly so."
"Generally in buses and trains I think that people’s manners have improved in many ways."
"There are cultural differences, so you might meet someone from a different culture and your set of manners will quite be different to theirs."

-----

Well, is it all a question of individual taste or is there some common ground? With me here is Simon Fanshawe, author of a book called ‘The Done Thing’, all about modern British manners.

-Simon, what are the basic dos and don’ts?

-I think one of the things that’s confusing for people is when they come here is there appear to be hundreds and hundreds of rules, hundreds of things you should and shouldn’t do. And the truth of it is that most of them are about class. And lots of them are trip-wires actually for people who don’t know them.

So what I tried to do in my book was take it back to some sort of first principle and say look – there are anthropological reasons why we have certain kinds of manners. So I’ll give you a very good example, in Britain there are sort of two ways of holding a knife, very broadly. And broadly speaking the middle-classes hold it with the index finger on the top, gripped in the hand. And working-class people hold it like a pen. Entirely a class distinction and people mercilessly exploit it if they want to. The truth of it is, the one way not to hold a knife at the table, is clasped in your fist, raised as if to kill your guest. And what does that tell us about eating? Well, what it tells us about eating is two things: it's never confuse your guests with either the food or the enemy. Don’t eat them and don’t kill them!That’s about how you should hold your knife, because actually manners are really about the reduction of violence. There’s a lot in there about reducing violence. So that’s just an illustration of what one tries to do so actually when you look at real table manners they’re about people feeling comfortable with each other, sharing food around a table. Very important human thing.

-And are things actually getting worse?

-Very broadly speaking, we all rub along together pretty well, actually, we don’t do so badly. The trouble with bad manners is that when you experience it, it completely occupies your field of vision. So you feel completely knocked back and rather hurt by somebody.

-Should foreigners, say, comply with British manners when in Britain or should they just be themselves?

-Well I think, one, they should be very gentle with us because we’re not terribly good at understanding that there are lots of different customs from round the world, so you know, be gentle. But I think the thing what I would say to anybody going to any other culture, any other country in the world: Number one – be curious, ask yourself. The other thing is don’t think there’s a right and a wrong way to do things in terms of little funny details. Always remember that fundamentals matter more than anything else. ‘Please’ and ‘Thank You’ is a gift and a grace in any language so treat people in the fundamental purpose of manners which is to make life easier. If I can give you a definition of manners, it is it the reduction of actual or potential violence between strangers. So always seek to defuse conflict, always seek to reach out and offer yourself to other people, always seek to open the door and let them through. Do those kind of things because actually you’ll find people love it and they’ll respond to you.

-Simon Fanshawe, it would be very bad manners of me not to say, ‘thank you’ for coming to talk to us.