'A White Heron,' by Sarah Orne Jewett

We present the short story "A White Heron" by Sarah Orne Jewett. Dona de Sanctis wrote this version for VOA Learning English. Your narrator is Kay Gallant. The forest was full of shadows as a little girl hurried through it one summer evening in June. It was already 8 o'clock and Sylvie wondered if her grandmother would be angry with her for being so late. Every evening Sylvie left her grandmother's house at 5:30 to bring their cow home. The old animal spent her days out in the open country eating sweet grass. It was Sylvie's job to bring her home to be milked. When the cow heard Sylvie's voice calling her, she would hide among the bushes. This evening it had taken Sylvie longer than usual to find her cow. The child hurried the cow through the dark forest, following a narrow path that led to her grandmother's home. The cow stopped at a small stream to drink. As Sylvie waited, she put her bare feet in the cold, fresh water of the stream. She had never before been alone in the forest as late as this. The air was soft and sweet. Sylvie felt as if she were a part of the gray shadows and the silver leaves that moved in the evening breeze. She began thinking how it was only a year ago that she came to her grandmother's farm. Before that, she had lived with her mother and father in a dirty, crowded factory town. One day, Sylvie's grandmother had visited them and had chosen Sylvie from all her brothers and sisters to be the one to help her on her farm in Vermont. The cow finished drinking, and as the 9-year-old child hurried through the forest to the home she loved, she thought again about the noisy town where her parents still lived. Suddenly the air was cut by a sharp whistle not far away. Sylvie knew it wasn't a friendly bird's whistle. It was the determined whistle of a person. She forgot the cow and hid in some bushes. But she was too late. "Hello, little girl," a young man called out cheerfully. "How far is it to the main road?"  Sylvie was trembling as she whispered "two miles." She came out of the bushes and looked up into the face of a tall young man carrying a gun. The stranger began walking with Sylvie as she followed her cow through the forest. "I've been hunting for birds," he explained, "but I've lost my way. Do you think I can spend the night at your house?" Sylvie didn't answer. She was glad they were almost home. She could see her grandmother standing near the door of the farm house. When they reached her, the stranger put down his gun and explained his problem to Sylvie's smiling grandmother. "Of course you can stay with us," she said. "We don't have much, but you're welcome to share what we have. Now Sylvie, get a plate for the gentleman!" After eating, they all sat outside. The young man explained he was a scientist, who collected birds. "Do you put them in a cage?" Sylvie asked. "No," he answered slowly,  "I shoot them and stuff them with special chemicals to preserve them. I have over 100 different kinds of birds from all over the United States in my study at home." "Sylvie knows a lot about birds, too," her grandmother said proudly. "She knows the forest so well, the wild animals come and eat bread right out of her hands." "So Sylvie knows all about birds. Maybe she can help me then," the young man said. "I saw a white heron not far from here two days ago. I've been looking for it ever since. It's a very rare bird, the little white heron. Have you seen it, too?" he asked Sylvie.  But Sylvie was silent. "You would know it if you saw it," he added. "It's a tall, strange bird with soft white feathers and long thin legs. It probably has its nest at the top of a tall tree." Sylvie's heart began to beat fast. She knew that strange white bird! She had seen it on the other side of the forest. The young man was staring at Sylvie. "I would give $10 to the person who showed me where the white heron is." That night Sylvie's dreams were full of all the wonderful things she and her grandmother could buy for ten dollars. Sylvie spent the next day in the forest with the young man. He told her a lot about the birds they saw. Sylvie would have had a much better time if the young man had left his gun at home. She could not understand why he killed the birds he seemed to like so much. She felt her heart tremble every time he shot an unsuspecting bird as it was singing in the trees. But Sylvie watched the young man with eyes full of admiration. She had never seen anyone so handsome and charming. A strange excitement filled her heart, a new feeling the little girl did not recognize … love. At last evening came. They drove the cow home together. Long after the moon came out and the young man had fallen asleep Sylvie was still awake. She had a plan that would get the $10 for her grandmother and make the young man happy. When it was almost time for the sun to rise, she quietly left her house and hurried through the forest. She finally reached a huge pine tree, so tall it could be seen for many miles around. Her plan was to climb to the top of the pine tree. She could see the whole forest from there. She was sure she would be able to see where the white heron had hidden its nest. Sylvie's bare feet and tiny fingers grabbed the tree's rough trunk. Sharp dry branches scratched at her like cat's claws. The pine tree's sticky sap made her fingers feel stiff and clumsy as she climbed higher and higher. The pine tree seemed to grow taller, the higher that Sylvie climbed. The sky began to brighten in the east. Sylvie's face was like a pale star when, at last, she reached the tree's highest branch. The golden sun's rays hit the green forest. Two hawks flew together in slow-moving circles far below Sylvie. Sylvie felt as if she could go flying among the clouds, too. To the west she could see other farms and forests. Suddenly Sylvie's dark gray eyes caught a flash of white that grew larger and larger. A bird with broad white wings and a long slender neck flew past Sylvie and landed on a pine branch below her. The white heron smoothed its feathers and called to its mate, sitting on their nest in a nearby tree. Then it lifted its wings and flew away. Sylvie gave a long sigh. She knew the wild bird's secret now. Slowly she began her dangerous trip down the ancient pine tree. She did not dare to look down and tried to forget that her fingers hurt and her feet were bleeding. All she wanted to think about was what the stranger would say to her when she told him where to find the heron's nest. As Sylvie climbed slowly down the pine tree, the stranger was waking up back at the farm. He was smiling because he was sure from the way the shy little girl had looked at him that she had seen the white heron. About an hour later Sylvie appeared. Both her grandmother and the young man stood up as she came into the kitchen. The splendid moment to speak about her secret had come. But Sylvie was silent. Her grandmother was angry with her. Where had she been? The young man's kind eyes looked deeply into Sylvie's own dark gray ones. He could give Sylvie and her grandmother $10 dollars. He had promised to do this, and they needed the money. Besides, Sylvie wanted to make him happy. But Sylvie was silent. She remembered how the white heron came flying through the golden air and how they watched the sun rise together from the top of the world. Sylvie could not speak. She could not tell the heron's secret and give its life away. The young man went away disappointed later that day. Sylvie was sad. She wanted to be his friend. He never returned. But many nights Sylvie heard the sound of his whistle as she came home with her grandmother's cow. Were the birds better friends than their hunter might have been? Who can know?   Download activities to help you understand this story here. Now it’s your turn. Imagine you are Sylvie​. Would you do the same thing she did - keep silent about the heron? If not, what could you say to the young man to make him stop killing birds?​ Let us know in the Comments section or on our Facebook page. _____________________________________________________________ QUIZ   _________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   whistle - n. a high and loud sound made by forcing air through your lips or teeth preserve - v. to keep (something) in its original state or in good condition heron -  n. a large bird that has long legs and a long neck and bill nest - n. the place where a bird lays its eggs and takes care of its young handsome - having a pleasing appearance that causes romantic feelings in someone

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The True Story of Pocahontas

  Pocahontas is one of the most famous figures in American history. Many books and films portray her as a beautiful American Indian “princess” who made sacrifices to serve British colonial interests. These stories also suggest that she saved England’s first Virginia settlers from death and starvation. Most likely none of that is true. Pocahontas was the daughter of Pamunkey Chief Wahunsenaca.  He was leader of an alliance of about thirty Algonquian tribes and bands in Virginia when the British arrived in 1607. This did not make her a “princess” however.  Royalty was a European idea. Her family called her Matoaka, “flower between two streams.” This likely referred to their home between Virginia’s Mattaponi and Pamunkey Rivers. Tradition has said that her father also called her “Pocahontas.” This has several possible meanings, including “wanton” to “mischievous.” The name suggests she had a lively personality. Little is known of Pocahontas’ childhood. Linwood “Little Bear” Custalow was a member of the Mattaponi tribe, an ally of Wahunsenaca’s. Dr. Linwood’s book, The True Story of Pocahontas, the Other Side of History reports about Mattaponi oral history. It says Matoakoa married a young Potowomac fighter named Kocoum when she was about 14. They had a child called Little Kocoum, who was raised among the Mattaponi. The book also says that the English murdered the older Kocoum.  ​Pocahontas’s imprisonment In 1613, the English took Pocahontas and imprisoned her because they thought it would help influence negotiations with her father.  They kept her for a year at the settlement of Jamestown. ​At some point during her imprisonment, Pocahontas was declared a Christian and her British captors gave her a new name: Rebecca. The Mattaponi say at one point the English settlers permitted her sister to visit her.  During that visit Pocahontas told her sister that she had been raped. During her time at Jamestown, a British farmer named John Rolfe took an interest in her. The details of their relationship are not clear. In his writings, Rolfe said that he loved Pocahontas but also recognized that a marriage alliance between Britain and Virginia tribes would be helpful. Rolfe married Pocahontas in 1614, and she gave birth to a son, Thomas. The Mattaponi say her father did not attend the wedding.  However he gave her a necklace made of pearls harvested from Virginia's coastal waters as a gift. Pocahontas later traveled to England with Rolfe and Thomas to help bring attention to the new Virginia colony. She was presented to the Queen as Virginia’s first Christian. Historical records say she was well-received. However, Pocahontas became sick, and later died before she and Rolfe could return to Virginia. She was buried at St. George’s Church in the Kent town of Gravesend on March 21, 1617. A memorial statue for Pocahontas stands there today. Famous for an unclear story Pocahontas is most famous for an event that likely never happened: Saving British explorer Captain John Smith from death by Chief Wahunsenaca in 1607. Smith claimed that he had been taken prisoner by a group of fighters, who brought him before Chief Wahunsenaca.  Smith said they were ready to kill him with a club. But, he wrote, Pocahontas threw herself down on top of the prisoner, which saved his life. Today, the Mattaponi say it could not have happened. They say such behavior would not have been consistent with Virginia Native culture or custom. Non-Native researchers also suspect the truth of this story, taking note that even in his own time, people saw Smith as a liar who had an inflated sense of his own importance. I’m Phil Dierking.   This story was originally written by Cecily Hilleary for VOANews. Phil Dierking adapted the story for VOA Learning. Caty Weaver was the editor. Does your country have history stories that might not be true? We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page. ______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   alliance - n. a union between people, groups, countries, etc.​ baptize - v.  to officially make someone a member of a specified Christian church through the ceremony of baptism​ exaggerate - v. to think of or describe something as larger or greater than it really is​ mischievous - adj. causing or tending to cause annoyance or minor harm or damage​ oral - adj. of or relating to the mouth​ pearl - n. a hard, shiny, white ball that is formed inside the shell of an oyster and that is often used as jewelry​ royalty - n. members of a royal family​ wanton - adj. showing no thought or care for the rights, feelings, or safety of others​

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Costumes from New York Theaters Find New Life in Other Plays

  In a huge, underground space in New York City, below the largest sound stage east of Hollywood, 80,000 costumes wait for actors to claim them. This is the TDF Costume Collection, run by the not-for-profit Theater Development Fund. The clothing, jewelry, hair pieces and other wearables come from Broadway, Off Broadway, opera, film, and regional productions. People can pay to use the costumes. But not all people, says collection director Steven Cabral. "We're not renting for Halloween, and we're not renting for parties with food or liquids where something could happen to the costume. But if you're doing something that seems of an artistic nature in some way, we're going to be able to rent to you." Cabral notes that the collection has a little of everything - from medieval warrior wear created in the 1920s to modern ball gowns, and some stranger things. "That is...yeah, that is an elephant head." Cabral says TDF got into the costume business in the mid-1960s, when the Metropolitan Opera was about to move into a new home in Lincoln Center. The opera house, also known as the Met, had costumes for 22 full operas that officials were not planning on keeping. But they did not want to throw them away either. So, Cabral says, TDF took on all these old production elements and began to rent them for a very low cost. High school, college and community theater groups, movie production companies and TV shows have all used costumes in the collection. Opera companies can find almost anything they need at TDF. Cabral says he got a call after one gown from a Met production of Lucia di Lammermoor arrived for an opera in the Midwest. It was the opera company director on the phone. "'You had one of my singers in tears last night.' The person being fitted for this costume was a young opera singer, and when she saw the costume, and saw that it had the Metropolitan Opera label, and it said Lucia, and it said wedding scene, and it said Beverly Sills. "The young woman broke down because she couldn't believe that she was so fortunate to not only wear Metropolitan Opera, but to wear something owned by Beverly Sills."  Costumes from the Met are built to last, so when they arrive, they go into a small room of "special stock." After these costumes have seen their share of use, they move to another room. And once they start looking pretty worn, they move again. Some even go on sale. Cabral says those twice-yearly sales have a set price for everything a shopper can fit into one bag. "And the rule is, we just don't ever want to see the costume again." There is always a new crop of donations waiting for space at TDF. I’m Caty Weaver.   The Associated Press reported this story. Caty Weaver adapted it for Learning English. Hai Do was the editor. _____________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   sound stage - n. an area of a movie or television studio for the recording of sound, typically used to record dialogue​ rent - v.  to pay money in return for being able to use​ costume - n. the clothes that are worn by someone (such as an actor) who is trying to look like a different person or thing​ medieval - adj. of or relating to the period of European history from about A.D. 500 to about 1500​ fortunate - adj. coming or happening because of good luck​   We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section.

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What It Takes - Lee Berger

00:00:02     OPRAH WINFREY: "Hattie Mae, this child is gifted," and I heard that enough that I started to believe it.   00:00:08     ROGER BANNISTER: If you have the opportunity, not a perfect opportunity, and you don't take it, you may never have another chance.   00:00:14     LAURYN HILL: It all was so clear. It was just, like, the picture started to form itself.   00:00:19     DESMOND TUTU: There was no way in which a lie could prevail over the truth, darkness over light, death over life.   00:00:27     CAROL BURNETT (quoting CARRIE HAMILTON): “Every day I wake up and decide, today I'm going to love my life. Decide.”   00:00:35     JOHNNY CASH: My advice is, if they're going to break your leg once when you go in that place, stay out of there.   00:00:40     JAMES MICHENER: And then along come these differential experiences that you don't look for, you don't plan for, but boy, you’d better not miss them.   00:00:52     LEE BERGER: These bones that we’re finding are of individuals that lay somewhere in our deep family tree.   00:01:03     ALICE WINKLER: This is What It Takes, a podcast about passion, vision, and perseverance from the Academy of Achievement. I’m Alice Winkler, and this is Lee Berger. He hunts for human ancestors, and is transforming our understanding of evolution.   00:01:23     LEE BERGER: Every single person is interested to know who their parents are, who your grandparents are, who your great-grandparents are. Genealogy websites and that work are hugely popular. Why? The reason is because every human being on this planet at some point realizes that the people who they descend from in the past carry traits and behaviors that are now part of them.   00:01:54     And as we try to understand ourselves as humans, something only humans can do, we explore our inner selves. We are looking for causality, reason. We want to know not only why we look physically like this, but often, the more important, why we behave like this. Well, people like me just do that in the deep depths of time.   00:02:19     ALICE WINKLER: People like Lee Berger are called paleoanthropologists, but it would be hard to argue that there are many paleoanthropologists like Lee Berger. In 2008, he found a new species, an ancient relative of humans called Australopithecus sediba, or just sediba for short, and in September of 2015, Lee Berger made headlines again when he announced he’d found a cave filled with skeletons of another human relative no one had seen before, a species he named Homo naledi.   00:03:00     These two discoveries are forcing a rewrite of the story of evolution. Lee Berger sat down with the Academy of Achievement twice to talk about his pioneering work, once in 2012, and again soon after the Homo naledi news broke. Both times he was wearing the kind of leather jacket you might expect to see on an intrepid explorer, à la Indiana Jones. You can occasionally hear the creak of the leather as he talks.   00:03:32     And Berger’s stories are often jaw-dropping, filled with enough suspense and drama to warrant a Hollywood movie. But Berger has also known years of fruitless searching, epic dead ends, and academic acrimony. We will cover all of that and more in this episode, but it seemed more fun to start with the tales of action and adventure.   00:04:03     In the autumn of 2013, Berger was hoping to find new bones — well, new very old bones, in what’s known as the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, in South Africa. It’s where he’d found sediba several years before. This time he sent a team of cave explorers underground.   00:04:26     LEE BERGER: And on September 13, they went into one of the best-known cave systems in the entire region, if not all of South Africa, the Rising Star system. They went off the map, though, and they found a place at the top of a collapse we call Dragon's Back, and there they looked down a seven-and-a-half-inch slot. Now imagine, they're already a hundred feet underground. They're looking into this slot and, of course, what do they do?   00:04:51     They go into it, and they go down it about 50 feet and drop into a chamber, and in that chamber are bones scattered across the floor. They're bones that they thought were the kind that I was looking for, and their camera didn't function, so they had to come back out. It was about a four-and-a-half-hour trip at that time. They told me that they thought they'd found something, but I said, you know, "Bring me pictures, and I'm not going to believe you unless I see pictures of this," because I get that kind of thing all the time.   00:05:22     You know, people call you up and say they found a skull, and it's a plastic baby doll head or something that they got out of their backyard.   00:05:28     ALICE WINKLER: A few weeks went by. Nothing. Berger says he forgot about the whole thing, and then one night at about nine p.m., someone showed up at his door.   00:05:39     LEE BERGER: I answered the intercom, and Pedro, who was a student that I had enlisted as sort of the team leader, was on the other end. He said, "You're going to want to let us in," and I almost didn't because it was kind of a creepy voice like that. In they came, lifted up a laptop, and there I saw a picture that I thought I'd never see. There, sitting on this photograph, was a jawbone that I could see was a primitive hominid, but it was just lying there on the floor. Next picture was a skull.   00:06:07     Next picture, a series of bones of a body, it looked like. I'd never seen anything like that in all of my career, just lying there on the floor, and so we celebrated a little. I couldn't sleep that night. Picked up the phone at two a.m., called National Geographic.   00:06:25     ALICE WINKLER: National Geographic agreed to fund an expedition to bring up the bones, but because of the extremely tight and treacherous space the scientists were going to need to get through — remember, seven-and-a-half inches wide — Berger had to advertise for skinny little risk-taking scientists. He ended up with six volunteers who fit the bill, all women. He calls them underground astronauts.   00:06:54     LEE BERGER: Within a week, we had the richest hominid site ever discovered in the history of South Africa, and by the end of a 21-day expedition, we’d found more fossils of primitive hominids than had been discovered in the entire history of the search for human origins, and we left thousands in the chamber. It's probably the richest site ever discovered in the world. It's like our version of Tutankhamun's tomb.   00:07:23     ALICE WINKLER: Before the expedition began, Lee Berger explains, he thought that they were onto one skeleton, which would have been miracle enough.   00:07:32     LEE BERGER: You know, this is a field of fragments. We don’t find these things, and I'd already had my lottery ticket punched with sediba, you know. I had my skeletons from that discovery. I went after this second one with all the expectation of a fragmented skeleton that we would get out of some species. I never in the world expected that chamber to have that richness, and I really didn't expect to find another new species.   00:08:01     ALICE WINKLER: Berger and his team were able to put together enough complete skeletons - male, female, young and old, to confidently form a picture of what this creature looked like.   00:08:12     LEE BERGER: So the easiest way to sort of describe Homo naledi is, it's not a human, first. You've got to get that out of your mind, but it is standing on two legs. Imagine something standing on two legs. It's probably about five feet tall but ultrathin. If you were looking at it across a room, you'd immediately know you're not looking at a human, or if you are, there's something wrong with him because perched atop that five-foot body is going to be a pinhead, a head literally with a brain the size of an orange.   00:08:45     The shoulders would be high and almost a brought-up sort of — held like an ape would hold its shoulders, but then you'd notice that the arms would be more human proportioned. The hands would look like a human hand, except they'd be held and curved out at the end so that they wouldn't be flat. They would just be sort of more like an ape at the end but human proportioned.   00:09:11     When you got down to the hips, they'd be sort of flared, but again, a very slender body, and then long, skinny legs, which, at the very end of that, a humanlike foot.   00:09:23     ALICE WINKLER: Homo naledi may have just been discovered, but because of the huge number of bone fragments involved — over 1,500 pieces from 15 individuals — scientists probably already know more about it than almost any other species of human relative ever discovered. Berger says they don’t yet know its age because the tools now available aren’t well suited for the condition these bones were found in.   00:09:51     Homo naledi may have lived a hundred thousand years ago or as much as three million years ago. Either way, naledi’s physique and its behavior are providing scientists with crucial new insights.   00:10:06     LEE BERGER: And so, we can say that Homo naledi was a climber, but we don’t know what it was climbing. It has these very different hands than any kind of hominid we've ever seen before, with those long, curved fingers.   00:10:20     We know it's a long distance walker. It's got these long legs, and it's walking in much the way a human is. We can even see that in the way the foot and ankle are constructed, but it's doing it somehow a little bit differently because the pelvis is constructed differently. So you've got a climbing, long distance walker, but perhaps what's most amazing about it is that we've also had a glimpse into its behavior.   08:45:55     We've hypothesized, after eliminating pretty much everything else, that Homo naledi was deliberately disposing of its dead, which means it's got a mind that has the capacity that we previously thought was not only unique to humans, but perhaps identified humans — the concept, perhaps, of the recognition of self-mortality.   00:11:07     ALICE WINKLER: That bears repeating, repeating and elaborating. Lee Berger and his colleagues are quite certain that these creatures were intentionally disposing of their dead. Baruch Shemtov, who spoke to Dr. Berger for the Academy of Achievement in 2015, asked how he could be so sure.   00:11:28     LEE BERGER: We were faced with a dilemma. About day four, we realized that there was nothing in this chamber but hominids. All of us have degrees in archeology, forensic anthropology, and we kind of knew what it meant to see a truly monospecific assemblage. It's rare to the point of unique in the paleontological record. Well, except for one species, Homo sapiens. This wasn't Homo sapiens. We knew that very early on.   00:11:57     We knew it was primitive, and so we began trying to eliminate things. We could easily eliminate, eventually, that it wasn't a predator. There were no marks of that. There was no scavenging. We knew that it wasn't a mass death assemblage because they had come in one after the other. We could tell that from studies of how the bones had — were laid out, and also how they were weathering. We knew that they hadn't died in some collapse. We knew they weren't washed in there. We could see that from the sediments.   00:12:26     We went through everything, and we were eventually left with this one hypothesis, that this non-human species of animal was doing something that we previously thought only humans did, deliberately disposing of its dead.   00:12:44     BARUCH SHEMTOV: And why would that be so significant?   00:12:47     LEE BERGER: Well, up until September 10, when we announced that we have a species of non-human animal that deliberately disposes of its dead in a ritualized fashion — at least that's the best hypothesis — it was thought that that was not only unique to humans, but perhaps identified us. Now we have to rethink what it means to be a human.   00:13:12     ALICE WINKLER: Lee Berger emphasized several times during this interview that no one knows where this species, Homo naledi, fits into the human family tree. And more than that, he said, it’s probably the wrong question to be asking. If anything, Homo naledi and Berger’s previous discovery, sediba, seem to indicate that there is no one family tree. More likely, there are branches that split off, developed, and came back together at times.   00:13:42     That’s why Berger calls these two species human relatives rather than human ancestors. On the path to humankind, he says, there were lots of different experiments. I want to switch gears here and take you on Lee Berger’s personal path, the path that brought him to sediba and Homo naledi eventually, but that began in the mid-1960s on the farm where he grew up outside the tiny town of Sylvania, Georgia. It's far, far away in every way from where he now lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.   00:14:19     LEE BERGER: I was always collecting things. I would spend my time in the woods whenever I could. Some unfortunate animals ended up in terrariums or aquariums in my house, or I would be out in the plowed fields looking for arrowheads or Native American artifacts or rocks. I came from a sort of long line of these sorts of explorers, if you will. My grandfather was an oil wildcatter. I have deep history in sodbusters, the first pioneers going out, and all types of sort of people who were always never happy to be right where they were but always looking for something.   00:14:55     And I found a real thrill in seeing things other people missed, you know, seeing the anomaly, if you will.   00:15:04     ALICE WINKLER: His dad sold insurance. His mom was a math teacher, but all he wanted to do was stay outdoors. He was an Eagle Scout, head of the Georgia 4H Club. You get the picture.   00:15:17     LEE BERGER: I began to become interested in wildlife conservation and biology. I found out there was an endangered species in my region called the gopher tortoise, and that took me to national competitions, and it also introduced me to the first scientists I’d ever met, and they were hugely formative. And I ended up starting the first gopher tortoise preserve in the state of Georgia.   00:15:41     It's now the state reptile, and it was a big part of teaching me not just about passion when you find something, but about the process of what you do to study something or to actually make something happen. It also taught me a little bit about politics, which, you know, getting some other people to become interested in something and assist you in accomplishing something.   00:16:05     ALICE WINKLER: But Lee Berger decided he ought to study law. Why is not such a big mystery, he explained in this interview with journalist Gail Eichenthal. Anyone who’s ever had parents can figure it out. “When you’re young,” he said, “what other people want you to be is often the easiest way out.” Berger got into Vanderbilt University on a Navy ROTC scholarship, but after his first few pre-law courses, he says, he was ready to die.   00:16:36     But he had gotten a scholarship to do what he was doing and didn’t see an escape.   00:16:41     LEE BERGER: My transcript looked sort of like F, D, D, F in my core subjects of what I was supposed to be, and then A, A, A in everything I was taking as an elective. And I reached a critical point where it was literally one of those situations where I was going to fail out of college, or I had to do something radical in my life.   00:17:05     And I had one of those incredible moments when I met a person who didn’t realize how influential he would be in my life, in the young lieutenant who was my advisor in the Naval ROTC, because I went in on the verge of failing out. Now I was lucky enough at that time that we had the two-year process, so I'd gone a year-and-a-bit into it, so I wouldn’t have to go enlisted, but I was in trouble.     00:17:33     And I went to him, and I said, "Gosh, you know, it's not working, and I think I'm maybe going to drop out for a while, maybe enlist in the Navy, and find myself, because this isn't working." And this young lieutenant, who had my life in his hands, he could have told me — and it would have been in his interests, because they're recruiting officers in some ways, to say, "Absolutely." Or, you know — he leaned across the table, and he said, "What is this, when you look at it?" And he had my transcript, and he shoved it across, and, you know, I was like, "Failure?"   00:18:09     You know, that was — and he said, "No, look at it again. Don't look at the D’s and F’s. Look at that again." And I said, "I don't see it." And he said, "I see your passion there. I see what you love. You just don't realize it." He said, "You’re not enlisted material. You need to find your love." And he said, "I will let you out of here right now as long as you promise me to go do what you love."   00:18:38     And he signed my release papers. I put my stay at Vanderbilt in abeyance, and I walked out the door into a very interesting period, but where I then found that thing and never looked back.   00:18:55     ALICE WINKLER: It wasn’t a straight shot to paleoanthropology. His journey included a stint as a news cameraman and the dramatic rescue of a drowning woman, but eventually Berger did get back to school, this time at East Georgia College.   00:19:10     LEE BERGER: And there I met a geologist who just exploded the world of fossils that were all around me. I had no idea, in the place that I lived, this low country, of what was around me. I met this — these passionate English professors and mathematicians. My grades, of course, rocked, because it wasn't work anymore. I stayed there for a brief period, got my grades back, went down to Georgia Southern University because it was the only place I could afford.   00:19:38     You know, I was on my own on this one. I’d had my scholarship chance. And I walked into another place with — that was just full of these rare, passionate academics and scientists. I had, by that time, read a book that fundamentally changed my life, and it was Lucy, and I actually took this book from the library. I did eventually pay the fine and put it back, but I couldn’t put it down.   00:20:06     ALICE WINKLER: “Lucy,” discovered in 1974 by Don Johanson and Tom Gray, was the first skeleton found of an early hominid, which is to say an animal that walks upright on two legs. Until Lucy, the field of paleoanthropology was based mostly on scraps and conjecture, which the book Lee Berger was reading made clear.   00:20:30     LEE BERGER: And there was one line in there that struck me, when Don, who would eventually become a great friend and mentor of mine, said that these early hominid fossils are effectively the rarest sought-after objects on Earth, and there's something like a one-in-ten-million chance of finding one. And I had just before then been thinking of becoming a dinosaur paleontologist or something, and I — that line so intrigued me because the first thought that came into my mind was not, "Gee, who would want to go into a field of science where you have no chance of finding something?"   00:21:11     But, "There's a field that you can make a difference with even the smallest discovery," and I wanted to make a difference.   00:21:21     ALICE WINKLER: Not too much later, Lee Berger met his hero, Don Johanson. Johanson liked him and invited him to join in on a project in Tanzania. When the project didn’t come through, though, Johanson arranged for Lee Berger to join a different research expedition in Kenya with the other most-famous paleontologist of that era, Richard Leakey.   00:21:44     LEE BERGER: My first morning there, I couldn’t sleep. Here I was. You know, these are the fossil fields of Africa. I woke up early. All the rest of the students stayed asleep, and I walked in. I saw the light on in this small encampment in the middle — right on the edge of Lake Turkana, middle of Africa, and there I met a man, John Kimengich, one of Richard Leakey’s fossil hunters, and he chatted to me for a moment. He was having tea.   00:22:12     It was probably 4:30, and then when he said, "You know, you want to go look for fossils with me? I'm going out now." I said, "Of course." Over the next several hours, he taught me how to find these anomalies, how to see these things, and as we were walking back to the Land Rover, 11:00 in the morning — it gets too hot to work — a hundred meters from the Land Rover, I look down, and there was a piece of a femur, this leg bone, of an early hominid. I found my first hominid — one-in-ten-million chance — my first day. It was completely — I was hooked.   00:22:46     ALICE WINKLER: Fast forward not too many years, Lee Berger, now just in his early 30s, had rocketed to a position as chair of a very prestigious research unit at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.   00:23:01     LEE BERGER: I'd taken over from a very powerful and famous paleoanthropologist named Phillip Vallentine Tobias, and I had made some discoveries. And when I first got to South Africa to do my Ph.D., I discovered two little hominid teeth, but those two teeth were the first new early hominid site discovered in Southern Africa in 48 years. They appeared in National Geographic, two teeth. That's how rare this stuff was at the time.     00:23:32     I had done other work looking at what killed the Taung Child. I had looked at body proportions, but I had not made major hominid discoveries because they are just that rare. And I had gotten into the type of ups and downs and wars — I'd had the most ferocious fights with colleagues, and I was always pushing boundary. I also took a stance in the late 1990s about open access to fossils.   00:24:03     You’ve got to remember — it's very important to remember — that I'm almost the first generation of scientists, people my age and just maybe a year older, that were never without a computer. It makes us think differently, and, in the late 1990s, there were some behavioral abnormalities within paleoanthropology that bothered me a lot. And I was in a very powerful position, a young man made director in seemingly one of the most powerful chairs in the science of paleoanthropology. And I had fossils that had been found by other people, albeit in the very distant past, under my control.   00:24:40     And in this science, those are resources, and I decided to open them up, let everyone look at them. It now is called “open access.” We didn’t have a name for it at that time, really, but I took a relatively public stance on that, that I was going to let people see these fossils. It was not the way it was done.   00:25:00     ALICE WINKLER: Keep in mind, the idea of an online database was still pretty novel at the time, so that's not what Lee Berger’s talking about here.   00:25:09     LEE BERGER: That was yet to be. No, I meant physically look at them. I meant — and it may sound strange to people, but let scientific colleagues see material, published or unpublished. And that was not the norm. The norm at that time was — and I'm not criticizing it, I'm just explaining how the science worked. You would gather a small team of people around you when you had important fossils, and you would study them over years and years and years and years, and then, at times, you would pronounce on the analyses that you had carefully conducted.   00:25:46     While that's not wrong in any way, shape, or form, it was different than the way my generation thinks about the value. We grew up in the age of where you have a Google or a Facebook or the Internet, where we didn't know what anything was worth until you put it out there and began to establish its worth as a community, as you tested the robusticity of it as you went along.   00:26:13     And so, I was looking at the fossils the same way, and I said, "I'm going to open the safe door." Well, it was probably a decade too early to say that, and it caused wars. It coincided with also a discovery of a very major fossil by a person older than me that worked for me. That caused tension and conflicts.   00:26:34     ALICE WINKLER: All in all, it was one of the lowest periods in his career. Berger says some of the academic infighting caused him to dissolve his own unit, which he’d spent six or seven years building. Eventually, he rebuilt it, but the problems persisted, and then technology shifted with the advent of 3D imaging and reliable large data.   00:26:58     LEE BERGER: Because my exploration efforts looking for fossils in various sites and stuff had not produced any really big hits, the push by things like the universities and colleagues was to move away from exploration. There was very much a real feel that we’d probably pretty much discovered every major fossil field in Africa, and, in fact, some scientists even wrote that down at the turn of the millennia.   00:27:27     ALICE WINKLER: It was becoming clear to Lee Berger that the future of paleoanthropology was going to be in the lab, looking at the fossils already discovered decades before with new tools. Berger began thinking about a career shift.   00:27:43     LEE BERGER: It was going to be very hard to continue to get the kind of resources to fund risk-taking exploration. People were clearly not believing that there were other sites out there. There were talks of not even allowing digging at new sites because they clearly had failed, and I'd almost been a demonstration of that over 17 years. It was at that moment that I became the last human being on Earth to discover Google Earth.   00:28:09     ALICE WINKLER: Berger had spent the previous three years using a handheld GPS and satellite maps he bought from NASA for thousands - sometimes tens of thousands - of dollars, to try and plot the coordinates of known fossil sites. It’s complicated and pretty technical, but he was looking for clues on the terrain that might help him discover where to search next. This technology was a big leap forward, he thought. Then, as he said, came Google Earth.   00:28:42     LEE BERGER: Well, you know, after looking at my house, like everyone does the first time they do it, I saw that little window over to the left that you could put GPS coordinates in. And I had some of the most expensively obtained GPS coordinates on the planet to put in that window, and I typed them in, and I saw what everyone sees, that amazing Google Earth phenomena of flying from the sky and popping right down onto the point that that coordinate is.   00:29:09     And my coordinate, the first one, which I'd put in because I knew it better than any place on Earth, landed on nothing. It landed hundreds and hundreds of meters away. Second point I put in, the same thing. Third — they were all useless. They were all wrong. I had wasted three years of my life. I had wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars of research grant.   00:29:34     Did not take me long to Google why the U.S. government had put deliberate error into those GPSs in the late 1990s, for military purposes, and that, with my — the errors that were inherent in those handheld GPSs had created a compounding error. Well, that was like adding low to low on my life at that moment, and so I spent the rest of December and January moving those points physically on Google from where they landed to where I knew they should be, because I could see these sites.   00:30:10     It was one of the most important moments in the entire story of my scientific career because it was in correcting that error that I began to see patterns, that I began to see that they fell in linear structures, that I began to see the fossil sites clustered together. Caves might be in more random situations.   00:30:37     And I also began to see and learn what a site would look like, all the different varieties, and I began to think that if that’s a site, that looks like a site, and this looks like a site.   00:30:52     ALICE WINKLER: First thing he did was make a list of targets, gathered a team, and started out. Within the year, he’d found 40 new fossil sites in an area world-famous for having 20. Then one morning he went out with a student; his dog, Tao; and his nine-year-old son, Matthew, to look at a potential site where some miners, looking for lime 100 years ago, had blasted a few holes with dynamite. For some reason, though, the miners had left the site otherwise untouched.   00:31:26     LEE BERGER: Matthew shouts, "Dad, I found a fossil!" He was 15 meters off the site in high grass. I could see he was holding a small rock, and just for a moment I almost didn't go look because I knew what he would have found. He would have found an antelope fossil because for every one of these early hominins we find, these human ancestor pieces, we find about 250,000 pieces of antelopes. We just don't find these things.   00:31:55     My nine-year-old son and — encouraging fossil-hunting — I started walking towards him, and five meters away I knew that his and my life were going to change forever. Because he was holding a small rock — you have to visualize and crouch down, and there on the outside of it was an S-shaped bone. And that S-shaped bone was a hominin clavicle, and the reason I knew that is very few mammals, first, in Africa have hominin clavicles.   00:32:24     Bats have them because they fly. Moles have them because they dig, and primates have them. We're primates, and only amongst primates do humans and our ancestors have this very characteristic S-shape, and at that time I was probably one of the world's only experts on hominin clavicles. I did my Ph.D. on them. All six or seven pieces, never a complete one, had been found.   00:32:49     I did my thesis on the clavicle, the proximal humerus, and the scapula, and one of the reasons I did is there were no complete bones in the entire record of those, and it was about the only thing left to study, and it was all scraps. And I was looking at one.   00:33:04     ALICE WINKLER: Berger turned over the rock, and on the other side was a jaw and a tooth. It turned out he and nine-year-old Matthew had found the partial skeleton of a child, a tween actually. Up until that day, there were only something like seven partial early hominid skeletons ever found, and two of those were discovered by Berger’s role models and mentors, Don Johanson and Richard Leakey. Overnight, Lee Berger had joined their ultra-elite club.   00:33:39     And all three, I can't help mentioning here, are members of the Academy of Achievement. But anyway, when Berger went back to the fossil site to hunt for the rest of his skeleton, he discovered another, and another, and another — six skeletons in all, belonging to that species he named Australopithecus sediba. At the time he talked to the Academy of Achievement about sediba, four years later, he was still in the glow of it.   00:34:10     After all, it was the discovery of a lifetime, as he told journalist Gail Eichenthal.   00:34:16     LEE BERGER: That started this adventure I’ve been on. It has — the site of Malapa, which I would eventually call it, which means “my home,” has turned into perhaps the richest early hominid site ever discovered in the history of this planet.   00:34:29     ALICE WINKLER: But remember, this conversation about sediba with the Academy of Achievement took place in 2012. The very next year, lightning struck again when Lee Berger discovered another new species, Homo naledi, and a way bigger collection of skeletons deep inside a cave, intentionally buried, it seems. Just weeks after news of that discovery went very, very viral, Lee Berger spoke with the Academy for the second time.   00:35:03     LEE BERGER: Homo naledi has done something that I thought would never happen to me as a paleoanthropologist. I went into a field to study and interpret bones. Suddenly, not only are there bones, but you've got a discovery that's giving you insight into behavior in a way that I never anticipated. The idea that we're getting a window into another species' mind from this chamber — that's amazing, you know?   00:35:33     That's something that I think the whole world is going to have to think about. You know, you've got something here, a discovery that's making us question our own humanity. I guess I don’t know how I feel about that. I haven't had enough time to digest the effect of that in something that I wasn't really prepared for. I'd spent my life as a biologist, a paleontologist, and now I have to also think like a philosopher. That's kind of neat though.   00:36:09     ALICE WINKLER: Lee Berger doesn’t know what he’s looking for next. At any moment, he says, his phone could ring and one of his explorers could be on the other end saying, "Hey, you’ve got to see this," and that, Berger says, is the thrill of it. This is What It Takes from the Academy of Achievement. If you want to learn more about Lee Berger’s life and work, go to achievement.org, and because you are a particularly curious form of hominid, make sure to follow us on Twitter to find out about upcoming episodes. Our handle is @WhatItTakesNow. I’m Alice Winkler.   00:36:49     And thanks, as always, to the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation for funding What It Takes.  

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English @ the Movies: 'We're Broke'

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November 9, 2017

A look at the best news photos from around the world.

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Understanding Adverbs: Always

  The film “Casablanca” is one of the most famous American movies of all time. At the end of the film, the actor Humphrey Bogart says a heartbreaking farewell to the woman he loves. Bergman: But what about us? Bogart: We'll always have Paris. Besides affecting one’s emotions, this movie scene can teach you a lot about English grammar. It can show you how English speakers use adverbs in a sentence. In our program today, we explore a single word: always. We will discover why Bogart said his famous line the way he did. Do not worry. Unlike the ending of “Casablanca,” we will not leave you in tears! Adverbs and Movability In other Everyday Grammar stories, we explored adverbs. Adverbs are words that change the meaning of a verb, adjective, or sentence. They are often used to show time, place, or a way of doing things. Adverbs are often movable. They can appear at the beginning, middle, or end of a sentence. Consider these examples: Occasionally I eat seafood. I occasionally eat seafood. I eat seafood occasionally. In this example, the adverb occasionally appears in three different places in the sentence. The placement of the adverb does not change the meaning. All three sentences have the same meaning. Most English speakers would not think it strange if you used any one of these sentences. Always is not as movable What about the adverb always? In general, the adverb always is not as movable as other kinds of adverbs – like the word occasionally. You will not often hear an English speaker use always at the beginning or the end of a sentence. Most often, you will hear always in the middle of the sentence, before the verb it is modifying. In some cases, you might hear it at the beginning of a sentence – when giving an order or command, for example.* Or you might hear it at the end of a sentence, but usually only in an artistic setting: a poetry reading or a musical performance, for example. But the central point is this: in speaking and in writing, always does not move its position as often as other adverbs. So, if you were to take our example sentence, "I eat seafood," and use the adverb always, you could say, "I always eat seafood." Always generally is found after “BE” verbs and auxiliary verbs, but before other verbs. You will find this structure in many popular films. Consider this famous line from “A Streetcar Named Desire:” "Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951 In the example, always appears after the auxiliary verb, have, and just before the main verb, depended. This same idea is true of Bogart's famous line from “Casablanca,” "We'll always have Paris." "We'll" is a short way to say, "we will." Always appears after the auxiliary verb, will, and before the main verb, have. Emphasized always You might think that our story about the word always ends here, but it does not! English speakers can also change the meaning of always. When you hear or read the adverb always in its usual position, before the verb it is modifying. It generally has the meaning of habitually. However, sometimes you will hear English speakers emphasize the word always. In this case, the meaning of the sentence has changed. Think back to our example sentence: "I always eat seafood." This sentence means that you usually eat seafood – perhaps when you go to a restaurant. If the speaker says, "I ALWAYS eat seafood," with the emphasis on the word "always," then the speaker is expressing annoyance. Perhaps the speaker is angry that another person – a close friend, for example – did not remember they like to eat seafood when they go out to dinner. Here is another example: you hear a child say, "My father always works late on Thursdays." This sentence uses the adverb always to express a habitual or common action. However, if you hear the child say, "My dad ALWAYS works late on Thursdays," then you know that the child is unhappy with the father's work schedule. What can you do? So, now you know that if Bogart had used the emphasized always in the film Casablanca, the ending of the film would have been very different. The next time you are listening or speaking, try to pay attention to the placement of the word always. Then, try to identify if it is emphasized or not. This will help you understand the speaker's feelings. Remember: English does not always communicate meaning through grammar. Emphasis plays an important role in showing the meaning of a sentence. With practice, you, too, will be able to use always like a native speaker! I’m Pete Musto. And I'm John Russell.  John Russell wrote this story for Learning English. George Grow was the editor. We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section. *Always can begin imperative sentences. Here is an example: Always wear your seatbelt.  _______________________________________________________________ Words in this Story   farewell – n. an act of leaving adverb – n. a word that describes a verb, an adjective, another adverb, or a sentence and that is often used to show time, manner, place, or degree occasionally – adv. sometimes but not often emphasize – v. to place emphasis on (something) auxiliary verb – n. a verb (such as have, be, may, do, shall, will, can, or must) that is used with another verb to show the verb's tense, to form a question, etc.​ modify – v. to limit or describe the meaning of (a word or group of words)​ scene – n. a part of a play, movie, story, etc., in which a particular action or activity occurs​

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America Celebrates Veterans Day

November 11 is Veterans Day in the United States. But because Veterans Day falls on a Saturday this year, Friday, November 10 is a federal holiday. A “veteran” is anyone who has served in the armed forces. Veterans Day honors the living. A separate holiday, Memorial Day in May, honors those who died in military service. The United States has about 18.5 million veterans. The term veteran is not just for those who have served in wars. It describes anyone who has ever been in the military. On November 11, communities across the country hold ceremonies and parades to mark Veterans Day. Military bands play. Public officials take part in the events. And soldiers fire guns into the air in a salute to remember those who died in service to their country.  The history of Veterans Day relates to World War I. Many people at the time called it “the war to end all wars.” The United States entered the fighting in Europe in 1917. But the U.S. armed forces were small. So the government began to draft men between the ages of 21 and 31. The men came from cities and farms. Some were rich. Others were poor. There were doctors, lawyers, businessmen, and college students. Many were married. The following year, the government expanded the draft. Now it called on men between the ages of 18 and 45. More than 13 million reported for duty.  Many women joined the armed forces, too. Most got office jobs at military bases in the United States. Some, however, went to France to work as nurses in battlefield hospitals. World War I ended when Germany surrendered at 11 o'clock in the morning on November 11, 1918 -- in other words, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.  The following year, President Woodrow Wilson signed a declaration to observe November 11th as Armistice Day in the United States. It would be a day to honor the men and women who had served in the U.S. armed forces during the war. In 1926, Congress made Armistice Day a national holiday.  But new problems were on the way. Soon, everyone knew that World War I would not be the war to end all wars. In all, more than 4,000,000 Americans served in the armed forces during the first World War. And 16 million would serve during the second one. Armistice Day in 1945 was a special day in the United States. Germany had surrendered in May 1945. And Japan surrendered in August of that year. Most of the men and women who had served in the war were home. So, instead of honoring just veterans of World War I, Americans also honored veterans of World War II. In 1954, Congress decided to change the name of Armistice Day. The holiday became Veterans Day. I’m Dorry Gundy.   Jerilyn Watson wrote this story for Learning English. George Grow was the editor. ______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   draft – v. to choose for some purpose, such as military service nurse – n. someone who has training to care for sick or injured people o’clock – adj. used to show position on a close or time piece hour – n. the time of day, based on two 12-hour periods

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Indonesian Village Uses Owls to Protect Crops

  To make room for agriculture, trees and other plants are often cleared away so that farmers have space to grow crops. The clearing of forests forces many animals from their homes. They often flee the area in search of a new place to live. There is a big downside to that. Some of those animals are natural predators. They control pest populations. They can help to clear the fields of rats, mice, and other rodents that eat and damage crops. This happened at one small farming village in Indonesia. After land was cleared for farming, rats and mice began appearing in large numbers. Villagers tried to target the animals by smoking them out and hunting them. But the villagers were unsuccessful. So, one farmer decided to try another method -- a natural one. Pujo Arto brought owls to his farm. Owls, after all, are experts at hunting rodents. It is what they do. And it worked! However, Pujo Arto didn't stop with his own field. He set up a Natural Predator Program. Now, owls are busy catching rats and mice in the fields around the village of Tlogoweru. There is a huge upside: no need for chemical pesticides, which can harm not only rodents, but other creatures. In 2011, the Indonesian man began setting up boxes where the owls live. He is also raising owlets in the village. After about four months, the young birds are released. These facilities have raised more than owls. They have also raised awareness in the community about the importance of owls. "We raised awareness within our community by building homes for these owls. At the same time, government officials helped to create laws to protect these owls." In addition to controlling pests naturally, there is another upside to the program. His village is now a popular stop for eco-tourists. People interested in learning more about owls, wildlife protection and natural pest control come to his village to learn more. Do owls make good pets? For owls, awareness is good, but popularity is not. Because of the Harry Potter books and movies, owls are increasingly popular as pets in Indonesia. So, many are sold in local bird markets. However, owls are wild animals and may not be a good choice to keep around the home. Before buying an owl, experts warn people about the downsides of owning one as a pet. Owls are loud. They can require a lot of care and attention. More importantly, they can be aggressive and can cause damage or injury. Their sharp claws are made for catching small animals and can injure the owner. One Indonesian man, a father, did his homework. He knew all of these downsides. But that did not stop him from buying his daughter an owl ... or from getting hurt himself.   "As parents, we usually give our children what they want. That is, if we can. But before getting an owl, we had to learn more about the nature of an owl. And coincidentally, just recently, I got clawed." This is exactly the kind of situation Pujo Arto is trying to end. To date, his program has raised and released more than 2,000 birds. He hopes the program will continue to provide farmers owls for natural pest control. But Arto adds that he hopes his program also shows people that owls belong in the wild as natural predators not in the home as domestic pets. I'm Anna Matteo.   Faith Lapidus reported on this story for VOA News. Anna Matteo adapted it for Learning English writing additional information about owl conservation. George Grow was the editor. _______________________________________________________________ Words in this Story   downside – n. a part of something that you do not want or like : a drawback or disadvantage predator – n. an animal that lives by killing and eating other animals : an animal that preys on other animals rodent – n. a small animal (such as a mouse, rat, squirrel, or beaver) that has sharp front teeth upside – n. a part of something that is good or desirable : an advantage or benefit pesticide – n. a chemical that is used to kill animals or insects that damage plants or crops awareness – n. a realization, perception, or knowledge of something eco-tourist – n. one who tours natural habitats in a manner meant to minimize ecological impact pet – n. a domesticated animal kept for pleasure rather than utility aggressive – adj. ready and willing to fight, argue, etc. : feeling or showing aggression claw – n. a sharp curved part on the toe of an animal (such as a cat or bird) : claw – v.  to scratch, grip, or dig with claws or fingers coincidentally – adv. happening because of a coincidence : not planned domestic – adj. relating to or involving someone's home or family

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Actor Kevin Spacey Removed from New Movie

Actor Kevin Spacey is facing more career problems as the number of accusations of sexual wrongdoing against him increase. Friday, a major movie company said it planned to replace the actor in a film set for release next month. Sony Pictures says it will remove Spacey from the film project All the Money in the World. It says it will re-shoot his parts with Academy Award winning actor Christopher Plummer. Movie director Ridley Scott is working quickly to make the changes to the film in order to meet the planned release date of December 22. In the movie, Spacey played the late oil businessman J. Paul Getty. The film tells the story about the kidnapping of Getty’s grandson, John Paul Getty III, in 1973. Getty refused to pay for his grandson’s release. Sony announced earlier that it was withdrawing the movie from the American Film Institute film festival in Los Angeles. Several movie and television companies have cut ties with Spacey after the actor Anthony Rapp accused him of sexual assault. The incident is reported to have taken place in 1986 when Rapp was 14 years old. In a statement, Spacey said he did not remember such an event but that he was sorry if it happened. Since then, more than 10 men have accused Spacey of sexual wrongdoing. The movie and television streaming company Netflix has since dismissed Spacey from its series House of Cards and withheld another Spacey film. On Wednesday, a former television news reporter, Heather Unruh, accused Spacey of sexually attacking her son last year. The incident reportedly took place on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. Unruh says a criminal investigation is taking place. However, Nantucket police are barred from confirming or denying the case because it involves sexual assault accusations. Unruh said, “I just want to see Kevin Spacey go to jail.” She added that she wanted this “not just for my son, but for the many others.” British news reports say police in London are investigating sexual assault claims from 2008. At least two other men have accused Spacey of sexually molesting them when they were teenagers. I’m Lucija Millonig.   Kenneth Schwartz and Richard Green reported this story for VOA News. Mario Ritter adapted it for VOA Learning English. Caty Weaver was the editor. _______________________________________________________________ Words in This Story   assault –n. carrying out an act of violence or threatening to do violence against someone streaming –adj. related to send video content such as movies, television shows or live material over the internet harassment –n. to repeatedly have unwanted interactions with someone molesting –v. to harm someone in a sexual way We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments section, and visit our Facebook page.

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Let's Teach English Unit 10: Collaboration Through Persona Poems

In this lesson, students learn how to write a poem. They use a format the teacher calls a “persona poem.” See the whole unit at http://ift.tt/2hh1EfK

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