Wild Eyes — the sailboat abandoned by American Abby Sunderland in her failed bid to circumnavigate the world solo as a 16-year-old — has been found floating off of Australia’s coast, nearly nine years after she was rescued in the Indian Ocean.
Seeing her boat again brought back a flood of emotions, says Sunderland, who is now 25.
“My heart skipped a beat. It brought back many memories — good and not so good — but it was neat to see it after so long,” she said, according to Australia’s ABC.
“It looked a little creepy, but that’s to be expected after so long.”
The capsized sailboat was noticed by a tuna-spotting plane roughly 11 miles south of Kangaroo Island, the South Australia Police said. That triggered a call for a helicopter and two nearby fishing boats to check out the craft; on the hull, Sunderland’s distinctive paintwork was clearly visible above a thick coating of barnacles.
Sunderland had been vying to become the youngest person to circumnavigate the world solo when she set out from her native California in early 2010. She sailed for thousands of miles, but brutal storms between Africa and Australia snapped her mast.
Photo: South Australia Police Caption: The hull of Wild Eyes — the sailboat Abby Sunderland used in her attempt to sail around the world solo — was found drifting off Australia’s Kangaroo Island.
Jack Silva didn’t know anything about how children learn to read. What he did know is that a lot of students in his district were struggling.
Silva is the chief academic officer for Bethlehem, Pa., public schools. In 2015, only 56 percent of third-graders were scoring proficient on the state reading test. That year, he set out to do something about that.
“It was really looking yourself in the mirror and saying, ‘Which 4 in 10 students don’t deserve to learn to read?’ ” he recalls.
Bethlehem is not an outlier. Across the country, millions of kids are struggling. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 32 percent of fourth-graders and 24 percent of eighth-graders aren’t reading at a basic level. Fewer than 40 percent are proficient or advanced.
One excuse that educators have long offered to explain poor reading performance is poverty. In Bethlehem, a small city in Eastern Pennsylvania that was once a booming steel town, there are plenty of poor families. But there are fancy homes in Bethlehem, too, and when Silva examined the reading scores he saw that many students at the wealthier schools weren’t reading very well either.
Silva didn’t know what to do. To begin with, he didn’t know how students in his district were being taught to read. So, he assigned his new director of literacy, Kim Harper, to find out.
A 2,300-year-old fortress that protected an ancient port called “Berenike” has been discovered in Egypt on the coast of the Red Sea by a Polish-American archaeological team.
Constructed at a time when Egypt was ruled by the Ptolemies, a dynasty of pharaohs descended from one of Alexander the Great’s generals, the fortifications are sizable.
“A double line of walls protected the western part of the fortress, while a single line sufficed farther to the east and north. Square towers were built at the corners and in strategic places where sections of the walls connected,” wrote archaeologists Marek Woźniakand Joanna Rądkowska in an article recently published online in the journal Antiquity.
The western part of the fort, which consists of double walls, faces inland, suggesting that the defenders were particularly concerned about an attack coming from that direction, Woźniak, of the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw, told Live Science. Read more.
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