The memorial planned for the World Trade Center site seems finally to have gotten some significant donations.
More than $300 million in private money has been raised, $165 million of it in the six months since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over the fund raising.

That’s good news. There’s been too much squabbling over this memorial — over the design, the placement of the victims’ names. It is now under construction and is scheduled to open in 2009.
Private fund raising had been stalled at just over $130 million.
The memorial will cost more than $700 million. The World Trade Center Memorial Foundation originally wanted to raise $500 million but now is aiming for $350 million. Government funds will make up the difference.
The memorial, called “Reflecting Absence,� will have two reflecting pools where the towers stood and waterfalls and it will be surrounded by trees.

PHOTO: An artist’s rendering supplied by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation shows a ground level view of the proposed redesign of the World Trade Center memorial. (Photo by The Associated Press)

Behind the debate over where sex offenders should be allowed to live are questions about who they are.
Here’s some information from a report called “Sexual Assault of Young Children as Reported to Law Enforcement: Victim, Incident and Offender Characteristics.� It was written by Howard N. Snyder of the National Center for Juvenile Justice in 2000.
There’s data on how often the attacker is a relative compared to a stranger.

For children up to the age of five, 48.6 percent of the assaults involved a family member, 48.3 percent an acquaintance and only 3.1 percent a stranger.
For those 6 to 11 years old, family members were involved in 42.4 percent of the cases, acquaintances in 52.9 percent and strangers in 4.7 percent.
And for the oldest, 12 to 17 years old, family members were at 24.3 percent, acquaintances, 66.0 percent and strangers 9.8 percent.

For the youngest children, most sexual assault offenders were relatives. For victims older than five, most were not family members but were somehow known to the child. Strangers were the least likely to involved.

There are other findings in the report about victims and their attackers.

The shootings at Virginia Tech put the nor’easter in perspective.
Not that I’d like to be pumping out a submerged home, or facing a ruined business, but the story out of Virginia is just horrible.

Here’s a link to “The Collegiate Times,”:http://collegemedia.com a student-run newspaper at the college.

Visit Tibbetts Brook Park in Yonkers on Sunday, April 22, and you can get compact florescent bulbs for free.

Or free compost to take home. And watch a compost-making demonstration while you’re there.

It’s Westchester County’s Earth Day celebration and it is featuring some concrete steps you can take if you want to make the county greener and cleaner.

The bulb give-away is intended to encourage you to use CFLs in place of incandescent bulbs to save energy and reduce greenhouse gases.

Old cell phones will be collected for Verizon Wireless’ HopeLine Project, which recycles phones for domestic violence victims.

Experts from the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Westchester will be there to answer your gardening questions.

The day’s program is from 11 a.m. until 3 p.m. Admission and parking are free.

In the next several months, Westchester County’s Global Warming Task Force is supposed to produce a plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting sustainable development.

New York City has similar plans. Its goal is to reduce emissions by 30 percent by 2030.

A study released yesterday showed that the city now produces nearly 1 percent of the country’s greenhouse gas emission. Nearly 80 percent came from buildings.

On Saturday for Step It Up, a national day on global warming, a variety of environmental groups will sponsor a day-long gathering at Rainbeau Ridge Farm in Bedford Hills. There will be a hike through Beaver Dam Sanctuary, demonstrations booths and information tables.

The farm is at 49 David’s Way. The events run from noon to 3 p.m., with a rally for 2 p.m.

Click “here”:http://stepitup2007.org for more information on this and other Step It Up events across the country.

TV turn-off week is this month, April 23 through April 29. The idea is to read, exercise, spend time with your family and friends, anything but plop yourself down in front of your television set.

That can’t be a bad idea. Here are some funny and not-so-funny statistics presented by the Center for Screen-Time Awareness. They come from the Nielson 2006 figures.

There are 2.55 people in the typical American household, and 2.73 televisions in those households.

“We are a society of more televisions that people!” the center says.

Plus the typical American watches on average 4 hours and 35 minutes of television each day.

The typical home has the television set on for more than 8 hours every day.

That’s way too much TV and no interesting dinner conversation.

TV-Turnoff Network, which sponsors the yearly event, has also compiled these quotes from famous people about television—all intended to make you consider skipping your favorite shows for a week.

“I do want to emphatically stress that there is much more to life than the boring, degrading, demeaning fare on the boob tube. I urge the American people to use this week to break your addiction to television. Just say no!”—Sen. Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, on the floor of the U.S. Senate

“Television is a chewing gum for the eyes. ”—Frank Lloyd Wright

“We have reconstructed the Tower of Babel, and it is a television antenna: a thousand voices producing a daily parody of democracy, in which everyone’s opinion is afforded equal weight regardless of substance or merit.”—Ted Koppel

And finally from Dr. David Satcher, former U.S. surgeon general: “We are raising the most overweight generation of youngsters in American history….This week is about saving lives.”

So mark it on your calendar. How could it hurt?

Over the weekend, a reader wrote to criticize my use of the so-called “first black president� to describe former President Bill Clinton.

For those of you who didn’t see Norman E. Gaines Jr.’s “Letter to the Editor� on Saturday, he asked in part if I meant: “that the first ‘black president’ would be a liar, an adulterer, a poor father, and a man who would publicly drag his family and nation through a sordid affair with a subordinate?�

The phrase was famously used by the author Toni Morrison in 1998, when she defended Clinton in a New Yorker magazine article during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

“Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs.: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President,� she wrote. “Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving from Arkansas.�

As Clinton came under attack, she continued, “The message was clear ‘No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved.�

In the years since, the phrase has been used widely — often no longer in the context of Clinton’s impeachment or without the edge it had in the original essay.

In 2001, when Clinton was honored by the Congressional Black Caucus, its then chairwoman Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, said Clinton, “took so many initiatives he made us think for a while we had elected the first black president.�

The USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham wrote of Morrison’s essay in 2005 that some whites found her “tongue in cheek suggestion� condescending, more than a few blacks found it offensive. “But among those who have had the highest office in this land, Bill Clinton by far comes closer than any other to deserving the title of first black president,� he said.

Still, before I use the phrase again, I think I’ll remember what Morrison was writing about and when.

I have a wonderful photograph of Jane Goodall taped up over my desk. She’s sitting with a chimpanzee named Freud at Gombe National Park in Tanzania and the two of them seem to be in conversation. If there were any doubts about how closely related man is to the great apes, this is the picture to put them to rest.
Goodall will be one of the speakers at a conference next week called “Being Fearless.” It’s sponsored by the Omega Institute, a non-profit educational center in Rhinebeck though the conference will be held at the Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan.
Goodall seems a good choice. Not only did she set out on a grand adventure in 1960 when she was 26 and arrived on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in East Africa to study chimpanzees but she says she remains hopeful today. Look on her Web site at the “Jane Goodall Institute”:http://www.janegoodall.org for her reasons why.

The conference is scheduled for April 13 until 15. The first, held four years ago, was designed to help New Yorkers struggling after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Goodall will be featured along with former Vice President Al Gore, author Nora Ephron, and columnist and blogger Arianna Huffington. Not for everyone obviously, but if you’re interested, you can click “here”:http://www.beingfearless.org/schedule.html for information about tickets and cost.

On Wednesday, I wrote about the need to expand New York’s bottle bill to include water and other non-carbonated drinks, iced tea for example and juices.

Some readers disagreed and argued instead for putting more effort into recycling.

Here’s an idea from New York City. The Bloomberg administration has begun putting out recycling bins in public places—not only spots like Union Square Park on 14th Street but also the Whitehall and Saint George terminals of the Staten Island Ferry. The program will run for three months and if it’s successful, the city will expand it.

You can already find recyling bins in parks around here, but maybe others aspects of New York City’s experiment could work in some of the downtown areas.

A group of professional women will donate $4,000 tomorrow to a program for rape victims in Westchester County.

The money will go to something called SANE Nurses — sexual assault nurse examiners, who provide medical treatment to sexual assault victims and help collect and safeguard evidence to be used to prosecute their attackers. Last year, the nurses were able to provide 50 forensic medical exams to women who went to emergency departments after being assaulted.

The professional women are members of The Zonta Club of Westchester. They raised the money during an annual rape and violence eradication walk (RAVE) which took place last November.

I had never heard of Zonta. It dates to 1919 and began in Buffalo, the idea of Marian de Forest, a playwright and journalist. The group was originally called Zhonta, a word meaning honest and trustworthy from the Lakhota language of the Sioux.

Today, it’s Zonta International, and it works toward improving the status of women throughout the world. It calls violence against women one of the most pervasive and least recognized human rights violations — from prenatal sex selection to genital mutilation to dowry abuse to rape and trafficking.

It’s good to see women fighting back on behalf of other women.

The ceremony will take place tomorrow morning at the offices of Westchester County Executive Andy Spano. Victims Assistance Services and the Westchester District Attorney’s Office will be also be there.