The Keshet Dance Company uses dance to teach literacy, math and conflict-resolution skills to 250 incarcerated youths at the New Mexico state juvenile detention center.

The Harmony Project in Los Angeles provides intensive, year-round music instruction, choir and orchestra programs, to inner-city children from low-income families.

These are just two of the 19 after-school programs to which first lady Michelle Obama presented a 2009 “Coming Up Taller Award” in a White House ceremony November 4. The award, which honors arts and humanities programs for underserved children, comes with a $10,000 prize for each recipient.

“Each of your programs is using achievement in the arts as a bridge to achievement in life,” said Mrs. Obama, the honorary chairman of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, which sponsors the Coming Up Taller awards in partnership with three federal agencies.

Water use per person in the U.S. is down nearly 30 percent from consumption levels thirty years ago — the remarkable result of more efficient use.

Numbers on total water use released last week by the U.S Geological Survey, which every five years examines water use of all kinds, residential, commercial, agricultural and industrial, also show that the nation used slightly less water in 2005 than it did in 2000.

“This is stunning news,” says Dr. Peter Gleick, President of the Pacific Institute, in a San Francisco Chronicle column on Thursday:

“We are growing more food with less water, and irrigation demand is down. We are producing more goods and services with less water, and industrial demand is down. It used to take 200 tons of water to make a ton of steel. Now steel plants in the U.S. use less than 20 tons of water to make a ton of steel — a 90% reduction.”

Photo courtesy of Sun Star

For the first time in its 150 year history, Chinatown will have a Chinese-American representative on the City Council, as Margaret Chin beat her Republican opponent in a landslide in yesterdays election. It is a dramatic win in New York City, where no Asian-Americans held elected office just eight years ago, even though the downtown Manhattan neighborhood is one of the biggest Chinese communities outside Asia.

Chin beat incumbent Alan Gerson in a Democratic run-off on Sept. 29, after a recent primary in which another Asian-American was running in a four-way race for comptroller, the city’s chief financial officer and one of its top three elected positions. Several other Asian-Americans were seeking council seats, and the poll brought out many first-time Asian voters.

Chin, whose family emigrated from Hong Kong in 1963, when she was 9, is a community organizer and immigrant advocate who speaks three Chinese dialects.

“People want to get involved and want to be part of the mainstream and want to make sure that the community that they come from is represented,” Chin said. “The dynamics of the city are changing.”