at St. Stephen’s Reformed Episcopal Church in Eldersburg, Md. Official practices are set to begin July 31. The football team currently includes 28 boys, while nine girls have signed up as cheerleaders.

The separation of school and sport is hardly a new concept. Already, some of the most elite teams in the country have very little to do with school – the basketball academies that regularly send players to the NBA and NCAA Division One programs aren’t exactly devoted to academics – and in Europe nearly all sporting competition revolves around athletic clubs, not schools, which has likely helped Europe surpass the United States in both academic and athletic performance.

Public schools that can’t teach children how to read or speak English are nothing new, but when a team fullEthiopia's Border Politics

As the Mengistu regime attempted to consolidate its rule, it had to cope with serious border problems, particularly with Somalia and Sudan. The point at issue with Somalia was the Ogaden region, an area that Mogadishu claimed as part of the historical Somali nation that had been seized by the Ethiopians during the colonial partition of the Horn of Africa. In fact, Ethiopia's only undefined boundary was the border it shared with the former Italian Somaliland. On maps drawn after 1950, this boundary is termed "Administrative Line". Upon gaining independence from European colonial rule in 1960, the inhabitants of the Republic of Somalia nurtured the hope that all Somali eventually would be united in a modern nation-state. Somali claims to the Ogaden, Djibouti, and parts of