Wednesday, January 29, 2014


News Clips For The Day



Six things we learned from the State of the Union – NBC
By Carrie Dann, NBC News

President Barack Obama may have made sweeping statements about his unfinished agenda on Tuesday night, but, when it came to specifics, the president used a scalpel rather than an axe when delivering his State of the Union message. 

The president put forward a series of relatively modest policy proposals that offered plenty for Democrats, but suggested little in the way of legacy-making ambitions. And he pulled some punches when it came to big ticket items like immigration and voting rights. 

Here are six takeaways from the big night: 

Carrots and sticks : It’s no secret that the president is frustrated with Republicans in Congress, whose resistance has foiled his plans for everything from immigration reform to the extension of long-term unemployment insurance. That exasperation was more than apparent in some parts of Obama’s speech, but he also urged cooperation and an optimistic outlook for solving the gridlock. Opponents likely heard his tone as patronizing and pained; fans probably heard patience and maturity. He sternly chided Republicans for the government shutdown and poked fun at Obamacare repeal efforts, but he also gave congressional Republicans wide berth on the issue of immigration and lauded conservative for backing voting rights reforms.  He devoted time to issues like patent reform and new trade proposals, things that many Republicans might be willing to play ball on. 

Looking to 2014 : As his party prepares for tough midterm elections, Obama offered plenty of items -- outside of Obamacare -- that Democrats can run on in 2014. He promoted access to education and improvements to international trade (without the controversial specifics that some in his party dislike). With lines like “Give America a raise” and “It’s time to do away with workplace policies that belong in a ‘Mad Men’ episode,” he created instant, stump-ready sound bites to plug a minimum wage hike and wage fairness for women. And he mentioned “opportunity” 12 times, underscoring Democrats’ message of economic fairness.  Aside from ongoing discomfort over proposed Iran sanctions that Obama says he will veto, there wasn’t much in this speech for Democrats to dislike. 

But, mostly small ball : While Obama did make sweeping statements about issues like climate change and gun violence -- hardly fertile areas for bipartisan compromise in an election year -- most of Obama’s “concrete, practical proposals” to help the economy were small in scope. Projects to improve access to broadband, create retirement savings bonds and reform federal training programs aren’t exactly sexy, even if they could positively impact many Americans’ lives. He repeated earlier declarations that he will use executive actions to bypass Congress -- including on guns, saying “America does not stand still -- and neither will I.”  But  the most specific executive proposals he laid out just weren’t the stuff of which headlines are made. 

Advertising, not apologizing, on Obamacare: After the disastrous launch of the HealthCare.Gov site last year, Obama held a lengthy and almost agonized press conference to apologize for the rollout. But that conciliatory tone was gone Tuesday night, with the president instead taking the opportunity of the big television audience to push Americans -- particularly young people -- to sign up for Obamacare. “Moms, get on your kids to sign up.  Kids, call your mom and walk her through the application,” he said. “It will give her some peace of mind – plus, she’ll appreciate hearing from you.”  He didn’t exactly treat GOP opponents of Obamacare with kid gloves either, urging them against more votes to outright repeal his signature domestic achievement. “The first forty were plenty. We got it.  We all owe it to the American people to say what we’re for, not just what we’re against,” he said. 

A gentle approach on immigration : As House Republicans prepare to consider a set of “principles” on the issue this week, Obama devoted only a paragraph of his 20-page speech to the issue of comprehensive immigration reform, his top second-term domestic agenda item. The brief mention -- devoid of any specifics about his priorities on how to treat undocumented immigrants inside the country’s borders -- may disappoint some pro-immigration activists. But Obama was also careful not to complicate the efforts of House GOP leaders to find a solution -- if there is one -- that can appease most Republicans and still make it to the president’s desk.


A transcendent moment for an American hero : The most memorable moment of the State of the Union, by far, was Obama’s callout to Sergeant First Class Cory Remsburg, a wounded veteran who was a guest of First Lady Michelle Obama. The lengthy and emotional standing ovation from every person in the chamber provided one powerful data point to back up Obama’s message that unity is still sometimes possible. But it also made the annual pomp and circumstance around what was a very modest State of the Union feel awfully small.



“Opponents likely heard his tone as patronizing and pained; fans probably heard patience and maturity.” “he also gave congressional Republicans wide berth on the issue of immigration and lauded conservative for backing voting rights reforms.” “He devoted time to issues like patent reform and new trade proposals, things that many Republicans might be willing to play ball on.” “to plug a minimum wage hike and wage fairness for women.” “Projects to improve access to broadband, create retirement savings bonds and reform federal training programs....”

The trouble with the State Of The Union address is that it's so long, however the above snippets highlight the news coverage on it. I first would like to say that I do really like the tendency that Obama has most of the time – he has occasionally made some sharp and pointed comments about various things – to be diplomatic, patient and “mature.” Maturity is something I really love to see, and is something that Biden, though he is usually very cute and entertaining, sometimes fails to show.

Voting rights – I'm glad to see that Obama thinks the Republicans have been behind voting rights reform, but I don't trust them not to make the voting rights more restrictive rather than more inclusive and fair. I know in Florida the Republican- ruled legislature has tended to insist on things like removing felons from the roles of voters after they are out of prison for a certain period of time and then failing to notify them that they could go and sign up to vote again, so those people have to be very careful to protect their rights. Many felons in Florida are black or Hispanic and also tend to vote Democratic, so the Republicans have effectively removed many Democrats from the list of registered voters. Likewise with the rule that ID must be a picture ID like a driver's license or even worse, requiring also a birth certificate. Many black people don't own cars and have never gone to the Tax Collector's office to get an official government ID. They are afraid of Democrats “stuffing the ballot box,” or illegal immigrants registering to vote, though there have been very few proven cases of that actually happening.

Minimum wage hikes and extensions or equal pay for women are things that the “conservatives” always fight. Being the party of big business, they are trying to please their constituency. They used to argue that men need more money because they have a wife and children to support, but when it is pointed out that many women are raising several children on their own with no husband, many Republicans argue that those women should get married! Bah!

Retirement Savings Bonds is not something I've heard before, and it sounds like it might make saving easier, since government savings bonds of the World War II era, at any rate, cost relatively little and matured to be worth a good deal more. Hopefully bonds will be issued again. There is a need for more plans to help people save for their retirement. I think employer plans are good, but it is possible for a person to cash their retirement plan out ahead of time and thus not have it when it is time to retire, plus many employers simply don't give any retirement plans. When finances get tight, it is tempting to cash their retirement out early. If the employee has been a long time federal government employee they probably won't have much money in the Social Security fund, so they are really up the creek without a paddle.

State of the Union messages are always so hopeful and full off clapping and standing ovations that it is possible to think that everybody there are completely happy with the actual state of the nation and the president's report, but when it's over the opposing party always gives their take on things with the aim to cut the president down. If you look closely, too, you can see that the standing ovations don't include everybody in the audience, with the opposing party grimly keeping their seats and with grimaces on some faces. I always watch it because I feel it's my duty, but my attempts to absorb all of it always fail. My mind begins to go blank before it's all over. It's just too long. Thank God for intrepid news reporters and analysts who will keep track of every point and present them for me to read!





Weatherman Jim Cantore wards off on-air ambush – NBC

By Alexander Smith, NBC News contributor

Meteorologist Jim Cantore has had to report on air while enduring some pretty extreme conditions. But during a broadcast from South Carolina’s College of Charleston on Tuesday night the weatherman was faced with an entirely different adversary when a young man ran up to him in the middle of a live broadcast.

Faced with an enthusiastic assailant who was letting out a lighthearted battle cry, Cantore didn't miss a beat, sticking out his knee and warding off the would-be ambusher.

Cantore was reporting for The Weather Channel on the rare winter storm which has caused chaos across a large part of the Deep South.
"Obviously, here at the College of Charleston, they are already having a good time," Cantore said, slightly perturbed but none the worse for wear.



Snow – we love it and we hate it. Nothing is more magical than a sky full of snow flakes. It's dizzying to see them falling toward us. I don't have that in Jacksonville, FL and I miss it. If we have to have cold weather, and we do, we should have beauty, too. Even freezing rain creates beauty, with the tree branches covered in crystal clear ice – they look like they're carved from glass. Yet snow and ice cause many automobile accidents and the weight of the ice pulls down power lines and tree branches. This year one of the northern mayors was on the news saying that his city had almost run out of their year's stockpile of salt already. They will have nothing when it snows again. But the snow has remained north of the Georgia border so far this year. Maybe I'll get a few flakes of snow before this unusually cold winter is over.





Jonathan Martin says he 'felt trapped' in Dolphins' locker room – NBC

By Tracy Connor, Staff Writer, NBC News

In his first interview since leaving the Miami Dolphins, NFL tackle Jonathan Martin says he felt "trapped" by bullying and decided it was best "just to remove myself from the situation."

"I'm a man. I'm a grown man. I've been in locker rooms. There's vulgar language in locker rooms," Martin told Football Night in America’s Tony Dungy in the exclusive sitdown.

"One instance doesn't bother me," Martin said of his former teammates' behavior. "It's the persistence of it. I wish I would have had more tools to solve my situation . . . but I didn't.

"I felt trapped like I didn't have a way to make it right. And it came down to the point where, you know, I thought it was best just to remove myself from the situation."

An excerpt of the interview aired on the Nightly News on Tuesday, and there will be more on TODAY on Wednesday. The full interview airs on NBCSN's “Pro Football Talk” on Wednesday at 6:30 p.m. ET. 

Martin, 24, who started playing for the Dolphins in 2012, left the team on Oct. 28, alleging he was harassed by teammates, including guard Richie Incognito, who was accused of leaving a voicemail with racial slurs and expletives.

Incognito, 30, was suspended Nov. 3 in the wake of the bullying scandal and has not played while an NFL probe, led by special investigator Ted Wells, is ongoing.
Martin's lawyer, David Cornwell, has said that his client "endured harassment that went far beyond the traditional locker room hazing."

“For the entire season-and-a-half that he was with the Dolphins, he attempted to befriend the same teammates who subjected him to the abuse with the hope that doing so would end the harassment. This is a textbook reaction of victims of bullying," Cornwell said in a statement in November.

"Despite these efforts, the taunting continued. Beyond the well-publicized voice mail with its racial epithet, Jonathan endured a malicious physical attack on him by a teammate, and daily vulgar comments."

Incognito, who is white, has said he's embarrassed about leaving the voicemail for Martin, who is African American, but insisted it was not malicious.
“I’m embarrassed by my actions. But what I want people to know is, the way Jonathan and the rest of the offensive line and how our teammates, how we communicate, it’s vulgar. It’s, it’s not right,” Incognito said in a November interview with Fox Sports.

“I understand why a lot of eyebrows get raised, but people don’t know how Jon and I communicate to one another,” he added.

He said that Martin had sent him a text that said, in an apparent joke, "I will murder your whole effing family.” Cornwell said that Martin has simply forwarded Incognito a widely disseminated Internet meme.

Wells has interviewed Martin, Incognito and others from the Dolphins — but it's unknown when his report on the scandal will be released.

Dolphins owner Stephen Ross meanwhile, said on Tuesday that he's spoken with the NFL and Wells about the report, and he's proud of the way the team handled the situation.
"I have an idea what will be in it," Ross said while speaking at a news conference to introduce the Dolphins' new general manager. "I haven't seen the report. I don't know exactly what his conclusion is. When it comes out, we'll do what has to be done. In my mind, I know what direction we're going ... The respect that we gained by how we handled the situation that took place here says a lot about this organization and the people that are running it."

Incognito becomes a free agent this winter. When asked if he or Martin will play for the Dolphins again, Ross was coy.
"I don't believe so — well, I can't say that," Ross said, adding with a chuckle, "Therefore I retract that." 




There is too much roughness in general in many professional sports. In an earlier article on the Martin affair it was stated that a coach had actually told Incognito to lean on Martin – they felt that he was not training and playing as hard and competitively as they wanted. I saw the Martin interview on NBC news, and Martin is a well-spoken and intelligent man. He may have qualms about bashing his head against another player, or receiving those hits himself. There has been a lot on the news about concussions and the long-term brain damage it causes. Maybe he is too intelligent to play football. I hope he goes back to college and gets an advanced degree to work in another field.






Scientists make a new type of stem cell, using a little acid – NBC
Maggie Fox NBC News


Japanese researchers have created a new type of stem cell just by pressuring normal cells in the body. This image shows a mouse embryo created using these cells, which are genetically engineered to glow green.

Scientists have made a whole new type of stem cell using little more than a little acid, and they say it may represent a way to skip all the complex and controversial steps that it now takes to make cells to regenerate tissues and organs.

The team in Japan includes some of the foremost experts in making what are called pluripotent stem cells — master cells that have the power to morph into any type of cells, from blood to bone to muscle. These master cells look and act like an embryo right after conception and, like a days-old embryo, have the power to generate new tissue of any type.

Making these powerful cells usually requires the use of embryos — something many disapprove of — or tricky mixtures of genes to turn back the clock.

While there’s not an immediate use for the discovery, it could add to the arsenal of tools that scientists can use in trying to find ways to repair the human body, the team reports in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

“It is also exciting to think about the new possibilities this finding offers, not only in areas like regenerative medicine but also perhaps in the study of senescence and cancer as well,” Haruko Obokata of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, told reporters in a conference call.

Obokata’s team worked with mice, and found they could get ordinary cells from baby mice to turn into pluripotent stem cells by bathing them in a slightly acidic solution. They call them stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency, or STAP, cells.

Other stem cells experts praised the work. “These breakthroughs are so impressive and potentially powerful — truly another dramatic game-changer,” said Dr. Gerald Schatten, a stem cell and genetic engineering expert at the University of Pittsburgh.
“If reproducible in humans, this will be a paradigm changer," said Dr. Robert Lanza of Massachusetts-based Advanced Cell Technology, a company developing stem cell-based treatments. 

“It also tells us that normal body cells have an amazing latent capacity, and raises the question ‘what else can our body's cells do under stress?’ That being said, there are a lot of things that work in mice that don't work in humans.”

Stem cells are the body’s master cells, and they’re found all through the body. But usually, they’re differentiated — on a clear road to become blood, or muscle, or nerve, with no turning back. These so-called adult stem cells are most commonly used to replace bone marrow in treating cancer.

What scientists want to do is start with a blank slate, taking cells from a patient that matches his or her DNA perfectly, and growing fresh bone marrow transplants, skin grafts or organs that could treat people without the fear of rejection.
One way to do this is to do what’s called therapeutic cloning — using someone’s cells to make a very early embryo and then harvesting those cells. But it’s almost impossible to do in people and extremely controversial because many people consider the process tantamount to creating a human life and then destroying it.

Scientists found another way to make similar cells called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) from ordinary pieces of human skin by injecting the genes that make a cell behave like an embryonic stem cell. But this process also isn’t straightforward or trouble-free.

Obokata and colleagues tried something far simpler and less complicated. They tried stressing cells to see what might happen. The idea comes from nature — crocodile eggs develop into either males or females based on temperature, for instance.

Less than half an hour in a slightly acidic solution turned mouse blood cells back into a stem-cell-like state. They injected these new cells into growing mouse embryos and the news cells mixed all through the growing fetal mouse, creating what’s called a chimera, an animal that’s a mix of two different animals.

“The ability to produce chimeras is a property that was previously thought to be exclusive to embryonic stem cells and iPS cells,” stem cell expert Austin Smith of Britain’s Cambridge University wrote in a commentary in Nature.

As with any pluripotent stem cell type, there’s a big danger — that the cells could turn into tumors, notes stem cell expert Dr. John Gearhart of the University of Pennsylvania. And the team will have to show this works on human cells.

And Schatten points out that cells behave differently in lab dishes than they do in the body. Something prevents people from regenerating a lost arm, for instance.
Another caveat: If this works as well in humans as it does in mice, it could offer another route to cloning human beings, Lanza noted. “This research could have serious ethical ramifications,” he said.




From Wikipedia, the term senescence refers to the aging process. According to this article the new stem cell process would provide “a way to skip all the complex and controversial steps that it now takes to make cells to regenerate tissues and organs.” Unfortunately, it also makes it easier to clone a human being, which so far is illegal in the US, though not in all countries. Whatever they use it for, this new kind of cell is another step forward in the research. Such improvements usually provide even more advantages than scientists at first predict. Knowledge builds on past knowledge, especially in science and technology.





$600k in U.S. taxpayer dollars buys medieval hospital in Afghanistan – NBC

By Jamieson Lesko, Producer, NBC News

KABUL, Afghanistan – Despite the United States spending nearly $600,000 in taxpayer dollars on Salang Hospital in Afghanistan’s Parwan province, the facility must still resort to medieval medical practices such as pulling teeth out with pliers.
Salang Hospital – the only medical facility servicing the mountainous community of approximately 50,000 – lacks essentials such as basic medical equipment, clean water, electricity and a working sewage system.

A comprehensive report released Wednesday by the Special Inspector for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a federal government watchdog, details the good intentions of the U.S. contract that was commissioned in 2009 to build the hospital, and tries to get to the bottom of what went wrong.

Teeth pulled with pliers
On a recent visit to the facility, NBC News observed the hospital’s desperate staff trying to administer care to patients like 12-year-old Khorshid, who goes by only one name. She came in with a toothache and left traumatized.  
“We have a total of six pieces of dental equipment,” said Dr. Said Maqsoud Sarwy, as he laid the rusty tools down on a table. He pushed a chair up against the wall, sat Khorshid down and poked around her top row of teeth with a pair of unsterilized scissors to determine which one hurt the most.

“We don’t have what we need to check the teeth for cavities,” he frowned. “We don’t even have the equipment to help us determine whether we should extract a tooth or not.” That said, he decided to pull one of hers out.

The girl was shivering with fear, and began crying after the doctor gave her a shot in her gums. Another man held her still as Sarwy swiftly tilted her head back, opened her mouth and yanked out one of her teeth with a pair of pliers.

Her tooth – along with some bloody gauze – were thrown in a filthy bucket and she was sent home. Compared to the other two patients NBC observed in the hospital on the day of our visit, she appeared to fare the best.

Best intentions
According to the SIGAR report, the USFOR-A (U.S. Forces-Afghanistan) commissioned a local Afghan contractor, Shafi Hakimi Construction Company, to do the job in 2009 through a program designed to give Afghans jobs. 

A 20-bed hospital with surgery and X-ray rooms, a lab, a pharmacy, dental, pediatric and mental wards was supposed to be built.

Instead, the resulting structure is a mostly unused, understaffed, inadequately supplied, structurally deficient building at risk of collapse in the second most seismic zone in an earthquake-prone country.

“They should have had a team of observers here, making sure the work was done properly and that they were using the right materials,” the hospital’s administrator, Arsala, who only goes by one name, told NBC News.

“Promises that were made to us here were broken,” said one of the nurses, Arzoo Mohammadi. She is part of a small staff that comprises less than 17 percent of the proposed staff that was supposed to be hired to provide care to the rugged mountain community.  

Mohammadi worries that the hospital has no ability to perform surgeries. Besides having no surgeons on staff, the “operating room” lacks even the most basic equipment. The hospital actually has to use its ambulance to send critical patients away from their facility to get care elsewhere, she said.

Salang Hospital is also in desperate need of an OB-GYN specialist to help mothers giving birth. The day NBC visited the facility, the “delivery room” consisted of one dirty, rusty bed standing in a puddle of flood water next to a moldy, wet wall. The water was leaking from the shoddy roof, where snow was melting. When babies are born here, the staff told NBC News, they are washed in untreated river water.

SIGAR’s report commends the small staff for “making the best of a limited facility.” They simply do what they have to, the staff said, in order to get by. That includes jerry-rigging wires to a neighbor’s property to keep the hospital running at night.
“We are working with just three light bulbs here,” the hospital’s supervisor, Dr. Khan Mohammad, told NBC News. SIGAR reports that when its inspectors visited the facility, the hospital staff told them they were "paying the equivalent of about $18 a month of their own money” in order to keep those three lights on.

Military aware of problems
USFOR-A has been aware of the many issues plaguing the hospital since it conducted an inspection of the property in mid-2012, said the report, which was sent to top U.S. military commanders, including Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, who commands all international forces in Afghanistan.

Despite documenting its problems and requesting additional funds to rectify the problems it identified, it issued a final payment to the builder before handing control of the beleaguered hospital over to Afghan officials.

In documents obtained by NBC News, USFOR-A said that due to “reduced combat forces, threats in the area, and reduced technical engineering assets… it could not conduct a re-inspection.”

On Tuesday, the day before SIGAR’s inspection report was publicly released, USFOR-A’s public affairs office issued a press release praising the facility, titled, “U.S.-funded, historic Salang Hospital providing critical care to mountain villagers.” 
In it, USFOR-A said the hospital “represents a significant step forward in medical services for local Afghans who previously had access to minimal medical care.”
The statement acknowledges the SIGAR inspection report citing incomplete construction and safety issues, but asserts that according to the province’s director for the Ministry of Public Health, the hospital’s capabilities include “internal medicine, pediatric, maternity, dentistry, nursing care, immunization, pharmaceutical and overnight hospitalization services.”

John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, told NBC News, “either no one from USFOR-A has actually visited this facility recently or USFOR-A is living in an alternate reality. SIGAR inspectors went there and what we saw was a decrepit facility, riddled with problems and underserving the community.”




This is simply scandalous. I assume there will be a Senate or Congressional investigation of the matter, with lots of news in the near future. It shows the US as being completely irresponsible, and if other US actions have been this bad, shows why the people there hate Americans.




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55 Bodies Exhumed At Reform School Site In Florida – NPR
by Bill Chappell
­
Researchers say they have exhumed the remains of 55 people at Florida's Dozier School for Boys, a notorious reform school that closed in 2011. The total found by University of South Florida researchers represents 24 more bodies than official records say should be there.

"They also found remains under a road, under a tree and spread throughout surrounding forest," reports The Tampa Bay Times. "Only 13 were found in the area marked as a cemetery with pipe crosses, which is on a forgotten corner of campus."

For years, the Dozier School has inspired stories of horror and sadness, told by the men who were sent there as children and by the relatives who sometimes never saw their son or brother alive after they arrived at Dozier.

Around 300 men have spoken out about their experiences at the reform school in the small panhandle town of Mariana in the 1950s and 1960s. And they said they were certain that some of their schoolmates had died as a result of the treatment they received.

NPR's Greg Allen gave us some background on the institution last year:
"They're called the White House Boys — a group of men, many now in their 60s and 70s — who were sent to the Dozier school when they were children. They take the name from a small white building on the school grounds where boys were beaten. Jerry Cooper was sent to the school in 1961. He says guards beat the boys using a leather strap."
"These were not spankings. These were beatings — brutal beatings," Cooper told Greg.
In a recent examination of the site, USF researchers used ground-penetrating radar to locate the bodies over the course of three months.

"Locating 55 burials is a significant finding, which opens up a whole new set of questions for our team," USF team leader Erin Kimmerle said, in a news release about the findings. "At this time, we know very little about the burials and the children in terms of who specifically was buried there, their ages or ancestry, as well as the timing and circumstances of their deaths."

Ovell Krell, whose brother died at Dozier more than 70 years ago — he was reportedly buried there before the family could go view his body — said she never believed the school's version of events, which claimed her brother, who was 14 when he died, had simply crawled under a house and not survived.

"It would be the answer to many a years of prayer" to find him, Krell tells the Tampa Bay Times. "I want to get him out of there and put him between my mother and daddy in Auburndale."

The Dozier school and site has repeatedly been the target of state and federal inquiries. The USF team has been working to find the boys' remains since at least 2012, when it announced the discovery of 19 more graves than had been reported
To help identify the bodies the USF team found in its recent work, the researchers will compare samples with DNA collected from the families of boys who died at Dozier. The team says it recovered "bones, teeth and numerous artifacts in every one of the 55 burials" whose discovery was announced today on the USF website.

"According to state records, 96 boys died while incarcerated at the Dozier School for Boys," CBS News reports.



I wonder what crimes the boys had committed to cause them to be sent there, and who sent them. It is shocking that this reform school was still open in 2011. What state government officials, if any, were aware of it and was there any oversight? The following is an excerpt from a long article on Wikipedia, which is recommended reading.

Florida School for Boys
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Florida School for Boys


Location
Marianna, Florida, United States


Information
School type
Reform school
Established
January 1, 1900 (1900-01-01)
Opened
1900
Status
for sale
Closed
June 30, 2011 (2011-06-30)
Gender
Male
Age
8 to 21
Enrollment
100-564
Campus size
159 acres (64 ha)
Campus type
Rural

The Florida School for Boys, also known as the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys (AGDS), was a reform school operated by the state of Florida in the panhandle town of Marianna from January 1, 1900, to June 30, 2011.[1][2] For a time, it was the largest juvenile reform institution in the United States.[3] A second campus was opened in the town of Okeechobee in 1955. Throughout its 111-year history, the school gained a reputation for abuse, beatings, rapes, torture, and even murder of students by staff. Despite periodic investigations, changes of leadership, and promises to improve, the allegations of cruelty and abuse continued. Many of the allegations were confirmed by separate investigations by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement in 2010 and the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice in 2011.[4] State authorities closed the school permanently in June 2011.


This is the kind of “conservative” thinking that I hate – these boys were simply “throw aways” to those running the boys home, and the State of Florida took its time about closing the place. It's absolutely nauseating.