Monday, April 6, 2015


News Clips For The Day

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/isis-syria-military-offensive-yarmouk-palestinian-refugee-camp-damascus/

"Beyond inhumane" battle for refugee camp in Syria
CBS/AP
April 6, 2015

Photograph – ISIS militants engage in street-to-street fighting in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp, in southern Damascus, Syria, in an unverified video posted online April 5, 2015.

BEIRUT -- Shelling and sporadic clashes struck a Palestinian refugee camp under attack by Islamic extremists in the Syrian capital Monday, a situation that a U.N. official described as "beyond inhumane."

Hatem al-Dimashqi, an activist based in an area just south of Damascus, said the Yarmouk camp was under attack Monday. Both Al-Dimashqi and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) also said Syrian government's air force has dropped several barrel bombs on the camp since Sunday.

CBS News' George Baghdadi reports that, according to Palestinian and Syrian sources, the Syrian government was planning an offensive to wrest control of the sprawling camp from the militants within a couple days.

Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants stormed the camp Wednesday, marking the extremist group's deepest foray yet into Damascus.

Palestinian officials and Syrian activists said they were working with rivals from the al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, the Nusra Front, but recent reports suggested the two groups, which have fought bloody battles against each other in other parts of Syria, were clashing around Yarmouk.

Nusra said in a statement that it was taking a neutral stance in the camp.

By most accounts from inside Syria, ISIS was in control of the camp, and its fighters were taking up positions around it's perimeter, clashing mostly with Syrian government fighters.

Chris Gunness, a spokesman for the U.N. agency that supports Palestinian refugees known as UNRWA, told The Associated Press in Barcelona late Sunday that the agency has not been able to send any food nor any convoys into the camp since the fighting started.

"That means that there is no food, there is no water and there is very little medicine," he said. "The situation in the camp is beyond inhumane. People are holed up in their houses, there is fighting going on in the streets. There are reports of ... bombardments. This has to stop and civilians must be evacuated."

He said 93 people have been evacuated from the camp so far.

Some reports said as many as 400 families -- around 2,000 people -- had managed to escape the camp during the weekend towards the capital's Zahira district, which is under control of the Syrian army.

SOHR said at least 26 people had been killed in Yarmouk since Wednesday, but the Al-Arabiya television network quoted local medical sources as saying the death toll was closer to 200, with most victims being civilians.

The United Nations says around 18,000 civilians, including a large number of children, remain trapped in Yarmouk. The camp has been under government siege for nearly two years, leading to starvation and illnesses. The camp also has witnessed several rounds of ferocious and deadly fighting between government forces and militants.

Gunness said the camp has been under siege for nearly two years, adding that "things were bad and things got worse when the fighting engulfed the camp."




“Shelling and sporadic clashes struck a Palestinian refugee camp under attack by Islamic extremists in the Syrian capital Monday, a situation that a U.N. official described as "beyond inhumane." Hatem al-Dimashqi, an activist based in an area just south of Damascus, said the Yarmouk camp was under attack Monday. Both Al-Dimashqi and the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) also said Syrian government's air force has dropped several barrel bombs on the camp since Sunday. …. By most accounts from inside Syria, ISIS was in control of the camp, and its fighters were taking up positions around it's perimeter, clashing mostly with Syrian government fighters. …. Palestinian officials and Syrian activists said they were working with rivals from the al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, the Nusra Front, but recent reports suggested the two groups, which have fought bloody battles against each other in other parts of Syria, were clashing around Yarmouk. …. Chris Gunness, a spokesman for the U.N. agency that supports Palestinian refugees known as UNRWA, told The Associated Press in Barcelona late Sunday that the agency has not been able to send any food nor any convoys into the camp since the fighting started. He said 93 people have been evacuated from the camp so far. Some reports said as many as 400 families -- around 2,000 people -- had managed to escape the camp during the weekend towards the capital's Zahira district, which is under control of the Syrian army. …. The United Nations says around 18,000 civilians, including a large number of children, remain trapped in Yarmouk. The camp has been under government siege for nearly two years, leading to starvation and illnesses. The camp also has witnessed several rounds of ferocious and deadly fighting between government forces and militants. Gunness said the camp has been under siege for nearly two years, adding that "things were bad and things got worse when the fighting engulfed the camp."

The ethnic and religious war has moved into Damascus and also Yemen in the last week. So far the US isn't involved, but there is a great humanitarian need at the city of Yarmouk and perhaps we can at least send in some food got those who are trapped there. UNRWA, a pro-Palestinian UN organization are watching the situation. The people there have been under attack for some two years and there is starvation and illness. The attackers are apparently Syrian extremists identified in this article as ISIS, who are under attack from the Syrian government. Civilians are dying and apparently helpless. I dread to see ISIS taking over more and more territory.





http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-social-worker-in-the-cop-car/

​The social worker in the cop car
By KATTI GRAY CBS NEWS
April 6, 2015

*48 Hours' Crimesider is pleased to announce that we have begun a publishing partnership with The Crime Report, a non-profit criminal justice news site run by the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

At the Houston Police Department, a licensed clinical social worker or caseworker rides along when police answer an emergency call regarding a person presumed to be mentally ill. Some 30 of those ride-along professionals now work out of that department's relatively new Mental Health Division.

In Wisconsin, the Madison Police Department Mental Health Liaison Program has similar pairings of health clinicians and cops, otherwise known as crisis intervention response teams.

The teams in those two cities reflect an innovative approach to handling police encounters with mentally ill persons that is picking up traction around the country.

The U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), which supports the Houston and Madison initiatives, is also monitoring other BJA-supported "specialized police response" demonstration sites in Los Angeles; Portland, Maine; Salt Lake City, Utah; and the University of Florida. Together, the six pilot programs are expected to provide new law enforcement tools and techniques aimed at steering mentally ill persons suspected to be lawbreakers toward medical treatment whenever that's deemed more appropriate than locking them up.

"It takes a set of skills that often is very different--sometimes even opposed to--the skill set that officers would apply to calls for service where a crime has been a committed. Coming onto a scene, even a police uniform can create unnecessary conflict ... involving someone with a mental disorder," said Gerard Murphy, deputy director of the Council of State Governments Justice Center National Initiatives division..

Jails and the Mentally Ill

The six programs are operating at a time when several recent studies shed new light on an old reality: Jails and, to a lesser extent, prisons, continue to function as holding facilities and sometimes as treatment centers for persons who aren't getting--or aren't submitting to--community-based medical treatment.

Lt. Robert Henry, who supervises the Harris County Sheriff's Office crisis intervention response teams, plucked one example from what he says is a flurry of real-life tales of mentally troubled individuals that his Houston-based agency has catalogued.

There's "the person who put the TV in a cart at Walmart, didn't try to hide that fact and walked straight out the door with the TV," Henry said. "When the sales clerk caught up with him, he said 'I'm receiving satellite communications from God. This TV doesn't belong to you.'"
Henry continued: "In the past, we threw that person in jail. We focused on the criminal component of the event, rather than looking at the person ... He's got an active diagnosis of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. And it used to be that after we arrested that person, and then let that person out of jail, we'd say just 'Good luck.'"

Instead, law enforcement officers and health workers who form a front line in jail diversion programs are now fulfilling their respective duties in tandem.

The officer, for example, does a criminal background check, while the ride-along counselor, social worker or caseworker is trolling his or her laptop for medical records and signs of where medical treatment fell apart.

Dispatching a Crisis Team

Whether a crisis team rolls out depends mainly upon answers to the standard questions posed by 911 dispatchers, which are designed to assess the mental stability of individuals who are the subject of emergency calls.

While not new, crisis teams have gained popularity.

Now-retired Memphis Police Department Maj. Sam Cochran developed the University of Memphis-based Crisis Intervention Training Center and is largely credited with being a driving force of crisis intervention, beginning in the 1980s.

Texas' Harris County Sheriff's Office launched intervention teams in 2011, partnering with clinicians from the Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority of Harris County. In 2013, the Houston Police Department created its stand-alone mental health division, assigning a police captain to oversee it, building on the establishment of crisis teams five years earlier.

"Through the relationship, police posture has changed," said licensed counselor Ann Macleod, the mental health authority's program director for the crisis intervention response teams.

"When an officer and a clinician arrive at someone's home or someone's scene, they are very empathetic. They are not charging in. It's not uncommon for an officer and clinician to sit at dining room table to talk [a distressed person] through it for an hour and a half. No one needed an arrest warrant. They needed someone to listen."

Since 2011, 990 of the 7,699 emergency calls to Harris County sheriff deputies that involved persons with mental illness who could have been charged with a crime, arraigned and possibly faced trial, resulted instead in those persons being diverted into treatment and not charged, department data show.

Another example: the Houston Police Department cites the case of one chronically mentally ill man with schizophrenia on whom the county had spent $142,241 over the course of 18 arrests, 32 separate contacts with the police, 12 separate psychiatric clinic admissions, and jail and prison stays that, combined, lasted for about eight months.

After two years in the diversion program, which hinged on medical oversight and other support services he received in a personal care home, that figure dropped to zero, the department reports. A former college scholarship athlete, the individual eventually enrolled in junior college, finished barber's college, and was preparing to take his barber-licensing exam.

The Need for Better Police Training

With that in mind, in 2010, the Council of State Governments issued Improving Responses to People with Mental Illness: Tailoring Law Enforcement Initiatives to Individual Jurisdictions, a report commissioned by the Bureau of Justice Assistance.

The report recommended that officers whose primary assignments do not involve crisis work be aware of the network of social and other support services often required to keep mentally ill persons out of the criminal justice system. Most persons with mental illness take their meds and manage reasonably well day to day, but for those who are at risk of becoming involved with law enforcement, officers should summon those with proper expertise in dealing with them.

"We're not training people to be diagnosticians," said Capt. Kristen Roman, community outreach commander in Madison's police department. "But we are at least trying to get them an understanding of what these illnesses look like.

"What are our processes? What are the things that, as police officers, we can do? What are the statutes that guide involuntary hospitalizations or, as we call them, emergency detentions?"

Nevertheless, the evolving system of mental health diversions is hardly foolproof, said Risdon Slate, Florida Southern College criminology department chairman and author of The Criminalization of Mental Illness.

"You can have all the training in the world, but if you don't have adequate treatment services in the community, what are you going to divert them to?" asked Slate, a National Alliance on Mental Illness board member who manages the bipolar disorder with which he was diagnosed 1986 through healthy living and medication. He himself was jailed briefly prior to that diagnosis.

"The problem in all of this is (that) the system that cannot say 'no' [is] the jail system. It's still true that, in many places, officers often find it more expedient to take someone to jail rather than to a hospital or crisis stabilization unit.

"They realize some private hospitals won't take these individuals in without insurance or if they've been violent in the past or are substance abusers, too, which sometimes is the case."

Far From Perfect

Observers agree that the diversion system is far from perfect.

Harris County's Henry keenly recalls a woman with a history of mental illness whom he thought he'd gently persuaded to lay down the weapon she'd turned on herself.

"She looked at me, smiled, then pulled the trigger," said Henry, whose book-in-progress, Protecting Both Sides of Badge: When Mental Illness and Law Enforcement Collide, aims to be a guide for law enforcement officials and families of justice-involved people with mental illness.

While there are tragedies in this line of interventionist policing, there are also examples of what counselor Macleod from the Harris County's mental health agency describes as attainable success.

"The politicians want to hear the data [about outcomes and cost-savings]," she said. "But real people in the community--myself included--want to hear about how all of this impacts individuals.

"Here's what I see: There was a specific individual living in an abandoned home, disowned by her family [who was] very, very mentally ill. Many people, many times, had called the police on her because they were concerned and afraid.

"Instead of arresting her, we were able to ... eventually get her into services. She stabilized on medication. An optometrist got her eyeglasses. An endocrinologist helped with her unmanaged diabetes, taught her about maintaining good nutrition, and how that helped with her medications.

"She actually got her own apartment and started taking Spanish lessons.

"The big thing in most of these individuals' lives is just to have a case manager available for them because so many, over their lifetime of having a diagnosis, had come in and out of their lives but not been much help."

This article originally appeared in The Crime Report




“At the Houston Police Department, a licensed clinical social worker or caseworker rides along when police answer an emergency call regarding a person presumed to be mentally ill. Some 30 of those ride-along professionals now work out of that department's relatively new Mental Health Division. In Wisconsin, the Madison Police Department Mental Health Liaison Program has similar pairings of health clinicians and cops, otherwise known as crisis intervention response teams. The teams in those two cities reflect an innovative approach to handling police encounters with mentally ill persons that is picking up traction around the country. …. Texas' Harris County Sheriff's Office launched intervention teams in 2011, partnering with clinicians from the Mental Health and Mental Retardation Authority of Harris County. In 2013, the Houston Police Department created its stand-alone mental health division, assigning a police captain to oversee it, building on the establishment of crisis teams five years earlier. …. "When an officer and a clinician arrive at someone's home or someone's scene, they are very empathetic. They are not charging in. It's not uncommon for an officer and clinician to sit at dining room table to talk [a distressed person] through it for an hour and a half. No one needed an arrest warrant. They needed someone to listen." …. "We're not training people to be diagnosticians," said Capt. Kristen Roman, community outreach commander in Madison's police department. "But we are at least trying to get them an understanding of what these illnesses look like. …. Nevertheless, the evolving system of mental health diversions is hardly foolproof, said Risdon Slate, Florida Southern College criminology department chairman and author of The Criminalization of Mental Illness. "You can have all the training in the world, but if you don't have adequate treatment services in the community, what are you going to divert them to?" asked Slate, a National Alliance on Mental Illness board member who manages the bipolar disorder with which he was diagnosed 1986 through healthy living and medication. He himself was jailed briefly prior to that diagnosis.”

“It's still true that, in many places, officers often find it more expedient to take someone to jail rather than to a hospital or crisis stabilization unit. "They realize some private hospitals won't take these individuals in without insurance or if they've been violent in the past or are substance abusers, too, which sometimes is the case." Given the complexity of mental illnesses and the difficulty of finding the right medication for each patient, the caseworker is the most important part of the system. People who need talk therapy and meds to begin to make progress may simply relapse and get in trouble with the law again if the PD has no crisis intervention team who can take the extra time and has the expertise to take over a patient's care. Those who just go back to living on the street will soon relapse on their meds and have another crisis.

People like the police – and the patients' families – have to be made to see clearly that a mentally ill person who is violent is not just a vicious individual who deserves to be put in prison, or worse still, shot to death for “disobeying” a policeman's orders. Their brain does not function the way a healthy person's does. Many Americans due to their religious belief about free will, their hatred of certain skin colors or of the need for a bath and some deodorant, or that prevalent condition in the US – a deep lack of education and insight about the human condition – simply do not view mental disabilities as an illness and think such cases should be punished or even executed. Courts, likewise, are still trying such people as being competent and even sentencing them to the electric chair.

It is very unfortunate that so many long term inpatient care facilities have been closed due largely to Ronald Reagan's desire to save government money and “deregulate” things that will always need government oversight. I am so glad to see what these police departments are doing to change that tragic situation. A large number, if not indeed most of homeless people have some kind of mental problem, including drug and alcohol addiction, which can be treated and should be. It's important that policemen and women should be enlightened as to the true nature of the problem and the humane way of handling it. That will go a long way toward making us a fair and just society.





http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2015/04/03/397322648/treating-saudi-arabian-jihadists-with-art-therapy

Treating Saudi Arabian Jihadists With Art Therapy
Deborah Amos
April 5, 2015

Photograph – Dr. Awad Al-Yami, an art therapist trained at the University of Pennsylvania, is a counselor at a Saudi Arabian center that seeks to rehabilitate convicted terrorists. The center claims a success rate of more than 80 percent, but acknowledges that some return to extremist groups like al-Qaida.
Deborah Amos/NPR


There are golf carts and palm trees and an Olympic-sized pool at the Mohammed Bin Naif Counseling and Care Center, a sprawling complex on the outskirts of Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh.

Once a holiday resort, the walled compound still looks like one — and not a rehabilitation center for convicted terrorists.

In the past year, the country has expanded counter-terrorism laws that make it illegal for Saudis to fight in Syria and Iraq. The kingdom has also expanded the terrorism rehab centers.

More than 3,000 young Saudi men graduated from the program since it began in 2008, including 120 former prisoners from a U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay.

The centers only work with inmates not convicted for violent crimes. The Saudis claim a success rate of more than 80 percent of the detainees returning to their families as well-adjusted members of Saudi society.

On my visit, the inmates are kept out of sight, except for a handpicked star graduate, 29-year-old Badr al-Anzi. Two years ago, he was set to join the militants of the self-declared Islamic State. Now he's a model of rehabilitation.

"I wanted to go to jihad," explains al-Anzi, who has a wife and three daughters. His plan was to travel to Syria with his cousin and brother, but he was arrested when he tried to pick up his passport at a government office.

After a six-month jail sentence, al-Anzi was sent to the rehab center. His treatment was intense, with psychological counseling, religious re-education, vocational training, plus financial incentives. Al-Anzi now attends college on a scholarship. He had help finding a job.

He makes monthly visits to the center to counsel others.

"Now, I want to fight ISIS," he says, which he does on Twitter, challenging Saudi recruits to quit and come home.

Al-Anzi's was an easy case. He never made it to the battlefield. But what about the hardened cases, the al-Qaida extremists?

"They're not so tough," says Dr. Awad Al-Yami, a counselor here. "These are our kids, and anyway, they are members of our society, and they are hurting us. We feel obligated to help them."

Al-Yami trained as an art therapist at the University of Pennsylvania. He pioneered an innovative program that's unusual in Saudi's ultra-conservative culture, where some clerics say that drawing is forbidden.

"I had a hard time convincing my people with art, let alone art therapy for jihadists," he says. But the program has delivered results.

"Actually, art creates balance for your psyche," he says.

It is also a window on the psyche, he says. Drawing is a way for inmates to express emotions, anger and depression, when they first arrive at the center.

He keeps a gallery of paintings, which he analyzes like a detective. The black and white landscapes, which depict scenes from Afghanistan, mean an inmate is still living in the past.

After a few months of counseling, the paintings show more promise. Inmates use color and depict scenes from family life in Riyadh. Al-Yami says this is a sign that the inmate is coming to terms with coming home.

There is a striking number of inmates who draw pictures of castles with high walls. Those send a distinct message, according to Al-Yami.

"I'm not going to give you any information," he says. "I'm behind the wall and you can't get through. If I give you information, I am weak."

He takes the failures hard. Some 20 percent of the inmates here go back to the fight. One spectacular failure went on to become an al-Qaida leader in Yemen.

Now, Al-Yami is preparing for a new wave of inmates: the ISIS generation. He knows they are more extreme than al-Qaida.

"We've got some in prison, waiting for their sentences to be over and they will be here," he says.

Can he reach them, too? He pauses before he answers.

"What the hell am I going to do with ISIS?" he says, a man who knows his toughest challenge is ahead.




“Dr. Awad Al-Yami, an art therapist trained at the University of Pennsylvania, is a counselor at a Saudi Arabian center that seeks to rehabilitate convicted terrorists. The center claims a success rate of more than 80 percent, but acknowledges that some return to extremist groups like al-Qaida. …. In the past year, the country has expanded counter-terrorism laws that make it illegal for Saudis to fight in Syria and Iraq. The kingdom has also expanded the terrorism rehab centers. More than 3,000 young Saudi men graduated from the program since it began in 2008, including 120 former prisoners from a U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay. The centers only work with inmates not convicted for violent crimes. …. "I wanted to go to jihad," explains al-Anzi, who has a wife and three daughters. His plan was to travel to Syria with his cousin and brother, but he was arrested when he tried to pick up his passport at a government office. After a six-month jail sentence, al-Anzi was sent to the rehab center. His treatment was intense, with psychological counseling, religious re-education, vocational training, plus financial incentives. Al-Anzi now attends college on a scholarship. He had help finding a job. …. He makes monthly visits to the center to counsel others. "Now, I want to fight ISIS," he says, which he does on Twitter, challenging Saudi recruits to quit and come home. …. Al-Yami trained as an art therapist at the University of Pennsylvania. He pioneered an innovative program that's unusual in Saudi's ultra-conservative culture, where some clerics say that drawing is forbidden. "I had a hard time convincing my people with art, let alone art therapy for jihadists," he says. But the program has delivered results. …. "Actually, art creates balance for your psyche," he says. It is also a window on the psyche, he says. Drawing is a way for inmates to express emotions, anger and depression, when they first arrive at the center.”

An 80 % success rate at turning people around and away from the brainwashed belief that jihad is a great thing to do and that they will go to the Islamic version of heaven if they kill people “for Allah.” One recent article on two women who were arrested in the US a week or two ago stated that one of the women referred to it as “pleasing Allah.” There really are a good many people in all societies who are either mentally impaired or emotionally disturbed. I don't think a healthy young person will leave their country and go to Syria or somewhere to kill in the name of God. It is interesting that art therapy has been so successful. I note that they do not take in those who have been violent, however. I have always dabbled in drawing, playing my recorder flute, writing poems, and it does indeed “balance” and soothe my inner condition. There is something magical about the way art of all kinds opens up my consciousness and focuses my attention on things that are definitely positive rather than the other alternative – depression or anger. I wish more people in this country would be gentle and caring enough to give up the idea that “punishment” instead is needed. We would have a much more civilized society if that were the case.





http://www.npr.org/blogs/ed/2015/04/04/396621542/without-janitors-students-are-in-charge-of-keeping-school-shipshape

Without Janitors, Students Are In Charge Of Keeping School Shipshape
Owen Phillips
April 4, 2015

Back in 2011, Newt Gingrich was running for president, and he proposed a radical idea to help schools cut costs: Fire the janitors and pay students to do the cleaning.

Needless to say, the idea to turn students into moonlighting janitors had about as much support as Gingrich's presidential campaign.

But ask Kim De Costa and she'll say there isn't anything radical about asking students to clean up after themselves. At her school, there are no janitors. Instead, students in grades 6-12 meet in teams once or twice a week to clean assigned areas.

De Costa is the executive director of the Armadillo Technical Institute. It's a public charter school in Phoenix, Ore., a few miles from the California border.

For 30 minutes after lunch, students sweep, mop, take out the trash and even clean the bathrooms — but responsibilities rotate so no one is stuck scrubbing toilets more than two or three times a year.

De Costa says it's easy to encourage students to respect their environment when they're the ones responsible for preserving it.

"We really wanted a school where the students took ownership and made it their own," says De Costa, who helped found ATI in 1999.

The school still has maintenance staff for the difficult or dangerous work. But for the most part, students at ATI handle the daily upkeep. And with a little help from peer pressure, the school stays clean.

Eden Cox, a 10th-grader, says that recently she had to confront a classmate after he left a mess behind. "I got on to him and said, 'Can you please throw your trash away so I don't have to,' " Cox recalls.

"After all, it's our school," she says, with an emphasis on "our."

Places like ATI that build cleanup into the curriculum are rare in the United States.

Elementary ichinensei (1st grade) students cleaning their classroom.

But in Japan, there's a long tradition of students cleaning their own schools.

There, "school is not just for learning from a book," says Michael Auslin — a former English teacher in Japan. "It's about learning how to become a member of society and taking responsibility for oneself," says Auslin, who is now a resident scholar and director of Japan studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

To make cleaning easier, Japanese students put on slippers before entering the classroom to prevent dirt from being dragged into the room.

Many Hands Make Light Work

At Brentwood Academy outside Nashville, Tenn., keeping the school spick-and-span is just part of the daily routine for students.

Each day before P.E., students at the private prep school report for 10 minutes of "clean-up" duty in their assigned areas.

Susan Shafer, the school's director of communications, considers "clean-up" an additional component of the school's mission of educating the whole person.

"We're trying to train them for life," says Shafer. "They're all going to go to college. No one is going to clean their dorm room for them."

Maddie Jarrard, an 11th-grader, is responsible for dusting a classroom every day. She says even after sports games, Brentwood players are expected to stay behind to pick up any trash left in the stands. 

"They're not only trying to keep the place clean," says Jarrard, referring to Brentwood's staff. "But they're also trying to build character in each student."

While some parents might balk at the idea of a school taking time away from class to make students push a broom, educators at both ATI and Brentwood both say that parents have shown overwhelming support.

If anything, according to staff, parents want to know how to get their kids to clean their room at home as well as they do at school.




“Places like ATI that build cleanup into the curriculum are rare in the United States. Elementary ichinensei (1st grade) students cleaning their classroom. But in Japan, there's a long tradition of students cleaning their own schools. here, "school is not just for learning from a book," says Michael Auslin — a former English teacher in Japan. "It's about learning how to become a member of society and taking responsibility for oneself," says Auslin, who is now a resident scholar and director of Japan studies at the American Enterprise Institute.”

This looks like something some parents would complain about, but pitching in with others to share a task is one of the most important things we need to learn. I think it's a great idea. Republicans should like it, because it would even save money. Also, if people do have to clean up behind themselves they will stop leaving such a mess as I have seen in most public place in the US, not just the schools. I love it!





http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/04/04/397484862/tribal-fighters-lay-siege-to-al-qaida-in-coastal-town

Tribal Fighters Lay Siege To Al-Qaida In Coastal Town
Scott Neuman
April 4, 2015

Photograph – Yemeni boys display shrapnel they collected from the rubble of houses destroyed by Saudi-led airstrikes in a village near Sanaa, Yemen, on Saturday.
Hani Mohammed/AP

A coalition of tribal fighters riding in pickup trucks have entered Yemen's coastal city of Mukalla in an effort to displace al-Qaida militiamen who seized the Gulf of Aden town just two days before.

Reuters reports:

"The fighters are part of a tribal alliance in the eastern Hadramawt province which has pledged to restore security after the militants seized Mukalla on Thursday and ransacked buildings, broke into banks and freed prisoners.

"The tribal force had already taken over two military bases further east along the coast at Shihr and Riyan, which were abandoned by the army earlier this week."

The move comes days after Yemen's Shiite Houthi rebels and their allies parts of the port city of Aden, about 270 miles to the west. That was occurring as fighters from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the regional affiliate of the terrorist network, laid siege to Mukalla.

Meanwhile an airstrike, likely by Saudi-led air assets, on a village near the capital Sanaa killed a family of nine, residents said on Saturday, according to Reuters.

The sudden rise of the Houthi rebels, who have made a blitzkrieg-style push from territory in recent months, has alarmed Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia.

The United Nations Security Council is meeting today to discuss a proposal for a humanitarian pause in the airstrikes on Yemen, Reuters says.




“Meanwhile an airstrike, likely by Saudi-led air assets, on a village near the capital Sanaa killed a family of nine, residents said on Saturday, according to Reuters. The sudden rise of the Houthi rebels, who have made a blitzkrieg-style push from territory in recent months, has alarmed Sunni-dominated Saudi Arabia. The United Nations Security Council is meeting today to discuss a proposal for a humanitarian pause in the airstrikes on Yemen, Reuters says.”

Somebody has to fight these al-Qaeda and ISIS groups or they will totally takeover large swaths of land, which is their declared objective. I prefer to see Islamic people who live there push them out rather than leaving it up to US or other outside groups. It's their territory and they need to fight for it. By that process alone can they really establish their own less radical power bases. It is better if they can work without US help. Islamic people who are relatively moderate need to stop the radicalized fundamentalist doctrine by firmly denouncing it. Of course, I know that all of those groups are in part aroused to fury by the actions of Israel which is not conciliatory or even very cooperative, while engaging in repetitive pushes to gain more land. I don't like that, though I feel that the Jews have earned a space. It's just that they aren't willing to give Palestine any. That's a prescription for endless war. I don't understand why either Israel or the Arab world would prefer the misery of day in and out warfare. Maybe the UN Security Council can convince both sides to back off.