October 3, 2015


News Clips For The Day


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/gay-priest-krzysztof-charamsa-fired-vatican-synod/

Vatican fires priest after he announces he's gay
AP October 3, 2015

Photograph -- Krzysztof Charamsa, who works for a Vatican office, gives a press conference with his partner Eduard to reveal his homosexuality Oct. 3, 2015, in Rome. TIZIANA FABI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
90 PHOTOS -- Pope Francis in America


VATICAN CITY -- The Vatican on Saturday fired a monsignor who came out as gay on the eve of a big meeting of the world's bishops to discuss church outreach to gays, divorcees and more traditional Catholic families.

The Vatican took action after Krzysztof Charamsa, a mid-level official in its doctrine office, came out in newspaper interviews in Italy and Poland saying he was happy and proud to be a gay priest, and that he was in love with a man whom he identified as his boyfriend.

"The decision to make such a pointed statement on the eve of the opening of the synod appears very serious and irresponsible, since it aims to subject the synod assembly to undue media pressure," the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said in a statement.

As a result, Charamsa could no longer work at the Vatican or its pontifical universities, Lombardi said. Despite his dismissal, Charamsa remains a priest, although Lombardi hinted that his superiors could take further action.

Charamsa, 43, initially planned a press conference in front of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith's office, but moved it to central Rome after the Vatican action. He was joined by his companion, identified only as Eduard.

Charamsa told reporters that the timing of his disclosure was not related to the bishops meeting on the family, but said he hoped it might add "a Christian voice" to the synod that is expected to address how the Church can better minister to the homosexual faithful.

"I came out. This is a very personal, difficult and tough decision in the Catholic Church's homophobic world," Charamsa said, and asked people to bear this in mind.

He said he has written a book in Italian and Polish to "lay bare" his experience "in front of all those who want to confront me."

Charamsa told the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza that he was motivated to make his sexual orientation public by hate mail that he received after publicly criticizing a right-wing Polish priest who is strongly anti-gay in the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny.

"I have to say who I am. I am a gay priest. I am a happy and proud gay priest," he told Gazeta Wyborcza.




“Charamsa told the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza that he was motivated to make his sexual orientation public by hate mail that he received after publicly criticizing a right-wing Polish priest who is strongly anti-gay in the Catholic weekly Tygodnik Powszechny. "I have to say who I am. I am a gay priest. I am a happy and proud gay priest," he told Gazeta Wyborcza.” I think the inherent danger of a gay priest (or an avowedly celibate pedophile priest) is that his duty to minister to the laity in their spiritual needs will become confused and abusive. Priests do the same thing to women, after all. I maintain that the worst problem with the priesthood on this issue, however, is that some young men who are not sexually interested in women decide to join the church in that way, and are then led by the ever-present and available male population to give in to their innate homosexual or pedifilic tendencies. The same thing is a problem in the military and sports teams, has been forever. Roman soldiers were known to fall back on the presence of their brothers in arms when they missed women. Humans are sexual creatures, and forced celibacy is a flawed plan. There is even a reasonable doubt that Jesus wasn’t married to Mary Magdalene as Dan Brown claimed in The Da Vinci Code.





http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-airstrike-afghanistan-doctors-without-borders-hospital-army/

U.S.: Strike may have caused Afghan "collateral damage"
CBS/AP
October 3, 2015

Photograph -- Injured Doctors Without Borders staff are seen after an explosion near their hospital in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz Oct. 3, 2015. MÉDECINS SANS FRONTIÈRES



KABUL, Afghanistan -- The international charity Doctors Without Borders said nine local staffers and seven patients, including three children, were killed when its clinic came under "sustained bombing" Saturday in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz, where Afghan officials said helicopter gunships had returned fire from Taliban sheltering in the facility.

The group said the facility, which was treating more than 100 patients, came under attack at 2:10 a.m. The charity did not say whether insurgents were present, and it was not immediately clear whether the staffers were killed by the Taliban, government or U.S. forces. The group said another 30 people were missing after the incident.

Army Col. Brian Tribus, a spokesman for American forces in Afghanistan, said a U.S. airstrike on Kunduz at 2:15 a.m. "may have resulted in collateral damage to a nearby medical facility" and that the incident was under investigation. He said it was the 12th U.S. airstrike "in the Kunduz vicinity" since Tuesday.

CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports that the U.S. had a gunship in the area that was firing on positions that were firing on special forces embedded with Afghan forces.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul said in a statement that it "mourns for the individuals and families affected by the tragic incident at the Doctors Without Borders hospital." The statement didn't mention the airstrike.

Afghan forces backed by U.S. airstrikes have been battling the Taliban street by street in Kunduz since Thursday, to dislodge insurgents who seized the strategic city three days earlier in their biggest foray into a major urban area since the U.S.-led invasion of 2001.

The Ministry of Defense said "terrorists" armed with light and heavy weapons had entered the hospital compound and used "the buildings and the people inside as a shield" while firing on security forces.

Brig. Gen. Dawlat Waziri, the ministry's deputy spokesman, told The Associated Press that helicopter gunships fired on the militants, causing damage to the buildings.

Interior Ministry spokesman Sediq Sediqqi said 10 to 15 "terrorists" had been hiding in the hospital at the time of the strike. "All of the terrorists were killed but we also lost doctors," he said. He said 80 staff at the hospital, including 15 foreigners, had been taken to safety. He did not say what sort of strike had damaged the compound.

Doctors Without Borders said its trauma center "was hit several times during sustained bombing and was very badly damaged." At the time, the hospital had 105 patients and their caretakers, and more than 80 international and Afghan staff, it said.

AP video of the compound showed burning buildings with firearms - automatic rifles and at least one Russian-made machine gun - on the windowsills pointed outward.

Doctors Without Borders did not comment on the identities of the 30 missing people, but said all of its international staffers were alive and accounted for. It said it regularly updated its GPS coordinates with all parties to the conflict.

Fighting raged throughout the day, and at around 2 p.m., the Taliban seized the medical compound, according to Sarwar Hussaini, the spokesman for the provincial police chief. "Fighting is continuing between Afghan security forces and the Taliban," he said.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid had earlier issued a statement saying there were no Taliban fighters in the hospital at the time of the bombing. He also accused Afghanistan's intelligence service of deliberately directing airstrikes on the hospital.

Adil Akbar, a doctor at the trauma center who was on duty at the time, told the AP that the operating theater, emergency room and other parts of the hospital complex had been hit in the bombing.

"I managed to escape after the attack but I know that most of the staff and even some of the patients are missing," he said.

Zabihullah Pashtoonyar, a former local radio reporter who was working as a security guard at the compound, was one of those killed in the incident, said his relative Gul Rahim.

Wahidullah Mayar, spokesman for the Public Health Ministry, tweeted that 37 people were wounded, among them 24 medical and non-medical staff.

Bart Janssens, the charity's director of operations, said "we do not yet have the final casualty figures," adding that the group's medical team was treating wounded patients and staffers.

Nicholas Haysom, the U.N. special representative in Afghanistan, condemned the "tragic and devastating airstrike" on the hospital. "Hospitals accommodating patients and medical personnel may never be the object of attack, and international humanitarian law also prohibits the use of medical facilities for military purposes."

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which also has facilities in Kunduz, said it was "deeply shocked." Amnesty International called for an investigation.

Doctors Without Borders, which operates in conflict zones across the globe, said it had treated 394 people wounded in fighting since the Taliban attacked the city. Afghan forces went in on Thursday, and the fighting has been underway since then.

Sediqqi said Afghan forces were still sweeping the city for militants, conducting "meter to meter, house to house operations" that would continue until "all those bad elements" had been eliminated.

The clinic in Kunduz is a sprawling facility with numerous buildings situated in the east of the city, in a residential area close to the local office of the NDS intelligence service.

Another Kunduz resident, Dawood Khan, said a cousin who works at the clinic as a doctor was lightly wounded in the bombing.

"I heard the sound of the bomb and rushed to the hospital to get news. The operating theater was on fire, people were terrified, running everywhere," he said.

Electricity and water have been cut off since the Taliban's Monday assault and seizure of the city, officials and residents said. Food and medical supplies cannot get through because the Afghan military is still working to clear mines planted by the Taliban. Sporadic gunfights are continuing in various pockets of the city as troops advance.

Most of the Taliban appear to have fled the city after the troops moved in on Thursday, taking looted vehicles, weapons and ammunition with them.

Officials have reported that they have moved east, into Takhar and Badakhshan provinces, where a number of districts fell to the Taliban on Friday. The Defense Ministry said troops had retaken the Baharak district after retreating under fire Friday.

The U.S. Embassy issued an emergency notice to Americans in Badakhshan, saying they should "consider departing the area immediately."




“The international charity Doctors Without Borders said nine local staffers and seven patients, including three children, were killed when its clinic came under "sustained bombing" Saturday in the northern Afghan city of Kunduz, where Afghan officials said helicopter gunships had returned fire from Taliban sheltering in the facility. The group said the facility, which was treating more than 100 patients, came under attack at 2:10 a.m. The charity did not say whether insurgents were present, and it was not immediately clear whether the staffers were killed by the Taliban, government or U.S. forces. The group said another 30 people were missing after the incident. ….

“The fog of war” is an evocative phrase, and it is exemplified in this encounter. “…and it was not immediately clear whether the staffers were killed by the Taliban, government or U.S. forces.” I can’t remember what war it was, either Iraq or Vietnam, I think, but our forces on that occasion did admittedly kill a group of Canadian troops. With all that smoke, fear and noise there is confusion.

With our modern use of remotely controlled drones, it surprises me even less, so I hate to hear of our frequent use of drones. A man in the US is using coordinates, a video screen and a computer to send the drone to a location where he thinks there are enemy troops. I don’t like that. There should at least be spotters located in the area who are directing the attack. In this case, the article says, “The Ministry of Defense said "terrorists" armed with light and heavy weapons had entered the hospital compound and used "the buildings and the people inside as a shield" while firing on security forces.” The presence of enemy fighters in a hospital, mosque, church or other building of the sort, should never lead OUR fighters to attack it like that. We need to be above such things. “Brig. Gen. Dawlat Waziri, the ministry's deputy spokesman, told The Associated Press that helicopter gunships fired on the militants, causing damage to the buildings.” Just because the barbarity of using “human shields” is commonly done in the Islamic world; that is no excuse for our own people doing essentially the same thing. The term “collateral damage” should disappear from our news reports and official records. It’s pure luck that more people weren’t killed there, if some 100 patients were there at the time to receive medical treatment.




EDUCATION HERE AND IN ENGLAND – THREE ARTICLES


http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2015/10/02/445281223/the-education-secretarys-greatest-hits

The Education Secretary's Greatest Hits
ERIC WESTERVELT
ANYA KAMENETZ
OCTOBER 02, 2015

Photograph -- Secretary of Education Arne Duncan takes the stage at North High School in Des Moines, Iowa, on Sept. 14 to discuss college access and affordability.
Andrew Harnik/AP


It has been decades since an education secretary had as high a national political profile as the long-serving Arne Duncan, who famously accompanied President Obama from Chicago and even more famously likes to shoot hoops with the president.

Supporters note that Duncan has advocated passionately for narrowing the opportunity and achievement gaps in America's public schools, ending the "school to prison pipeline" and boosting pay for teachers who serve in high-poverty schools.

He has spoken eloquently about the inequities in the system of funding of the nation's schools based on property taxes. As Duncan put it this week at the National Press Club:

"In far too many places the children of the wealthy get dramatically more spent on them than the children of the poor."

But the former pro ball player (in Australia) has also presided over one of the most contentious, partisan periods in education policy of the last several decades, and critics say his own personality has never placed him far above the fray.

"Some of Duncan's battles he can wear proudly because he was fighting hard fights," says Rick Hess of the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. "But some, I think, were the product of his own tendency to dismiss those who had good-faith disagreements."

Here's a look at some of Duncan's wins, scores and losses over the past seven years.

K-12

Digging In On High-Stakes Testing

The push for standardized tests predated Duncan. President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind in 2002, creating a system of federal consequences for states, districts and schools whose students failed to make "adequate yearly progress" on annual tests. The law stated that all students everywhere must score "proficient" by 2014.

Duncan's Race To The Top initiative in 2009 provided incentives to states for tying test scores to teacher evaluations, further raising the stakes on high-stakes tests in a way that was destined to offend teachers unions.

It wasn't just unions. Education experts argued that the federal push for using controversial "value added methods" for assessing teacher effectiveness were misguided and often failed to help teachers improve or students learn.

At the same time, beginning in 2011, with the No Child law well overdue for reauthorization, the administration began granting individual waivers to states to provide flexibility on testing targets that were proving impossible to reach.

High-stakes testing coincided with modest gains on math scores, and relative gains by some minority groups. In combination with the Common Core, testing has also become a focal point of teacher and parent protests nationwide, with some students, notably in New York State, "opting out."

Duncan called the law "tired" and "prescriptive" and stated in 2014 that testing issues were "sucking the oxygen out of the room" in schools.

But he defended annual testing, even as some critics were blaming tests for a wide range of unintended consequences, ranging from narrowing of the curriculum to the en masse closure of urban neighborhood schools to cheating scandals as seen in Atlanta.

The law is now (finally) up for reauthorization and both the House and Senate versions of the bill keep the annual testing requirements in place.

'White Suburban Moms' And The Common Core

Race To The Top, signed into law as part of the federal stimulus package after the 2008 financial crash, was structured cleverly as a competitive grant.

States got points for, among other things, adopting new, higher academic standards. In this way, Duncan and Obama were able to push 45 states initially to adopt what became the Common Core State Standards — before they were even written and without making them an explicit federal policy.

But despite initial bipartisanship, Duncan's advocacy of the Common Core crashed into Washington's current atmosphere of bitter partisanship and the long-standing distrust of a strong federal role in local education.

One of several anti-Duncan Facebook groups popped up: MAD, Mothers Against Duncan. And Duncan was sometimes his own worst enemy, PR-wise.

He famously said that opposition to Common Core and mastering standards in core areas of reading and math had become "a rallying cry for fringe groups."

At an otherwise sleepy state school superintendents meeting in 2013, Duncan suggested that opposition to the new reading and math guidelines was mostly from white mothers whose kids are facing tougher standards and tougher tests.

"And it's fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from sort of white suburban moms," Duncan was quoted as saying in The Washington Post, "who, all of a sudden, their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were, their schools aren't quite as good as they thought they were. And that's pretty scary."

Duncan apologized for his "clumsy" remarks, but for some it underscored what they saw as Washington's dismissive, arrogant approach to critics of the state standards.

Opponents, including Republican presidential hopefuls, began referring to the Common Core as "Obamacore" in a fledgling effort to link the standards debate with the fight over the president's controversial health-care legislation.

That was the moment, "when I knew that the debate was shifting into the larger context in Washington that was all about seeking partisan advantage," says Stanford University professor Thomas Dee, who heads the school's Center for Education Policy Analysis.

The charged rhetoric often drowned out teachers' legitimate concerns about how to put Common Core into action inside the classroom, Dee says. "It is such a heavy lift to ask the nation's teachers to reinvent their teaching practices around these standards."

The ongoing debate over the standards, in many ways, shows the limitations of the federal role reform in America's highly decentralized education system.

Teacher Evaluations

The nation's largest teachers union, the National Education Association, called on Duncan to resign in 2014, charging that he had undermined educators by linking teacher evaluations and school ratings to student test scores.

States that received federal waivers for No Child Left Behind provisions had to include teacher evaluations as part of the deal. Duncan had access to some federal stimulus money that he shifted to school district consortia to expand performance-based evaluations. Did it help improve learning and teaching? The results, so far, are a mixed bag.

Research by Stanford's Thomas Dee suggests that one place it is working is in the Washington, D.C., public schools. "Their teacher-evaluation system has helped drive an entire district turnaround," he argues.

But some districts cashed the federal check and made largely cosmetic changes. Many districts had to return millions in federal funds for not meeting the requirement that they get union buy-in for teacher evaluations.

"I'm not sure Duncan could have done much more on this than he did from his perch," he says. Bottom line for Dee: "Arne has been one of the most influential secretaries in the nation's history. In general his policy prescriptions have been sound ... But it's hard to drive change from a seat in Washington."

Pre-K

Secretary Duncan has complained that he's not given enough credit for advocating for expanded early childhood education. He pushed to roll out quality rating systems for early childhood centers — still a work in progress. So far, it seems that implementation is going a lot better than Common Core, and reaction has been far less partisan and controversial.

He also advocated boosting salaries for teachers in high poverty schools and worked to expand and improve pre-K pay and training.

"Secretary Duncan advanced a vision of preschool for our nation which rightly makes the link between high quality early learning experiences for children and the compensation and qualifications of their teachers," says Marcy Whitebook, director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley.

She notes that Duncan pushed to have federal Preschool Development Grants pay preschool teachers comparably to K-12 teachers. "Now even with college degrees they earn only 60 percent on average of a kindergarten teacher's salary," Whitebook says. But she laments that, like many of the education initiatives championed by Duncan and the White House, his pre-K "vision was not fully funded during his tenure."

Higher Ed

Duncan's profile in the world of higher education policy is lower than it is in the world of K-12. "I think [Obama and Duncan] don't get credit for it, but he and they have a huge higher-ed legacy," says Michael Dannenberg, a director of strategic initiatives at a group called Education Reform Now, and a former Duncan policy adviser.

That legacy, Dannenberg has written, includes increased aid to students and families, reform of the student-loan program, significant crackdowns on for-profit colleges and a new focus on accessibility, equity, value for money and college performance that mirrors the accountability focus on the K-12 side.

Cutting The Middleman Out Of Student Loans

In 2009, President Obama signed a law that ended the Federal Family Education Loan Program. That meant banks would no longer be able to profit by making federally subsidized loans to college students. Instead, the Department of Education would make these loans directly. That move made $40 billion available to the Pell Grant program.

Student loan borrowing continues to grow, surpassing $1.2 trillion this year, and student debt has become an increasing issue of economic concern. Since 2009, the Department of Education has added several different loan repayment and forgiveness plans. All have slightly different terms and qualifications.

For-Profit College Crackdown

The Department of Education has called abusive practices in the for-profit education sector "one of the biggest problems in higher education."

"There are too many [institutions that] have been morally unconscionable with what they've done ... Too many of these guys took advantage," Duncan has said.

After six years of political battles, suits and countersuits, a new requirement called the "gainful employment" rule went into place earlier this year. Under it, for-profit and other certificate programs where students can't pay back their loans stand to lose eligibility for federal student aid.

The Education Department, alongside the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, pursued action against many for-profit colleges for predatory lending and fraud, leading to the high-profile shutdown of Corinthian Colleges.

For-profit enrollment has dipped significantly from its high of almost 2 million in 2010. At the same time, graduation rates at these institutions have risen.

Introducing The College Scorecard

Obama and Duncan tried and failed various times to get states to increase funding to colleges and to get colleges to raise graduation rates and lower tuition.

President Obama announced in the 2012 State of the Union, "Let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can't stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down."

Not surprisingly, that led to protests from college and university presidents and professional associations.

That proposal morphed into the recently announced College Scorecard, which combines public data from the Education Department, Treasury and the IRS to make it easier than ever to see which colleges are affordable, accessible and likely to pay off.




“Supporters note that Duncan has advocated passionately for narrowing the opportunity and achievement gaps in America's public schools, ending the "school to prison pipeline" and boosting pay for teachers who serve in high-poverty schools. He has spoken eloquently about the inequities in the system of funding of the nation's schools based on property taxes. As Duncan put it this week at the National Press Club: "In far too many places the children of the wealthy get dramatically more spent on them than the children of the poor." …. . President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind in 2002, creating a system of federal consequences for states, districts and schools whose students failed to make "adequate yearly progress" on annual tests. …. But he defended annual testing, even as some critics were blaming tests for a wide range of unintended consequences, ranging from narrowing of the curriculum to the en masse closure of urban neighborhood schools to cheating scandals as seen in Atlanta. …. And Duncan was sometimes his own worst enemy, PR-wise. He famously said that opposition to Common Core and mastering standards in core areas of reading and math had become "a rallying cry for fringe groups." At an otherwise sleepy state school superintendents meeting in 2013, Duncan suggested that opposition to the new reading and math guidelines was mostly from white mothers whose kids are facing tougher standards and tougher tests. …. The charged rhetoric often drowned out teachers' legitimate concerns about how to put Common Core into action inside the classroom, Dee says. …. "Their teacher-evaluation system has helped drive an entire district turnaround," he argues. But some districts cashed the federal check and made largely cosmetic changes. Many districts had to return millions in federal funds for not meeting the requirement that they get union buy-in for teacher evaluations.”

This is a long and informative article which gives a timeline on the current backlash against many school programs, as well as on the Pre-K and college issues. Duncan himself has sometimes been criticized as arrogant and insensitive – especially when he stated that some white suburban moms "who, all of a sudden, their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were, their schools aren't quite as good as they thought they were. And that's pretty scary." That is probably the exact truth, but it was “clumsy.”

He did oversee the change from No Child Left Behind, equally as unpopular among “the fringe” as Common Core, when they were being put into actual practice in the classrooms. Teachers have responded unhappily, some even cheating for the kids who were not answering questions correctly on the annual tests. That was a shame, but predictable. Unfortunately, putting their salary level or even their job itself on the line for kids who in many cases just aren’t overwhelmingly bright is not going to be popular. I do remember one thing from my school days. Some kids just couldn’t do the regular curriculum. They were “passed up” to the 12th grade and “graduated,” no matter how bad their performance was sometimes, because lacking any Special Education classes, they were mainstreamed. It’s going to be traumatic for those kids whether they are mainstreamed or segregated into special classes, and it may not make much difference in how much they learn either way, unless they also receive intensive personal attention in their education. Remedial reading in the early grades should make them do better in later grades.

I think a lot of the problem is that some kids don’t pick up the basic and necessary skill of reading and building vocabulary in a timely manner, and then get passed up to the next grade, where they flounder entirely. It seems harsh to fail such a student, but if he can get special attention in summer school or by repeating the grade, he may then catch on and do much better. If he is one of the ADHD kids, then he may need medications. I personally strongly agree with the teachers who are opposed to the use of a standardized test which all kids, including those with problems, must take to evaluate the overall performance of the teacher.

There is too much here to examine in a short period of time. Other issues were pre-K and college level matters, one in particular being the funding of school loans through banks rather than directly from the government and the essentially unethical “for profit colleges,” which often fail to graduate young people even after charging them outrageous tuition and fees paid for by loans. The college system in particularly which is mentioned here, and which made a splash in the news about a year ago, is called Corinthian Colleges. Check them out on Google for more information.

Finally, a very good thing that Obama and Duncan did was to oversee the “College Scorecard, which combines public data from the Education Department, Treasury and the IRS to make it easier than ever to see which colleges are affordable, accessible and likely to pay off.” Schools that rob students of thousands of dollars and offer little in return will be put out of business as the public sees which of them are little more than scams. I am highly suspicious of the “online universities.” Any community college probably gives a better education than those programs do, and if Obama’s plan to provide free tuition at community college goes through that will make a difference, too. If Bernie Sanders is elected and gets his free tuition at all state universities through, that will be even better.

See the interesting article below on the British educational system. An interesting thing about their local schools is that they are not controlled by a local body administratively, but by the Secretary of State for Education on the national level. I think that would probably significantly improved our schools in the US. This article does show a similar concern with the quality of local education as compared with the US.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_England

Education in England
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Education in England is overseen by the United Kingdom's Department for Education and Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Local government authorities are responsible for implementing policy for public education and state-funded schools at a local level.

The education system is divided into stages based upon age: Early Years Foundation Stage (ages 3–5), primary education (ages 5–11), secondary education (ages 11–18) and tertiary education (ages 18+).

From the age of 16 there is a two-year period of education known as "sixth form" or "college" which typically leads to A-level qualifications (similar to a high school diploma in some other countries), or a number of alternate qualifications such as BTEC, the International Baccalaureate or the Cambridge Pre-U.

England also has a tradition of independent schooling and Home schooling; legally, parents may choose to educate their children by any suitable means.

Higher education often begins with a three-year bachelor's degree. Postgraduate degrees include master's degrees, either taught or by research, and the doctorate, a research degree that usually takes at least three years. Universities require a Royal Charter in order to issue degrees and all but one are financed by the state via tuition fees, which cost up to £9,000 per academic year for English, Welsh and European Union students.

History of English education[edit]

Main article: History of education in England

Until 1870 all schools were charitable or private institutions, but in that year the Elementary Education Act 1870 permitted local governments to complement the existing elementary schools in order to fill any gaps. The Education Act 1902 allowed local authorities to create secondary schools. The Education Act 1918 abolished fees for elementary schools.

Legally Compulsory Education[edit]

Full-time education is compulsory for all children aged 5 to 18, either at school or otherwise, with a child beginning primary education during the school year he or she turns 5.[8] Children between the ages of 3 and 5 are entitled to 600 hours per year of optional, state-funded, pre-school education. This can be provided in "playgroups", nurseries, community childcare centres or nursery classes in schools.

The age at which a student may choose to stop education is commonly known as the "leaving age" for compulsory education. This age was raised to 18 by the Education and Skills Act 2008; the change took effect in 2013 for 16-year-olds and takes effect in 2015 for 17-year-olds.[9] State-provided schooling and sixth-form education are paid for by taxes.

All children in England must currently therefore receive an effective education (at school or otherwise) from the first "prescribed day", which falls on or after their fifth birthday to the last Friday in June of the school year in which they turn 18 (formerly 16).[10][11] The leaving age was raised in 2013 to the year in which they turn 17 and will be raised in 2015 to their 18th birthday for those born after 1 September 1997.[9] The prescribed days are 31 August, 31 December and 31 March.[12][13] The school year begins on 1 September (or 1 August if a term starts in August).[14]

The Compulsory stages of education are broken into a Foundation Stage (actually covering the last part of optional and first part of compulsory education), four Key Stages, and Sixth Form (which covers the last 2 years of Secondary Education).

State-funded schools[edit]

St Barnabas Church of England Primary School, Oxford
Main article: State-funded schools (England)
Some 93% of children between the ages of 3 and 18 are in education in state-funded schools without charge (other than for activities such as swimming, theatre visits and field trips for which a voluntary payment can be requested, and limited charges at state-funded boarding schools[15])

Allerton High School, a typical former secondary modern school in Leeds, West Yorkshire.
Since 1998, there have been six main types of maintained (state funded) school in England:[16][17][18]

Academy Schools

Academy schools, established by the 1997-2010 Labour Government to replace poorly-performing community schools in areas of high social and economic deprivation. Their start-up costs are typically funded by private means, such as entrepreneurs or NGOs, with running costs met by Central Government and, like Foundation schools, are administratively free from direct local authority control. The 2010 Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government expanded the role of Academies in the Academy Programme, in which a wide number of schools in non-deprived areas were also encouraged to become Academies, thereby essentially replacing the role of Foundation schools established by the previous Labour government. They are monitored directly by the Department for Education.[19]
Community schools (formerly county schools), in which the local authority employs the schools' staff, owns the schools' lands and buildings, and has primary responsibility for admissions.

Free schools, introduced by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition following the 2010 general election, are newly established schools in England set up by parents, teachers, charities or businesses, where there is a perceived local need for more schools. They are funded by taxpayers, are academically non-selective and free to attend, and like Foundation schools and Academies, are not controlled by a local authority. They are ultimately accountable to the Secretary of State for Education. Free schools are an extension of the existing Academy Programme. The first 24 free schools opened in Autumn 2011.

Foundation schools, in which the governing body employs the staff and has primary responsibility for admissions. School land and buildings are owned by the governing body or by a charitable foundation. The Foundation appoints a minority of governors. Many of these schools were formerly grant maintained schools. In 2005 the Labour government proposed allowing all schools to become Foundation schools if they wished.

Voluntary Aided schools, linked to a variety of organisations. They can be faith schools (often the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church), or non-denominational schools, such as those linked to London Livery Companies. The charitable foundation contributes towards the capital costs of the school (typically 10%), and appoints a majority of the school governors. The governing body employs the staff and has primary responsibility for admissions.[20]

Voluntary Controlled schools, which are almost always church schools, with the lands and buildings often owned by a charitable foundation. However, the local authority employs the schools' staff and has primary responsibility for admissions.

In addition, 3 of the 15 City Technology Colleges established in the 1980s still remain, the rest having converted to academies. These are state-funded all-ability secondary schools which charge no fees but which are independent of local authority control. There are also a small number of state-funded boarding schools.

English state-funded primary schools are almost all local schools with a small catchment area. More than half are owned by the Local Authority, though many are (nominally) voluntary controlled and some are voluntary aided. Some schools just include infants (aged 4 to 7) and some just juniors (aged 7 to 11). Some are linked, with automatic progression from the infant school to the junior school, and some are not. A few areas still have first schools for ages around 4 to 8 and middle schools for ages 8 or 9 to 12 or 13.

An example of a Grammar School - in Sutton, London

English secondary schools are mostly comprehensive, although the intake of comprehensive schools can vary widely, especially in urban areas with several local schools. Nearly 90% of state-funded secondary schools are specialist schools, receiving extra funding to develop one or more subjects in which the school specialises, which can select up to 10% of their intake for aptitude in the specialism (though relatively few of them have taken up this option). In a few areas children can enter a grammar school if they pass the eleven plus exam, there are also a number of isolated fully selective grammar schools and a few dozen partially selective schools.[21] A significant minority of state-funded schools are faith schools, which are attached to religious groups, most often the Church of England or the Roman Catholic Church.

All state-funded schools are regularly inspected by the Office for Standards in Education, often known simply as Ofsted. Ofsted publish reports on the quality of education at a particular school on a regular basis. Schools judged by Ofsted to be providing an inadequate standard of education may be subject to special measures, which could include replacing the governing body and senior staff.

Independent schools[edit]

Main article: Independent school (United Kingdom)
Approximately 7% of school children in England attend privately run, fee-paying independent schools. Some independent schools for 13-18 year olds are known for historical reasons as 'public schools' and for 8-13 year olds as 'prep schools'. Some schools offer scholarships for those with particular skills or aptitudes, or bursaries to allow students from less financially well-off families to attend. Independent schools do not have to follow the National Curriculum, and their teachers are not required or regulated by law to have official teaching qualifications."[4]

Education by means other than schooling[edit]

(See also: Education Otherwise)
The 1944 Education Act (Section 36) stated that parents are responsible for the education of their children, "by regular attendance at school or otherwise", which allows children to be educated at home. The legislation places no requirement for parents who choose not to send their children to school to follow the National Curriculum, or to give formal lessons, or to follow school hours and terms, and parents do not need to be qualified teachers.[23] A small but increasing numbers of parents do choose to educate their children outside the conventional school systems.[24][25][26] Officially referred to as "Elective Home Education", teaching ranges from structured homeschooling (using a school-style curriculum) to less-structured unschooling.[27][28] Education Otherwise has supported parents who wished to educate their children outside school since the 1970s. The state provides no financial support to parents who choose to educate their children outside of school.





http://www.usnews.com/news/special-reports/articles/2014/02/27/the-history-of-common-core-state-standards

The History of Common Core State Standards
What some see as a surprise attack on states' rights, others know as a carefully thought out education reform.
By Allie Bidwell
Feb. 27, 2014

Photograph -- What seems like straight-forward educational reform has sparked plenty of controversy.
[READ: Who Is Fighting For Common Core?]


For some, the Common Core State Standards seemed to come from nowhere, and appeared to be a sneaky attack on states' rights to control local education. But for those involved in writing the standards, it was nothing short of an exhaustive and collaborative years-long effort aimed at raising the achievement levels of students across the country.

Although they only recently captured national attention, the Common Core standards – which lay out what students should know and be able to do by each grade – have been in the works since at least 2008. It all started with former Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, who was the 2006-07 chair of the National Governors Association and now leads the University of California system, says Dane Linn, a vice president of the Business Roundtable who oversees its Education and Workforce Committee.

While serving as chair, Napolitano wrote an initiative for the year, as every past chair had done and as every chair has since. According to Linn, who at the time was serving as director of the NGA's Educational Policy Division, Napolitano's initiative had a strong focus on improving math and science education, as well as the workforce.

"The more she thought about it, she came to the conclusion that America couldn't lead the world in innovation and remain being competitive if we didn't have an internationally competitive education system," Linn says.

So Napolitano created a task force – composed of commissioners of education, governors, corporate chief executive officers and recognized experts in higher education – which in December 2008 released a report that Linn says would eventually serve as the building blocks of what became known as the Common Core State Standards, now adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia.

[READ: Who Is Fighting Against Common Core?]

Rick Hess, a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, says the Common Core standards also have roots in No Child Left Behind. Under the President George W. Bush-era education law, the federal government required states to test, disaggregate and report data on student performance, but allowed states to continue deciding on their own which standards and tests to use.

"The problem with that is if you had hard tests or hard standards you made your schools look bad. So there was a real, kind of perverse incentive baked into NCLB," Hess says. The desire to correct that mistake, Hess says, led to the creation of what became the Common Core.

But the controversy over standards-based education reform is nothing new. Ever since the early 1990s, when the U.S. Senate voted 99 to 1 against a set of national history standards supported and funded by the federal government under President George H.W. Bush, the idea of federal intrusion into the public education system has become a rallying cry for opponents of common standards.

That's why proponents of the Common Core say they had to tread lightly and ensure that the effort was an absolutely state-led initiative.

Following the task force report, the NGA – along with the Council of Chief State School Officers and the nonprofit education reform group Achieve – came together to make sure the goals of the report became a reality. It was decided that "the key to advancing any of these recommendations was to start with the standards," Linn says.

Then came the arduous task of deciding what exactly should be included in the English Language Arts and mathematics standards. The entire purpose of the standards, Linn says, was to determine what students need to know and demonstrate the ability to do in order to be prepared for an entry-level college course.

For some states, that task would prove more difficult than others because academic standards varied widely from state to state. For Massachusetts, which historically has had very high academic standards, Linn says, it was important that the Common Core was equal to or greater than the current state standards. But in other states, like Tennessee, standards were much lower.

"What's more important?" Linn asks. "To tell the truth to parents about where their kids are really performing? Or to continue to make them believe they're doing really well, only until they get into the workforce or they go to college and they're finding out they need to be put in a remedial English class?"

While the effort was spearheaded by the NGA, CCSSO and Achieve, representatives from other national organizations were also enlisted for their input, such as the International Reading Association, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and members of both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association – the two largest teachers' unions in the country.

Linn says one moment that stands out in his memory is of the way in which mathematics teachers from the AFT gave their feedback on the standards.

"I walked in on a Monday morning and the math teachers had literally cut up all the standards," Linn says. "They revamped, in some cases, the progression, the order in which we listed the standards. And in some cases they wrote new standards they thought were missing. That type of input was taken very seriously in helping inform our revision of the standards."

Still, opponents have criticized the quality of the standards, claiming they haven't been field tested, that they aren't grounded in research and that it's unclear if they have been appropriately benchmarked against international standards.

Linn says those who wrote the standards used the best evidence and research that was available at the time, and also looked to states that either had very high standards, as determined by their performance on international assessments, or had gone through a similar process as the Common Core in recent years. Minnesota and Massachusetts were two high-performing states Linn named, while Georgia and Colorado served as examples of states that had recently developed internationally benchmarked standards.

And each draft of the standards was posted online for the public to view. After the final draft was published, Linn says, the organizations allowed "anyone and everyone" to submit comments, questions and concerns. They received more than 10,000 responses.

"Every one of them was reviewed and helped inform our revision of the standards," Linn says.

While there remains no clear-cut party-line divide on the standards, as both Democrats and Republicans have expressed concern with them, backlash and cries of government overreach bubbled to the surface when the Obama administration slowly pumped up its support for Common Core.

While proponents of the standards staunchly maintain the federal government had absolutely no involvement in the development of the standards, and that it will play no role in the implementation, they also admit that the support from the White House hasn't actually helped the cause.

Many assumed the Democratic National Platform in 2012 referenced the Common Core when it credited President Barack Obama with encouraging states "to raise their standards so students graduate ready for college or career and can succeed in a dynamic global economy." Likewise, Obama also tip-toed around the plan in his 2013 State of the Union address, during which he took credit for using Race to the Top funds to persuade "almost every state to develop smarter curricula and higher standards."

Those conditions, and events since then, served as fodder for the federal-overreach debate.

"Historically, we should have been forewarned about the debates of the past," Linn says. "But we never envisioned that it would become the political football that it has become over time."


Allie Bidwell is an education reporter for U.S. News & World Report. You can follow her on Twitter or reach her at sbidwell@usnews.com.




"The more she thought about it, she came to the conclusion that America couldn't lead the world in innovation and remain being competitive if we didn't have an internationally competitive education system," Linn says. So Napolitano created a task force – composed of commissioners of education, governors, corporate chief executive officers and recognized experts in higher education – which in December 2008 released a report that Linn says would eventually serve as the building blocks of what became known as the Common Core State Standards, now adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia. Rick Hess, a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, says the Common Core standards also have roots in No Child Left Behind. Under the President George W. Bush-era education law, the federal government required states to test, disaggregate and report data on student performance, but allowed states to continue deciding on their own which standards and tests to use. …. The desire to correct that mistake, Hess says, led to the creation of what became the Common Core. But the controversy over standards-based education reform is nothing new. Ever since the early 1990s, when the U.S. Senate voted 99 to 1 against a set of national history standards supported and funded by the federal government under President George H.W. Bush, the idea of federal intrusion into the public education system has become a rallying cry for opponents of common standards. …. It was decided that "the key to advancing any of these recommendations was to start with the standards," Linn says. Then came the arduous task of deciding what exactly should be included in the English Language Arts and mathematics standards. The entire purpose of the standards, Linn says, was to determine what students need to know and demonstrate the ability to do in order to be prepared for an entry-level college course. …. "What's more important?" Linn asks. "To tell the truth to parents about where their kids are really performing? Or to continue to make them believe they're doing really well, only until they get into the workforce or they go to college and they're finding out they need to be put in a remedial English class?" …. Linn says one moment that stands out in his memory is of the way in which mathematics teachers from the AFT gave their feedback on the standards. "I walked in on a Monday morning and the math teachers had literally cut up all the standards," Linn says. "They revamped, in some cases, the progression, the order in which we listed the standards. And in some cases they wrote new standards they thought were missing. That type of input was taken very seriously in helping inform our revision of the standards.”


"Likewise, Obama also tip-toed around the plan in his 2013 State of the Union address, during which he took credit for using Race to the Top funds to persuade "almost every state to develop smarter curricula and higher standards." Race To the Top Funds must be the government funding for education that some conservatives say have been withheld if local and state education administrations eschew Common Core. That isn’t the same as requiring states to comply with the standards as conservatives claim, but a reward for doing so. No schools were going to be closed over the matter. It also isn’t a party-line issue, since this whole drive to improve the public high school education – implying perhaps too strongly that there was a strong perceived need for improvement – began with George H W Bush, continued with George W., and then was taken up by Obama.

The Common Core math has been criticized for being inscrutable, even in the view of at least one high school math teacher who was interviewed for a news article a couple of years ago. I haven’t personally seen it Common Core math, but there are ways of teaching math that are supposed to promote a better UNDERSTANDING of math, but which bear no resemblance to the arithmetic that we learned in school. That method is believed to make higher mathematics more understandable to high school and college students, but it is not as easy to pick up as our old counting based arithmetic. When I was a young woman, parents of my age group were already complaining about the “New Math,” (not Common Core) which was being used in many schools, circa the 1970’s. It was so different, in appearance at any rate, that parents were not able to “help” a child who was having trouble with their homework. Parents are now saying the same thing about Common Core.

The ability to rapidly pick up knowledge about our own native language from parents and others is hardwired in a baby’s brain, but math is not, at least not higher math. It is thought that some birds, and probably mammals are able to visually “count” at least up to a certain point, which helps them to care for their babies, but as far as I know, no other animals can calculate. There was, however, a mom cat in the news who became a national heroine a few years ago, when she went back six times into a raging house fire until she got all of her kittens. She was badly burned in the process, but she and her whole family lived. (Just because cats can’t easily be made to “roll over” on command doesn’t mean they are “dumb.”)

In defense of Common Core math, the “New Math” of the 1970s used something called a number line to help kids conceptualize what was going on, while in my young years I just worked repeatedly with the tried and true “carry 1” method, which I basically understood, but it was the memorization and repetition that actually taught me. That was even more true for the multiplication tables and “long division.” The truth is there are good math teachers and considerably more inferior ones. No teacher taught me to “figure it in my head” as my father was able to do. That has to do with conceptualizing addition and subtraction based on the number 10 rather than one by one. When my boyfriend, a college physics major, taught me the simple ten-based figuring method I picked it up easily. No teacher had taught me that. I should have learned it in the second grade. Every time I think of that it ticks me off. If I had had better early teaching I might have had an easier time from there on and successfully studied mathematical sciences. I was interested in biology which, while not really mathematical, has some math applications such as statistics. I might also have had “fun” with math as my husband did, rather than slogging my way through it. I did later found algebra and geometry both much more fun and easier than arithmetic, as they are based on logic, plus the fact that my teacher during those years -- whose name was Mrs. Fulp -- was an excellent teacher. Trig did confuse and, unfortunately, simply bore me, however, and I just squeaked by in that course, but that’s all water under the bridge. My main talent was in the language arts, especially writing and analysis. For some reason my mind never “runs out” of words.

I managed to get a reasonably good education, but if Common Core math is actually a superior teaching method, then I approve of it. I absolutely approve of the history courses that teach both the good and the bad events in our history, rather than being little more than right-wing indoctrination programs. Predictably, because they are not “patriotic” enough, many conservatives are criticizing them heavily. The culture wars are ongoing, so I will simply keep fighting what I perceive to be “the good fight.”







http://www.cbsnews.com/news/dogs-on-the-road-in-texas/

Dogs "On The Road" in Texas
By STEVE HARTMAN CBS NEWS
October 2, 2015

Photograph -- en1002hartmandogs04.jpg -- Dog train in Texas. CBS NEWS


FORT WORTH -- I came to Fort Worth, Texas thinking I had seen everything, when out rolled evidence to the contrary -- a guy on a mower pulling nine dogs on a train.

That's a new one. In fact, the only thing more surprising than the sight, may be the story behind it.

The train ride is the brain child of brothers Eugene and Walter Bostick, and it's just a small part of their much larger mission to improve the lives of every single critter they come across. The Bosticks, who live in the same 11 acre woods they grew up in, spend thousands of dollars a year just feeding the wildlife here.

"You name 'em - 'coons, 'possums," said Walter.

"Beaver," Eugene chimed in.

"No, we don't...Oh yeah, the beaver does eat corn and bread," Walter responded.

They don't miss so much as a mallard. And if you're wondering why they have this insatiable need to feed, the answer is simple -- childhood guilt.

"When we first moved here we killed them all. The rule of the day was anything that moved we shot," the brothers said.

But now these repentant hunters are making amends in any way they can think of, which brings us back to the train. Over the years a lot of stray dogs have wandered onto the property. Of course they're cared for, but that wasn't enough for the Bostick boys who thought these mutts might enjoy a little movement as well.

"You'd be surprised how good it makes you feel to see them loading up and how happy they are," Walter said.

The train departs once a week for an hour of pure joy. The mangy misfits -- now the envy of the neighborhood. The dogs no one wanted -- now like celebrities on a catwalk.

Their giant chew-chew toy takes the dogs mostly through the local warehouse district, but for the brothers, each trip takes them one step closer to redemption.

Certainly if all dogs go to heaven, you know there's gotta be room for those who engineer their happiness.



Life is still fun, even if we are having culture wars. Nobody can disagree with what these two warm-hearted animal lovers are doing. Go to the website and click on the video to see dogs having an obviously ecstatic time. I have never known a dog that doesn’t love to take a ride in a car, and this open air conveyance is even better.

October 2, 2015


News Clips For The Day


ROSEBURG SHOOTER – THREE ARTICLES


http://www.cbsnews.com/news/oregon-shooting-umpqua-community-college-gunman-chris-harper-mercers-family-speaks-out/

Gunman's family reacts to Oregon massacre
CBS NEWS
October 2, 2015


TORRANCE, Calif. --The man suspected of opening fire on a college campus and killing nine people in Oregon had ties to Torrance and relatives in Tarzana, California, CBS Los Angeles reported.

Two law enforcement sources told CBS News that Chris Harper Mercer, 26, was the man who opened fire at Umpqua Community College. He died after exchanging gunfire with responding officers.

Carmen Nesnick, the stepsister of Mercer, said he was born in the United Kingdom and traveled to the United States as a young boy.

"I'm actually still shaking and my mom is in there crying. I don't know what to do," said Nesnick, who said that Mercer's father, who lives in Tarzana, married her mother a few years ago.

She says the last time she spoke with Mercer was about a year ago. Even though they had met only a few times, Nesnick described him as "caring and supportive."

"All he ever did was put everybody before himself. He wanted everyone to be happy. No matter if he was sad or mad, he would always try to cheer up everybody," she said.

Nesnick said her stepbrother was not a religious nor anti-religious person and that her family is Christian.

"I am just as shocked as anybody at what happened today," said Ian Mercer, the suspect's father.

"I can't answer any questions right now. I don't want to answer any questions right now. Obviously, it's been a devastating day, devastating for me and my family," he said.

Meanwhile, Bronte Hart, who lived below Mercer in the community of Winchester, told the Associated Press that Mercer would "sit by himself in the dark in the balcony with this little light."

Hart, who said Mercer "seemed really unfriendly," told the AP that a woman she believed to be Mercer's mother also lived upstairs and was "crying her eyes out" Thursday night.

Posts on an online blog that appears to belong to Mercer reference multiple shootings, including one in Virginia in August that left a television news reporter and cameraman dead. The last upload on the blog was Wednesday. when a documentary about the Newtown shooting was posted.

In one post on the blog about Vester Flanagan, the man who killed the reporter and cameraman in Virginia, Mercer apparently wrote, "I have noticed that so many people like [Flanagan] are alone and unknown, yet when they spill a little blood, the whole world knows who they are. A man who was known by no one, is now known by everyone. His face splashed across every screen, his name across the lips of every person on the planet, all in the course of one day. Seems like the more people you kill, the more you're in the limelight."





http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mass-shootings-and-the-mental-health-connection/

Mass shootings and the mental health connection
By JONATHAN LAPOOK CBS NEWS
October 1, 2015

Video -- CBS NEWS with Scott Pelley


The cause of the shooting at a community college in Oregon on Thursday is not yet known, but often mental illness is part of it.

The American College of Physicians says gun violence is not only a criminal justice issue, but a public health threat, as well. In many cases, it is also a mental health issue.

CBS News' Chief medical correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook reports that when it comes to mental illness, early intervention helps, but even then, often access to care is difficult.

There's currently a pilot program at Children's National Medical Center in D.C. that began in May.

Pediatricians and school counselors are trained to identify mental illness and then call child and adolescent psychiatrists for help.

To learn more about the program and what it does, watch the video above.




MENTAL HEALTH – “The American College of Physicians says gun violence is not only a criminal justice issue, but a public health threat, as well. In many cases, it is also a mental health issue. …. There's currently a pilot program at Children's National Medical Center in D.C. that began in May. Pediatricians and school counselors are trained to identify mental illness and then call child and adolescent psychiatrists for help. …. To learn more about the program and what it does, watch the video above.”

I’m very glad to see that professionals who are in contact with children and teens are being trained to spot signs of mental illness, which can take on a number of different forms. I have most often heard about autism, ADHD, and depression. Such children may be bullied unmercifully on high school campuses and outside them, and too often teachers just don’t step in and stop that immediately, and may even blame the victim. Schools have become a no man’s land in many cities.

The teen years are usually a time of a “normal” level of emotional imbalance as the kids of both sexes are going through the natural hormonal changes of growing up, but they are also very much subject during that time to more serious feelings of social disaffection or emotional withdrawal. They want to be accepted by people but may be too shy or timid to blend with their peers in a way that will keep them from being bullied or simply shunned by some, especially if there are highly divisive social class elements in the school of race or wealth, and young people like that may have some highly negative views on authority figures or people of other races. Scattered among that group of young people are individuals with schizophrenia or other severe illness that tends to get worse with age or under social or school pressure. Then one day the child decides to take a gun to school and take vengeance against his enemies. Sometimes they have literally “snapped,” and other times they have planned it for months. This situation at Rosewood is such a case.

In this case he disliked Christians and “organized religion” of all kinds. I don’t like fundamentalist religion, but I do believe that the more liberal religious groups do a great deal of good for society, and I certainly am not moved to kill anyone over their opinions. Mercer also was highly involved with the IRA, which haven’t been in the news recently but were in the 1990s and for many years before. Both Mercer and his father were originally from the UK, one video said, and when his father spoke on camera he had what sounded to me like an Irish accent. The main connection I see in that with this killing is the severe violence of IRA members before they made a peace agreement with the UK government, and if he’s poring over their history, he was involved with some very violent material. I have always personally liked the Irish people I’ve met, and indeed am descended from them, but I don’t like their inherent tendency to be in fights. He was also interested in White Supremacy groups whose violence is legendary. He seems to have been steeped in hatred and rage, probably “stifled it” to avoid getting into trouble, and one day just boiled over. See the comments about him in the other two articles posted. He gave the appearance of being unusually conciliatory – that was very likely due to an inability to deal with conflict and possibly a fear of being injured. There may have been violence within his home, I think, as with many American families.

We get quite upset whenever there is a shooting like this one and understandably so, but violence among young people is far more common than just those high profile shooting cases, and it should not be discounted as a cause for concern. I believe violent young people should be given mental health treatment rather than simply arresting them. Gang violence is also caused by poor mental health. Young people who are full of anger and don’t “fit in” frequently join street gangs for the group security they find there, and then end up in jail. It’s not an accident, but a result.

They need some mental health counseling and possibly appropriate drugs, but too often don’t get it. Many parents simply don’t see there children as having any real problems, especially if they are in the habit of punishing their kids harshly rather than maintaining a close talking relationship with them. That is not only less effective in “reforming” the young person, but it often brings out chronic fear and anger to make their behavior worse and worse. Many adults have little insight into their own thoughts and emotions, and even less so into those of their children, so they rarely just “talk to them” like Sheriff Andy Taylor with Opie, but threaten them with violence. If a pediatrician points out to the parent that their child needs professional help, as the Children's National Medical Center in D.C. mentioned above recommends, they are more likely to pay closer attention to the matter, and perhaps even agree to go to Family Counseling with a psychological professional rather than merely a church minister.

One of the main enemies of good mental health in this country is Fundamentalist religion of any kind, not usually just because of its specific tenets, but because of the closed-minded and often harsh thinking patterns of their members. Many of these shooters turn out to be religious radicals, especially in the killing of abortion doctors and the Islamic killers of the last year or so here in this country and in France. The dogmas of religion are so often taken as a substitute for good thinking, gentleness and self-knowledge, that such people believe that their actions are not only justified, but a “call from God.” I personally consider people like that to be either less than normally intelligent or psychotic, and there have been more of them during the last ten or fifteen years since 9/11.

This killer had a different twist on religion, though he was killing Christians, he wasn’t affiliated with any religion and posted anti-religious comments on the Internet. He also was highly involved with guns, as most of these people are and had a collection. The following MSN article gives a great deal of detail about Mercer and his background and also about the shooting as it progressed.



http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/oregon-shooter-said-to-have-singled-out-christians-for-killing-in-%e2%80%98horrific-act-of-cowardice%e2%80%99/ar-AAf2dui?li=AAa0dzB&ocid=iehp

Oregon shooter said to have singled out Christians for killing in ‘horrific act of cowardice’
The Washington Post
By Eli Saslow, Sarah Kaplan and Joseph Hoyt
October 2, 2015


ROSEBURG, Ore. — Investigators including cyber-experts and hate crime specialists peered Friday into the life of a 26-year-old gunman whose massacre across an Oregon campus may have been driven by religious rage and a fascination with the twisted notoriety of high-profile killers.

What is known so far about the attacker — identified by a U.S. law enforcement official as Chris Harper Mercer — appear only as loose strands that suggested an interest in firearms and the infamy gained by mass shooters.

Witnesses also said he seemed to seek specific revenge against Christians, and police examined Web posts that hinted of wider antipathy toward organized faith.

But authorities still struggled to build a clearer picture at what drove the California-raised Mercer to stalk rural Umpqua Community College — armed with three pistols and a semiautomatic rifle — and methodically pick off students and professors Thursday on the fourth day of the fall semester.

At the end, nine people were dead, plus Mercer, and the college joined the mournful roster of America’s mass shooting sites.

[Shooter left behind online portrait of a lonely youth with a grudge]

At least 10 others were admitted for treatment at the Mercy Medical Center, said the chief medical officer, Jason Gray, on Friday. Three patients were transferred to larger facilities for more intensive care, he added.


“The days and weeks ahead will be the most challenging” as the small community copes with the aftermath, Gray said.

The names of those killed and wounded were not yet released nor would Douglas County Sheriff John Hanlin name the shooter publicly, more out of rage than discretion. “I will not name the shooter,” he said at a news conference Thursday night. “I will not give him credit for this horrific act of cowardice. Media will get the name confirmed in time … but you will never hear us use it.”

A gofundme fundraising page was started for one man believed to be a victim of the shooting, Christopher Mintz, an Army veteran who was shot seven times. The page, which includes a photo of Mintz lying in a hospital bed, was established by a man who identified himself as Derek Bourgeois, a cousin of Mintz’s. Bourgeois said he grew up with Mintz in Randleman, N.C.

Relatives told CNN that Mintz tried to block the door of a classroom and was shot three times. When the shooter made his way in, Mintz told them that Thursday was his son’s sixth birthday and was shot at least twice more. Mintz was wounded in the back, stomach, hands and legs, according to the report.

The gofundme page says that “yesterday my cousin Chris Mintz was shot 7 times while trying to protect others from the gunman at Umpqua Community College.” It adds that “during the shooting both of his legs were broken and he is going to have to go through a ton of physical therapy.”

The transition from the anonymity of “before” to the notoriety of “after” took just about 10 terrifying minutes, during which the shooter strode through a school building armed with three pistols and a semiautomatic rifle. Clad in a dark shirt and jeans, driven by a motive that is still unknown, he methodically sprayed bullets into classrooms full of students, who hid behind desks and desperately tried to block doors that didn’t lock.

In one classroom, he appeared to single out Christian students for killing, according to witness Anastasia Boylan.

“He said, ‘Good, because you’re a Christian, you’re going to see God in just about one second,'” Boylan’s father, Stacy, told CNN, relaying his daughter’s account while she underwent surgery to treat a gunshot to her spine.

“And then he shot and killed them.”

Another account came from Autumn Vicari, who described to NBC News what her brother J.J. witnessed in the room where the shootings occurred. According to NBC: “Vicari said at one point the shooter told people to stand up before asking whether they were Christian or not. Vicari’s brother told her that anyone who responded ‘yes’ was shot in the head. If they said ‘other’ or didn’t answer, they were shot elsewhere in the body, usually the leg.”

The violence stopped only after authorities exchanged gunfire with Mercer. At 10:47 a.m. local time Thursday, the end was announced over the police scanner: The suspect was down.

The scraps of information about Mercer uncovered so far did not fit together easily and much remained unconfirmed, including reports that he had forecast some act of violence in Oregon in a dark corner of the Internet known as 4chan, a report being investigated by federal authorities, according to the New York Times. But a murky portrait was emerging of a quiet and withdrawn young man who struggled to connect with other people, instead seeking attention online, and who harbored anger against organized religion.

Thursday’s rampage was the latest in a series of mass shootings that have produced national revulsion, even as they have left Republicans and Democrats divided over whether such violence should lead to stricter gun laws. The campus shootings came three months after nine people were gunned down at a historic African American church in Charleston, S.C.

One group that tracks gun violence, the Mass Shooting Tracker, said it was the 294th death or injury from a shooting involving four or more people in the United States this year — a rate of more than one victim a day.

School shootings have figured prominently in this series of tragedies, including the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings and the deaths of 20 children in 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

From Washington, a visibly frustrated President Obama offered prayers for the victims and their families and quickly pivoted to repeat his call for stricter gun-safety laws, something he has done throughout his presidency to no avail.

“Each time we see one of these mass shootings, our thoughts and prayers are not enough,” he said. “It’s not enough. It does not capture the heartache and grief and anger that we should feel. It does nothing to prevent this carnage from being inflicted someplace else in America.”

But in Douglas County, a rural region where hunting is popular and crime rates are low, support for gun rights is strong.

“I carry to protect myself — the exact same reason this happened,” Casey Runyan, a disabled Marine Corps veteran who now lives in the area, told the Associated Press. He told the AP he brings a Glock-29 pistol wherever he goes.

Hanlin, the Douglas County sheriff, sent a letter to Vice President Biden in 2013, after the shootings in Newtown renewed the debate about gun control. Hanlin said that proposed restrictions would be “irresponsible and an indisputable insult to the American people,” and he and his deputies would refuse to enforce them.

For Thursday night, at least, attention was mainly on the victims. In a ritual that has repeated itself many times in other places over the past few years, people gathered at the Douglas County Fairgrounds where evacuees from the school had been taken to meet their families. With darkness falling, the site of reunions became a base for an anxious vigil. A chaplain led a group prayer. Families missing a member clung to one another. Friends stood by and struggled to stave off dread.

“It’s agonizing to be here and just wait,” said Sarah Cobb, 17, a UCC student who had survived the shooting by ducking under her desk but was still waiting to hear about some of her classmates and friends.

“The longer people sit in there, the more they know it is going to be bad,” she said, referring to a gathering of investigators and FBI agents in a small building at the fairgrounds. “But you’re just praying and hoping that it’s not.”

[Grief and uncertainty at the vigil: ‘Pretty much just total shock’]

All day Thursday, local and federal law enforcement officials swarmed Umpqua’s small campus, a modest collection of about a dozen buildings largely unprotected by gates or walls.

Umpqua, one of 17 community colleges in Oregon, has about 2,000 students and about 200 full- and part-time faculty members. Federal data suggests Umpqua is a quiet campus; the only crimes reported there in recent years have been an occasional burglary and, in 2013, an aggravated assault.

After a 2006 incident in which one student was shot by another at Roseburg High School, local institutions — including UCC — hired security guards, according to the Eugene Register-Guard. Those security guards are unarmed, interim college President Rita Calvin told the newspaper. The campus is a gun-free zone.

Investigators also fanned out across two states where Mercer lived, questioning family members and former neighbors, sifting through social media postings and obscure Internet forums in search of some clues about what happened, and why.

Public records showed no previous brushes with law enforcement by Mercer. Social media accounts attributed to him, including a MySpace page and an online dating profile, offer hints of his interests — the Irish Republican Army, punk rock music, an antipathy toward religion — but little real insight.

According to reports, authorities are investigating a conversation on the message board 4chan posted Wednesday evening. The site is notorious for staging online hoaxes, in addition to cat memes, hackings and Internet attacks. But the conversation, if authentic, appears to show a gunman’s plans for a shooting. “Don’t go to school tomorrow if you are in the northwest,” the post reads.

Mercer grew up in California, where he attended the Switzer Learning Center for students with disabilities. Rick Rada, a former classmate, recalled Mercer as quiet, cheerful and non-violent.

“To me Chris was just an ordinary guy, really. He was one of the silent types like me,” Rada told The Washington Post. “… But we got along with our teachers. He opened up with the teachers, talked to them, had fun.”

Former neighbors in Torrance, Calif., a beachside city just south of Los Angeles, told the Los Angeles Times that Mercer liked to practice target shooting and tended to act “anxious or nervous,” as Rosario Espinoza put it. He and his mother, Laurel Harper, mostly kept to themselves, except for occasional disputes over bugs or loud noises. Espinoza’s mother, Rosario Lucumi, recalled thinking it “strange” that Harper referred to her son as “baby.”

[Umpqua, Ore.: Where unemployment is high and gun rights are precious]

Mercer moved to Oregon with his mother a year or two ago, according to public records. It’s not clear if and how he may have been affiliated with Umpqua Community College, though a student told CNN that she took a theater class with Mercer, and a “Chris Harper-Mercer” is listed as a production assistant on the Facebook page of a UCC fall show.

His father, Ian Mercer, still lives in Los Angeles. He stepped outside his home there briefly on Thursday night to say that he had spent the day speaking with law enforcement and could not answer questions about his son or the shooting.

“Shocked is all I can say,” he told reporters. “It’s been a devastating day.”

Gloria Buhring, a neighbor at the Winchester, Ore., apartment complex where Mercer appeared to have lived, said police officers swarmed the area Thursday, blocking much of the complex off with police tape.

Buhring didn’t know Mercer. But on Wednesday, she returned home to find a previously empty dumpster “overflowing with stuff that looked like it had been moved from an apartment,” she told The Washington Post. “It looked like somebody had gotten rid of a lot of stuff and left.”

Another Winchester neighbor, Bronte Hart, told Seattle TV station KIRO that Mercer would “sit by himself in the dark in the balcony with this little light.”

Hart said a woman she believed to be Mercer’s mother lived with him and was “crying her eyes out” Thursday.

Steven Fisher, who also lives nearby, described Mercer as “skittish.”

“His demeanor, the way he moved, always looking around,” Fisher told CNN. “I got a bad vibe from him.”

Those words — “silent,” “skittish,” “strange” — come up a lot in answers to questions about Mercer. But not “violent.” No one interviewed who knew him said they suspected that he might be the type of person to fire into a classroom full of college students.

The attack started just after 10:30 a.m. local time, when students in Snyder Hall — a modest building in the southeast part of campus where science and English classes are held — heard a sudden popping noise.

Some were bewildered by the noises. But Cobb, a 17-year-old who heard the sound from her Writing 121 class in Snyder, recognized them immediately.

Gunshots.

“I grew up hunting, so by then I knew what it was,” she told The Washington Post. Cobb screamed to her teacher that they all needed to get out, and the instructor opened the door onto chaos: students running, a teacher crying, a man screaming for someone to call 911. Cobb left her phone, her backpack and all of her belongings in the classroom and then ran out of the building, tripping her way down the stairs.

“There was so much screaming you knew it was serious,” she said. “I was terrified. I was sprinting. You could hear the gunshots echoing in the hall.”

Cobb had just moved to Roseburg from Eugene a few months earlier, and she didn’t know anyone in her class.

“I think everyone in my room escaped,” she said. “But you know right away that wasn’t going to be the same next door.”

One of Cobb’s classmates, 19-year-old Hannah Miles, told the Eugene Register-Guard that she followed her instructor and several other classmates to the school bookstore, where an employee called 911.

The report came in at 10:38 a.m: “Active shooter at UCC,” the dispatcher said.

While police, paramedics and first responders went into action, Mercer continued his rampage on campus.

Anastasia Boylan, the witness being treated for a spinal injury, told her family that the gunman entered her classroom firing, according to CNN.

“I’ve been waiting to do this for years,” he told the professor. Then he shot the man point blank.

According to Boylan’s account, as retold by her family, everyone in the classroom dropped to the ground. Mercer reloaded his weapon, then asked students who were Christian to stand up.

They did so. That’s when he told them “you’re going to see God,” and fired, choosing to shoot others in the legs.

Boylan, 18, survived by pretending to be dead. She’d been hit in the back and lay on the floor bleeding, according to CNN. When Mercer said, “Hey you, blonde woman,” she did nothing.

Eventually, Boylan was rescued and airlifted to a Eugene hospital, where she is being treated for her injuries, her grandmother told the LA Times.

In a room nearby, Cassandra Welding heard the percussive sounds of gunshots with horror. A classmate opened the door to look at what was happening, Welding told the LA Times, and was shot.

“We were screaming, ‘Close the door! Close the door!'” Welding said.

Someone dragged the injured woman back into the room and locked the door. Taking turns, classmates performed CPR on the woman, who had been shot in the torso. Her broken glasses lay on the floor near her, Welding told the LA Times. Blood was splattered on the walls.

The students crawled toward the back of the room, away from the door.

“I was so terrified for my life and I was shaking,” Welding said. While another classmate called 911, the 20-year-old phoned her mother. She wasn’t the only one.

“I just heard other people in tears, crying, calling their loved ones and telling them, ‘I love you.'” she told the Times. “It was such a heart-wrenching thing.”

Minutes after the initial 911 call, police arrived on campus.

Their quick, deadly confrontation with gunman was reported over the police scanner.

“We exchanged shots with him; he’s in a classroom on the east side of Snyder Hall,” an officer hurriedly informed the dispatcher.

Then, minutes later: “The suspect is down. We’ve got multiple gun shot wounds. We’re going to need multiple ambulances on scene,” an officer urged. “… As many ambulances as possible. We have upwards of 20 victims.”

Later in the day, that figure was revised down: 10 dead, including the gunman, and seven more wounded.

Hanlin, the Douglas County sheriff, said at a Thursday night press conference that the victims likely won’t be identified for another 24 to 48 hours. Officials want to ensure that all families have been notified before releasing the names of those killed.

Officials at Mercy Medical Center in Roseburg said the hospital had received 10 patients from the shooting.

PeaceHealth Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend, a hospital about 70 miles north of the school, said it had three female patients, one in critical condition and the other two in serious condition.

The UCC campus will remain closed Friday, as officials continue to catalog and investigate the aftermath. Around Oregon, flags are being flown at half-staff.

“Today was the saddest day in the history of the college,” Cavin said at a news conference Thursday.

That evening, with their friends in the hospital, their campus a crime scene and the dead still nine nameless unknowns, hundreds of people gathered at a park in downtown Roseburg. Cheeks wet, candles clutched in their hands, mourners listened as professors, public officials and the college president urged them to think of the victims, and not the man who killed them.

When the speeches were over, a chant went up: “We are UCC.”

“After” was underway.

Eli Saslow and Joseph Hoyt reported from Oregon. Brian Murphy, Michael Miller, Yanan Wang, Mark Berman and Jerry Markon contributed reporting from Washington.




POLITICAL CANDIDATES


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/10/01/bernie-sanderss-26-million-cash-haul-is-a-major-problem-for-hillary-clinton/

Bernie Sanders’s $26 million cash haul is a major problem for Hillary Clinton
By Chris Cillizza
October 1 at 9:09 AM

Photograph and video -- Democratic candidate for president, Sen. Bernie Sander's (I-Vt.) campaign is surging, but does he even have a chance against Hillary Clinton? The Fix's Chris Cillizza explains. (Pamela Kirkland and Randolph Smith/The Washington Post)


Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton technically beat Bernie Sanders by $2 million in the chase for campaign cash over the past three months. But that isn't the story — not even close.

Clinton held 58 fundraising events to raise her total; Sanders held seven. As of the end of September, Sanders had brought in 1.3 million total donations from 650,000 individuals since he began running. Clinton's campaign did not release how many total donors she has. And Sanders ended September with $25 million in the bank; Clinton did not release how much money her campaign had on hand.

Read between the lines, and you get this: Sanders is drawing huge amounts of small-dollar donations via the Web. That means two important things: (1) Sanders has been able to concentrate on meeting and greeting potential voters rather than spending his time courting donors, and (2) He has been able to conserve money because he isn't spending cash on lavish events for donors.


Money is, of course, a sign of broader trends in the race as well. Sanders is the grass-roots candidate who is appealing to the heart of the party base; Clinton is the lead candidate, accruing donations — at least in part — out of a sense that, in the end, she will be the nominee. Hence, lots of people are sending small-dollar donations to Sanders while Clinton holds more traditional fundraising events to collect cash from the usual suspects.

[How Bernie Sanders would transform the nation]

That story line is — as you might have guessed — not a good one for Clinton. It reinforces everything that people already believe about the dynamics of the contest — that Sanders is the energy candidate who is speaking the language of the base and that Clinton continues to struggle to inspire that sort of devotion and passion.

Then, of course, there is the simple fact that if I told you six months ago that Sanders would (1) raise $25 million in a single fundraising quarter and (2) would come within a few million dollars of Clinton, you would not have believed me. No way.

Sanders, who began this campaign as an oddity, now has every vestige of a serious candidate — from crowds to organization to money. And he has the one thing that Clinton badly wants/needs: energy.

There are practical realities of Sanders's fundraising, too. Having $25 million in the bank, and having raised $40 million, Sanders will now be able to get his message out — largely via TV ads — in at least Iowa and New Hampshire. Clinton and her aligned super PAC will still outspend Sanders on TV, but it won't be totally lopsided or at least as lopsided as everyone, including Sanders and his team, expected.

Sometimes, top-line numbers don't tell the whole story. This is one of those cases. Yes, Clinton raised the most money. But, make no mistake: This is Sanders's quarter.

Update 12:06 p.m.: Clinton's campaign says it has at least $32 million cash on hand, compared to Sanders's $25 million.


Chris Cillizza writes “The Fix,” a politics blog for the Washington Post. He also covers the White House.




“That story line is — as you might have guessed — not a good one for Clinton. It reinforces everything that people already believe about the dynamics of the contest — that Sanders is the energy candidate who is speaking the language of the base and that Clinton continues to struggle to inspire that sort of devotion and passion. …. There are practical realities of Sanders's fundraising, too. Having $25 million in the bank, and having raised $40 million, Sanders will now be able to get his message out — largely via TV ads — in at least Iowa and New Hampshire. Clinton and her aligned super PAC will still outspend Sanders on TV, but it won't be totally lopsided or at least as lopsided as everyone, including Sanders and his team, expected.”

When I first began to see what Bernie Sanders was saying, and the fact that he calls himself a Democratic Socialist, I thought, “I do wish he could become president,” but I feared all the angry white men would lambast him out of all ability to win, because of his Socialist label. My early political years, the fifties and sixties, were full of the widespread fear of communism in this country, though it never really appealed to the masses here. Socialism is viewed by those people as “Communism Lite.” The word back then was Pinko for Socialist and Red for Communist. In small Southern cities like Thomasville there was a great deal of anger in the air over that issue.

It is interesting that not one conservative has been in the news – at least a leading candidate – even criticizing him very much over anything, much less his “Pinko” leanings. Are they holding their breath because they are afraid to give him that much personal attention? Of course, there will be more talk about it before 2015 is over, and especially if he gets the Democratic nomination. My fear, however, is that the leaders of the Democratic Party will be terrified of nominating him for fear the “White Backlash” crowd will rise up in fury and he will be seen as truly unelectable.

I’m still hedging my bet. If he is nominated I will certainly vote for him, but if Hillary or Biden gets it instead I will also vote for them. I will not vote for Sanders if he makes a third party run. He promised not to do that. I really can’t wait for the Democratic convention next year. I do have high hopes for Sanders. He’s like a breath of fresh spring air in February. I’m interested in Biden, but he has said very, very little so far. I don’t think that’s a good thing.





http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/jeb-bush%e2%80%99s-remarks-about-blacks-echo-a-firestorm-he-faced-as-governor/ar-AAf2cM6?li=AAa0dzB&ocid=iehp

Jeb Bush’s Remarks About Blacks Echo a Firestorm He Faced as Governor
The New York Times
By MATT FLEGENHEIMER
October 2, 2015 6 hrs ago

Photograph -- © Mark Foley/Associated Press Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida met in January 2000 with State Representative Anthony C. Hill and State Senator Kendrick Meek.


In 1999, shortly after Jeb Bush’s election as governor of Florida, the leader of a national movement to overturn affirmative action policies visited his Tallahassee office with a request: Would Mr. Bush support a ballot measure banishing such policies, which had become a favored conservative target?

The governor’s eyes wandered to an image on his wall, featuring several black children. He approached the photograph. “I’m not with you,” Mr. Bush said finally, according to the activist, Ward Connerly. “They are the ones I want to help.”

By the end of the year, black leaders across Florida disagreed with that self-assessment.

Mr. Bush unveiled an alternative plan, which itself took aim at racial preferences in public university admissions and state contracting, setting off a firestorm he said he had strained to avoid. Black legislators staged a sit-in at the governor’s executive suite. Thousands marched on the Capitol. And Mr. Bush’s inbox swelled with the pleas of students, asking why he was quashing their chance to attend college.

It was, allies say, neither the first nor the last time that Mr. Bush’s good intentions had been misunderstood on a matter of race. The most recent example arrived last week, as Mr. Bush told a crowd in South Carolina that Republicans should not appeal to African-Americans with promises of “free stuff.”

“Our message is one that is uplifting,” Mr. Bush said then, “that says you can achieve earned success.”

Opponents saw in the Sept. 24 comments a brazen hypocrisy from a son of political royalty — the latest stumble for a candidate who has cast himself as a bridge to new voters, with experience leading a diverse state and a unique perspective among Republican presidential candidates as the bilingual husband of a woman born in Mexico.

Longtime supporters heard something else: an echo of one of the most turbulent episodes of his governorship.

Mr. Bush had not planned on a fight upon entering office, at least not on this count. Chastened by a narrow election loss in 1994 — he campaigned for governor as a tough-on-crime conservative who glibly predicted he would do “probably nothing” for blacks if elected — Mr. Bush had since moved to expand his outreach to new constituencies.

He co-founded a charter school serving predominantly black residents in Miami, pressed for diversity in appointments of agency heads and judges, and expressed remorse in a 1998 debate when asked about his relationship with black voters.

“Republicans have ignored the black vote in this state, and I was part of that, and it was a mistake,” he said.

As Mr. Bush took office, though, Mr. Connerly, who had helped spur a national movement to challenge affirmative action policies on state ballots, eyed Florida as his next battleground.

Mr. Bush largely agreed with him, arguing against racial quotas. But he cast the prospect of a ballot measure as needlessly divisive. Some critics saw another motivation: The vote would have come in November 2000, and threatened to increase African-American turnout for an election in which his brother was on the ballot for president. Those close to Mr. Bush have disputed any connection.

Mr. Bush proposed a third way, calling the initiative “One Florida.” It banned racial preferences at universities and in state procurements, but required state campuses to guarantee a spot for all students who finished in the top 20 percent of their class. His brother George W. Bush, then the Texas governor, had endorsed a similar approach, backing a 1996 court decision that banned racial preferences at the University of Texas School of Law but called for an “affirmative access” approach that assured admission for top graduates from Texas high schools.

In Tallahassee, Mr. Bush argued the changes would actually increase enrollment figures for minority groups — a claim that, more than a decade later, remains contested. He also said he was ordering agencies to revamp procurement protocols to encourage greater diversity among vendors.

Few groups were pleased. Some black elected officials suggested Mr. Bush had not consulted them sufficiently. Conservatives had long questioned why he refused to back Mr. Connerly’s efforts in the first place.

“I am not wobbly,” Mr. Bush responded in a March 1999 email to one skeptic. “I oppose quotas and set-asides, and can assure you that they will not be used in state government.”

By Mr. Bush’s count, he received about 20 messages a day on the subject — and answered most of them himself, suggesting the state’s Citizen Services unit lacked “the political or social sensitivities” to respond adequately.

“Kind of scary and I am very tired,” he wrote to aides at the end of his first month as governor, describing the email volume.

At times, Mr. Bush seemed wounded. “Who told you that?” he wrote back to a 13-year-old who suggested his hopes of attending college would be dashed. “Why don’t you get the person who told you an untruth to write me?”

The debate consumed much of his first year in office, cresting perhaps in January 2000, two months after Mr. Bush had issued an executive order outlining his vision.

Two prominent black lawmakers arrived in Mr. Bush’s executive suite for a meeting with the lieutenant governor. Mr. Bush, who had resisted meeting the men himself, dropped in briefly to lament the futility of their push.

“If you think I’m going to change my mind, you might as well get some blankets,” he told the lawmakers, according to one of them, Anthony C. Hill, then a state representative.

“So we did that,” Mr. Hill recalled.

Soon, the governor’s office was overtaken by the spectacle. Protesters descended on the Capitol to support Mr. Hill and his State Senate colleague, Kendrick Meek, who did not budge for more than 24 hours. Reporters raced to the premises. And in a hot-mike moment that attracted national headlines, Mr. Bush ordered aides to “kick their asses out,” unaware that his words were being recorded. His team later insisted he was talking about the reporters.

Eventually, Mr. Bush relented, slightly. He agreed to meet the lawmakers and scheduled a series of public meetings on the changes to come.

But emotions simmered still. The Rev. R.B. Holmes Jr., who was Mr. Bush’s most outspoken black supporter, said at the time that he felt double-crossed: “Instead of One Florida, it’s divisive Florida.” (The enmity did not last; Mr. Holmes introduced Mr. Bush at his presidential campaign kickoff in June and has continued campaigning for him.)

Al Cardenas, Mr. Bush’s longtime adviser and friend, said Mr. Bush feared violent demonstrations and urged his team to avoid inflaming tensions.

“It’s the only time I remember him calling me two or three times saying, ‘Don’t be too provocative,’” said Mr. Cardenas, who had advocated challenging the affirmative action supporters to a public debate.

Less than two months after the sit-in, as Mr. Bush defended One Florida in his State of the State address, an enormous protest, led by the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, rolled through Tallahassee.

Inside the House chambers, Mr. Bush vowed that his plan would work. “This year,” he pledged, “more minority students will be admitted to our university system than last year.”

That fall, Mr. Bush and his team highlighted gains in minority admissions at state universities. But many in higher education were skeptical of the program, noting that those acceptance decisions had taken place before One Florida’s implementation.

The next year, some statistics were less encouraging. At the University of Florida, 7.2 percent of incoming freshmen in 2001 were black, down from 11.7 percent the previous year.

“When that policy was put in place, we scrambled a little bit,” Joe Glover, the University of Florida’s provost, said in an interview.

He said the program had, for better or worse, helped compel the school to revise its admissions practices by targeting groups, like low-income applicants whose parents had not attended college, to increase diversity without violating the order.

Mr. Bush’s supporters have argued that the plan fulfilled its purpose, infusing admissions policies with conservative ideals while coaxing schools to find opportunities for underrepresented groups in other ways.

An analysis by the Orlando Sentinel in 2010 found that minority enrollment in the state’s university system had not kept pace with the number of minorities graduating high school. In 1999, the report said, more than 20 percent of the state’s high school graduates and 17.5 percent of university freshmen were black. By 2008, black students accounted for 19.5 percent of high school graduates and 14.9 percent of university freshmen.

Mr. Bush’s team has pushed back since his tenure ended, noting that more students of all races had been enrolled, with particular gains among Hispanics as the state’s demographics shifted.

And according to the Bush campaign, businesses run by blacks and Hispanics received tens of millions of dollars more in state procurements by the time he left office.

But some opponents required special attention from the governor. In 2000, a student named Tania Williams engaged Mr. Bush in a multi-email exchange, predicting a return to the era of Jim Crow and asking how long Mr. Bush would wait to assess the program’s success.

“Great question and that is what I am working on to lessen people’s fears,” Mr. Bush wrote. “You are very perceptive!”

Ms. Williams asked, with a typed smiley face, if this meant she could pester Mr. Bush about a summer internship. “I don’t know if we have summer internships, but look me up nonetheless,” he replied.

In an email this week, Ms. Williams said she had gotten the internship.

She is now a lawyer in West Palm Beach, some 75 miles from Mr. Bush’s campaign headquarters.




“In 1999, shortly after Jeb Bush’s election as governor of Florida, the leader of a national movement to overturn affirmative action policies visited his Tallahassee office with a request: Would Mr. Bush support a ballot measure banishing such policies, which had become a favored conservative target? The governor’s eyes wandered to an image on his wall, featuring several black children. He approached the photograph. “I’m not with you,” Mr. Bush said finally, according to the activist, Ward Connerly. “They are the ones I want to help.” …. Mr. Bush unveiled an alternative plan, which itself took aim at racial preferences in public university admissions and state contracting, setting off a firestorm he said he had strained to avoid. …. The most recent example arrived last week, as Mr. Bush told a crowd in South Carolina that Republicans should not appeal to African-Americans with promises of “free stuff.” “Our message is one that is uplifting,” Mr. Bush said then, “that says you can achieve earned success.” …. Mr. Bush proposed a third way, calling the initiative “One Florida.” It banned racial preferences at universities and in state procurements, but required state campuses to guarantee a spot for all students who finished in the top 20 percent of their class. …. Few groups were pleased. Some black elected officials suggested Mr. Bush had not consulted them sufficiently. Conservatives had long questioned why he refused to back Mr. Connerly’s efforts in the first place. …. Less than two months after the sit-in, as Mr. Bush defended One Florida in his State of the State address, an enormous protest, led by the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, rolled through Tallahassee. Inside the House chambers, Mr. Bush vowed that his plan would work. “This year,” he pledged, “more minority students will be admitted to our university system than last year.” …. He said the program had, for better or worse, helped compel the school to revise its admissions practices by targeting groups, like low-income applicants whose parents had not attended college, to increase diversity without violating the order. …. An analysis by the Orlando Sentinel in 2010 found that minority enrollment in the state’s university system had not kept pace with the number of minorities graduating high school. …. Ms. Williams asked, with a typed smiley face, if this meant she could pester Mr. Bush about a summer internship. “I don’t know if we have summer internships, but look me up nonetheless,” he replied. In an email this week, Ms. Williams said she had gotten the internship. She is now a lawyer in West Palm Beach, some 75 miles from Mr. Bush’s campaign headquarters.”

When I clipped this article I thought I would see some ugly references to black people accidentally overheard, but actually it just basically says that he was against direct quotas based on race. He did offer a slot in all state schools for those who make a grade in the top 20% of their class, which is something that most black kids certainly could do if they would do their homework every day; he also gave a slot at state schools to low income students whose parents had not attended college. Those are good initiatives, however the diversity didn’t improve as much as needed.

I would like to see some statistics on how many black students coming out of high school did, in fact, place in the top 20% of their class. Perhaps if he had offered work scholarships or small academic scholarships to all poor children who qualified academically to enter the college, that would have added more. Many minority people are very poor, and poor people simply cannot always pay basic tuition. Now if Bernie Sanders is elected, and manages to require all states to offer free tuition on state supported college campuses, at least for those poor kids, that would make an even greater difference. Still, I’m glad to see that on the human level Jeb saw his way to giving Ms. Williams her Internship. I guess he thought she had proven that she deserved it.





http://www.cbsnews.com/news/vatican-popes-encounter-with-kim-davis-not-a-sign-of-support/

Vatican: Pope's encounter with Kim Davis not a sign of support
AP October 2, 2015

Photographs -- Pope Francis, and Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis. REUTERS/AP
90 PHOTOS -- Pope Francis in America





VATICAN CITY - The Vatican on Friday distanced Pope Francis from Kim Davis, the focal point in the gay marriage debate in the U.S., saying she was one of dozens of people the pope greeted in the U.S. and that their encounter "should not be considered a form of support of her position."

After days of confusion, the Vatican issued a statement Friday clarifying the circumstances of Francis' Sept. 24 encounter with Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who went to jail for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses.

In a statement, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Francis met with "several dozen" people at the Vatican's embassy in Washington just before leaving for New York.

Lombardi said such meetings are par for the course of any Vatican trip and are due to the pope's "kindness and availability." He said the pope only really had one "audience" in Washington: with former students and his family members.

"The pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis, and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects," Lombardi said.

Fr. Tom Rosica, and assistant to Lombardi, told CBS News that the meeting was arranged solely by the nuncio.

Davis, an Apostolic Christian, spent five days in jail for defying a series of federal court orders to issue same-sex marriage licenses after the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage across the country.

A judge ultimately freed Davis on the condition she not interfere with her deputies issuing the licenses. When Davis returned to work, she confiscated the marriage licenses and replaced them with new ones saying they were issued not under the authority of the county clerk, but "pursuant to federal court order."

Is Kentucky clerk Kim Davis back in hot water?

However, Davis' lawyer, Mat Staver, told The Associated Press that the Vatican initiated the meeting as an affirmation of her right to be conscientious objector.

"We wouldn't expect the pope to weigh in on the particulars of any case," Staver said Friday.

He said Vatican personnel initiated the meeting on Sept. 14, the day she returned to work, saying the pope wanted to meet her. He said Vatican security picked up her and her husband from their hotel and told her to change her hairdo so she wouldn't be recognized since the Vatican wanted the meeting kept secret.

Staver disputed a Vatican spokesman's claims that the pope only met Davis in a receiving line. He said the couple was in a separate room with Francis and Vatican personnel.

Davis said earlier this week that she and her husband met briefly with the pope at the Vatican's nunciature in Washington and that he encouraged her to "stay strong."

"Just knowing that the pope is on track with what we're doing and agreeing, you know, it kind of validates everything," she told ABC.

The Vatican statement made clear the pope intended no such validation.

News of the audience sent shockwaves through the U.S. church, with Davis' supporters saying it showed the pope backed her cause and opponents questioning whether the pope had been duped into meeting with her.

Initially the Vatican only reluctantly confirmed the meeting but offered no comment.

On Friday, Lombardi met with Francis and issued a fuller statement to "contribute to an objective understanding of what transpired."

He declined to say who invited Davis into the nunciature or what the pope knew of the case ahead of time. Such encounters are arranged by the Vatican ambassador and his staff, not the pope's delegation or the U.S. bishops' conference.

An assistant to Lombardi, the Rev. Thomas Rosica, said he believed the pope was unaware of Davis or the implications of the meeting.

"I don't think it's a matter of being tricked as of being fully aware of the situation and its complexities," he said. "I don't think anyone was willfully trying to trick the pope, and at the same time nor was the pope briefed properly on who was he meeting. He wasn't properly briefed on the person or the impact of such a visit."

From the start of his six-day tour, Francis encouraged Americans to preserve religious freedom, which he called "one of America's most precious possessions." But he listed it among many other issues, including immigration, climate change and the death penalty.

Francis firmly upholds church teaching that marriage is between a man and woman, but he did not focus on the debate over same-sex marriage during his visit, at one point telling the U.S. bishops to avoid "harsh and divisive" language despite the challenges they face in society.

As he left the country, Francis told reporters who inquired that he did not know Davis' case in detail, but he defended conscientious objection as a human right.

"It is a right. And if a person does not allow others to be a conscientious objector, he denies a right," Francis said.




“In a statement, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Francis met with "several dozen" people at the Vatican's embassy in Washington just before leaving for New York. Lombardi said such meetings are par for the course of any Vatican trip and are due to the pope's "kindness and availability." He said the pope only really had one "audience" in Washington: with former students and his family members. "The pope did not enter into the details of the situation of Mrs. Davis, and his meeting with her should not be considered a form of support of her position in all of its particular and complex aspects," Lombardi said. Fr. Tom Rosica, and assistant to Lombardi, told CBS News that the meeting was arranged solely by the nuncio. …. "We wouldn't expect the pope to weigh in on the particulars of any case," Staver said Friday. He said Vatican personnel initiated the meeting on Sept. 14, the day she returned to work, saying the pope wanted to meet her. He said Vatican security picked up her and her husband from their hotel and told her to change her hairdo so she wouldn't be recognized since the Vatican wanted the meeting kept secret. Staver disputed a Vatican spokesman's claims that the pope only met Davis in a receiving line. He said the couple was in a separate room with Francis and Vatican personnel. …. "Just knowing that the pope is on track with what we're doing and agreeing, you know, it kind of validates everything," she told ABC. The Vatican statement made clear the pope intended no such validation. News of the audience sent shockwaves through the U.S. church, with Davis' supporters saying it showed the pope backed her cause and opponents questioning whether the pope had been duped into meeting with her. Initially the Vatican only reluctantly confirmed the meeting but offered no comment. …. He declined to say who invited Davis into the nunciature or what the pope knew of the case ahead of time. Such encounters are arranged by the Vatican ambassador and his staff, not the pope's delegation or the U.S. bishops' conference. An assistant to Lombardi, the Rev. Thomas Rosica, said he believed the pope was unaware of Davis or the implications of the meeting. …. Francis firmly upholds church teaching that marriage is between a man and woman, but he did not focus on the debate over same-sex marriage during his visit, at one point telling the U.S. bishops to avoid "harsh and divisive" language despite the challenges they face in society. As he left the country, Francis told reporters who inquired that he did not know Davis' case in detail, but he defended conscientious objection as a human right.”

"I don't think anyone was willfully trying to trick the pope, and at the same time nor was the pope briefed properly on who was he meeting. He wasn't properly briefed on the person or the impact of such a visit." This article serves to cast doubt on Davis’ claims about a Papal meeting or his overall approval of her actions. He approves of her right to a stance of conscientious objection, but I wonder if he would think that she should keep her job, receiving the nearly $70,000 for the position, and at the same time persist in marking the marriage licenses as invalid, if only by refusing her signature. The rights under our constitution are not defined by any religion, but by citizenship. Everything she has done, including this recent claim about the Pope, makes me angry. She should simply quit her job and bow out. She disapproves of the requirements of her position and is unwilling to perform them. 'Nuff said.

October 1, 2015


News Clips For The Day


http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/official-at-least-7-dead-20-hurt-in-oregon-shooting/ar-AAf0Xnl?ocid=ansmsnnews11

Gunman opens fire at Oregon community college, killing 7
Associated Press
October 1, 2015 22 mins ago

Photograph -- Thursday, Oct. 1, 2015. Aaron Yost/Roseburg News-Review/AP© Aaron Yost/Roseburg News-Review/AP A patient is wheeled into the emergency room at Mercy Medical Center in Roseburg, Ore.,


ROSEBURG, Ore. (AP) — A gunman opened fire at an Oregon community college Thursday, killing at least seven people and wounding 20, authorities said.

The shooting happened at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, about 180 miles south of Portland. The local fire district advised people via Twitter to stay away from the school. It later tweeted that there were "multiple casualties" but did not elaborate.

State police Lt. Bill Fugate told KATU-TV that seven to 10 people were dead and at least 20 others hurt. A photographer for the Roseburg News-Review newspaper said he saw people being loaded into multiple ambulances and taken to the local hospital.

Andrea Zielinski, a spokeswoman for Douglas County Sheriff's office, told The Associated Press: "There's no more threat."

Zielinski would not say whether a suspect was apprehended or dead.

A patient is wheeled into the emergency room at Mercy Medical Center in Roseburg, Ore., following a deadly shooting at Umpqua Community College, in Roseburg, following a deadly shooting at Umpqua Community College, in Roseburg…The school has about 3,000 students. Its website was down Thursday, and a phone message left at the college was not immediately returned.

State police and the Douglas County Sheriff's Office did not immediately return calls from The Associated Press seeking details.

The sheriff's office reported on Twitter that it received a call about the shooting at 10:38 a.m.

Students and faculty members were being bused to the Douglas County Fairgrounds, the sheriff's office said.

A spokeswoman for the Oregon department that oversees community colleges in the state said she had not received any detailed information about the shooting.

"It's extremely concerning and sad," said Endi Hartigan, spokeswoman for the Oregon Higher Education Coordinating Commission.

The rural town of Roseburg lies west of the Cascade Mountains in an area where the timber industry has struggled. In recent years, officials have tried to promote the region as a tourist destination for vineyards and outdoor activities.

This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.




“Andrea Zielinski, a spokeswoman for Douglas County Sheriff's office, told The Associated Press: "There's no more threat." Zielinski would not say whether a suspect was apprehended or dead. …. State police and the Douglas County Sheriff's Office did not immediately return calls from The Associated Press seeking details. The sheriff's office reported on Twitter that it received a call about the shooting at 10:38 a.m. Students and faculty members were being bused to the Douglas County Fairgrounds, the sheriff's office said. …. The rural town of Roseburg lies west of the Cascade Mountains in an area where the timber industry has struggled. In recent years, officials have tried to promote the region as a tourist destination for vineyards and outdoor activities.”

I really would like more information on this killing, but as of 4:00 PM this is the best I could do. Perhaps the economic situation, as hinted in the statements about a dying lumber industry and promoting it as a tourist area, is a cause of stress among the people there. We won’t know until the police open up with what they do know. A number of people were admitted to the hospital, so hopefully they will be able to witness to what occurred. As I see more about it I will post it.





http://www.cbsnews.com/news/planned-parenthood-fire-in-california-deemed-suspicious/

Fire at Calif. Planned Parenthood facility deemed suspicious
CBS/AP
October 1, 2015


THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. -- Arson investigators are probing a small fire that caused minor damage at a Planned Parenthood facility in Ventura County.

Officials say nobody was hurt in the blaze reported late Wednesday at the office in Thousand Oaks.

CBS News' Steve Futterman, who reports that the FBI and ATF have been informed of the suspected arson, posted photos from the scene on Twitter.

Upon their arrival, firefighters located flames burning at the location caused sprinklers to turn on within the building, which were able to extinguish the small fire, CBS Los Angeles reports.

Investigators consider the blaze suspicious in nature. County Fire Capt. Mike Lindbery says one of the building's windows was smashed in.

Officials say there was likely more damage from the sprinklers than from the fire itself.




“Officials say nobody was hurt in the blaze reported late Wednesday at the office in Thousand Oaks. CBS News' Steve Futterman, who reports that the FBI and ATF have been informed of the suspected arson, posted photos from the scene on Twitter. …. Investigators consider the blaze suspicious in nature. County Fire Capt. Mike Lindbery says one of the building's windows was smashed in.”

This may or may not have been politically motivated, but the timing with recent news articles is suggestive. There are, of course, certain insane people whose whole goal in life is to start fires and watch them burn. I would think that it hadn’t been burning long, or wasn’t started very efficiently at least, because there was very little damage from the fire itself. It seems to me that they could perhaps have caught the perpetrator in the act, or perhaps trying to escape. Of course that isn’t the goal of firemen. They aren’t police. If Planned Parenthood is being targeted maliciously the public should know about that. If I see any other articles like this one I will pull it also.





http://www.cbsnews.com/news/fox-lake-illinois-police-charles-joseph-gliniewicz-unidentified-dna-samples/

Investigator: Slain Illinois cop was shot with own weapon
CBS/AP
October 1, 2015

Photograph -- Fox Lake Lieutenant Charles Joseph Gliniewicz is pictured in this undated handout photo provided by Lake County Sheriff's Office in Illinois, September 1, 2015. REUTERS
Play VIDEO -- Funeral held for slain Illinois officer


FOX LAKE, Ill. -- The northern Illinois police officer found dead last month was shot with his own weapon, but detectives were still treating it as a homicide investigation based on evidence that included signs of a struggle, the lead investigator said Thursday.

After vetting the information and concluding it wouldn't harm the investigation, authorities confirmed for the first time that Fox Lake police Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz was shot with his own weapon. He was struck by two rounds, one that hit his ballistic vest with the force of a "sledgehammer" and another that pierced his upper chest, said Lake County Major Crimes Task Force Commander George Filenko.

But gunshot residue found on both his hands was inconclusive as to whether the officer fired any shots himself, according to results that came back from the Illinois State Police crime lab in the last week or two.

"The weapon could have been fired by Lt. Gliniewicz or he could have been in a close proximity of the weapon being fired," Filenko said. He refused to provide any details on what the signs of the struggle were.

Gliniewicz was found Sept. 1 after he radioed that he was pursuing three suspicious men in a remote area of the village south of the Wisconsin-Illinois state line. Police have said Gliniewicz provided only a very vague description of the three suspects - two white males and one black male, CBS Chicago reported. Despite a massive manhunt, police haven't made any arrests or identified any suspects.

Filenko said there are still no firm theories on a possible motive.


Questions have swirled around the investigation - particularly since the county coroner said he has been unable to rule the 52-year-old Gliniewicz's death a homicide, suicide or an accident.

Filenko emphasized the investigation was "strictly" being conducted as a homicide probe, though he acknowledged detectives weren't ruling anything out, including the possibility of suicide.

Investigators also revealed that nine unidentified DNA samples were found at the scene and that detectives working to identify the source of that material have taken more than 100 samples from anyone who might have had contact with the officer, including from police who were close to the scene, Filenko said.

Filenko said additional DNA swabs were being collected Thursday, and 30 to 40 samples were being sent to the Illinois State Police crime lab for comparison, CBS Chicago reported.

Investigators returned to the scene to recreate possible escape routes, including hunting trails, Filenko said in a newspaper interview a day earlier.

Investigators believe Gliniewicz was in the area because the village recently purchased the property and there had been reports of vandalism and trespassing.




“He was struck by two rounds, one that hit his ballistic vest with the force of a "sledgehammer" and another that pierced his upper chest, said Lake County Major Crimes Task Force Commander George Filenko. But gunshot residue found on both his hands was inconclusive as to whether the officer fired any shots himself, according to results that came back from the Illinois State Police crime lab in the last week or two. …. Gliniewicz was found Sept. 1 after he radioed that he was pursuing three suspicious men in a remote area of the village south of the Wisconsin-Illinois state line. Police have said Gliniewicz provided only a very vague description of the three suspects - two white males and one black male, CBS Chicago reported. Despite a massive manhunt, police haven't made any arrests or identified any suspects. Filenko said there are still no firm theories on a possible motive. …. Investigators also revealed that nine unidentified DNA samples were found at the scene and that detectives working to identify the source of that material have taken more than 100 samples from anyone who might have had contact with the officer, including from police who were close to the scene, Filenko said. Filenko said additional DNA swabs were being collected Thursday, and 30 to 40 samples were being sent to the Illinois State Police crime lab for comparison, CBS Chicago reported. …. Investigators believe Gliniewicz was in the area because the village recently purchased the property and there had been reports of vandalism and trespassing.”

This is another mysteriously written article. Nine different DNA samples? Could the crime scene have been the site of street gang activity, or a camp of homeless people, perhaps? The reports of vandalism often go along with young, angry men, like a street gang. They like to do property damage just for fun. Gliniewicz was reportedly chasing two white men and one black, but the reason was not given.

For the officer’s own weapon to be used on him, he had to have been overpowered. If he did not himself fire the weapon, the presence of powder residue on his hands indicates that he was very close when the shot was fired, and perhaps struggling for his life. It’s interesting that “30 to 40” DNA tests have been sent for testing. I would love to hear more about what is happening in this case. It reminds me of that great Joseph Wambaugh non-fiction report of the first forensic DNA testing which occurred in an industrial town in England. Those officers ordered every male in the town to be tested. The book is called “The Blooding” and I would like to get it from the library to read again. As much as I like mystery fiction, I like true crime even more. Yes, it can be frightening and disturbing, but forensics and the psychology of criminals is very interesting to me.





http://www.cbsnews.com/news/high-bridge-arms-last-gun-store-in-san-francisco-forced-to-close-by-new-legislation/

Last gun store in San Francisco closing over proposed law
CBS NEWS
October 1, 2015


A showdown in San Francisco between lawmakers concerned with public safety and the city's last remaining gun store has reached the endgame.

Under siege from an increasing amount of regulation from City Hall, "High Bridge Arms" is closing, reports CBS News correspondent John Blackstone.

Steven Alcairo, general manager of the modest storefront in San Francisco's Mission District, says his business is being pushed out by a proposed city law that would require the store to videotape every gun sale, then turn in the footage to the police department.

Gun buyers already have to fill out a detailed form, go through a background check and a waiting period. But sending a videotape of the purchase to local police strikes Alcairo as one regulation too many.

"When the idea was just announced, the following two weeks, sales just dipped. It was like a ghost town in here; nobody was coming in," he said.

Mark Farrell, the member of the city's Board of Supervisors who proposed the legislation, sees it as a necessary move for the safety of residents.

Although "High Bridge Arms" would be the only store that would be affected by the measure as of now, Farrell said the law would also target other stores that were looking to move to the area.

But Alcairo said the legislation would not make the city safer--"not in the very least"-- and that San Francisco would be losing a piece of history.

To some relief of gun buyers they won't have to go far when High Bridge closes -- there's a gun store just south of San Francisco's city limits.




“Steven Alcairo, general manager of the modest storefront in San Francisco's Mission District, says his business is being pushed out by a proposed city law that would require the store to videotape every gun sale, then turn in the footage to the police department. Gun buyers already have to fill out a detailed form, go through a background check and a waiting period. But sending a videotape of the purchase to local police strikes Alcairo as one regulation too many. "When the idea was just announced, the following two weeks, sales just dipped. It was like a ghost town in here; nobody was coming in," he said. …. To some relief of gun buyers they won't have to go far when High Bridge closes -- there's a gun store just south of San Francisco's city limits.”

Perhaps the SF gun buyers aren’t affected by the ruling except to be inconvenienced slightly. Yet, I’m photographed by cameras every time I go into Walmart, and it doesn’t bother me at all. Of course, I’m not a professional robber who fears being identified in such a place. I wonder how much paranoia there is in the right-leaning population that we have now. I’m really surprised that all this man’s customers just disappeared like that. Personally, I agree with the town government that photographing the sale of guns, preferably from the front to get a good view of the face, is a good additional security measure. Perhaps his loss of business is due to the fact that many people buying guns have been showing false ID or something like that. There are lots of Americans who literally hoard guns, either due to current conspiracy theories or just the macho “love” of guns. I think there should be a limit to how many guns one person can collect like that, especially automatic weapons that shoot a gazillion bullets within a few seconds. There’s no legitimate use for a gun like that.





http://www.cbsnews.com/news/football-teams-dropped-by-high-schools-cite-deaths-injuries/

High schools drop football over deaths, injuries and lack of interest
By DON DAHLER CBS NEWS
September 30, 2015

Photograph -- dahlerkidcloseup.jpg, Issac Pearson CBS NEWS
Photograph -- endahler4.jpg, Maplewood Richmond Heights High School went to the state championship in 2010. CBS NEWS
Photograph -- endahler3.jpg, Maplewood Richmond Heights High School's homecoming game will feature soccer -- not football. CBS NEWS


MAPLEWOOD, Mo. -- Football runs through Isaac Pearson's bloodline. Both his father and brother played. But the sophomore from Maplewood, Missouri chose a different field.

"My mom's like, soccer's your thing. She doesn't want me to get hurt, too. But soccer's something I really liked," Isaac Pearson said.

The Maplewood Richmond Heights High School -- Pearson's school -- also has a proud tradition of football, having gone to the state championship as recently as 2010.

"A great year. That was a great football team," said school board president Nelson Mitten looking at the school's trophy case.

But there is no team at Maplewood this season. Like schools in Camden, Maine, and Ridgefield, New Jersey, Maplewood had a hard time finding enough players, due to injuries and lack of interest.

"When you have low numbers of students from a school this size, you're drawing all the way from freshman to seniors. If we didn't have the size, that can have a significant effect upon the possibility of injuries," said Mitten.

The number of high school football players in the U.S. has declined by 25,000 over the past five years. Last year, five high school players died playing football. That's more deaths than in college, semi-pro, or professional levels according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injuries.

Maplewood senior Romelle Person misses the game.

"When I first heard about it I was devastated. Cause like, football is my favorite sport. Even when we didn't do good we had that fun experience. Everyone would come see us perform. Just not the same," said Pearson.

Students at Maplewood will still get to attend the annual homecoming game next month. But for the first time the sport will be soccer.




"My mom's like, soccer's your thing. She doesn't want me to get hurt, too. But soccer's something I really liked," Isaac Pearson said. …. But there is no team at Maplewood this season. Like schools in Camden, Maine, and Ridgefield, New Jersey, Maplewood had a hard time finding enough players, due to injuries and lack of interest. "When you have low numbers of students from a school this size, you're drawing all the way from freshman to seniors. If we didn't have the size, that can have a significant effect upon the possibility of injuries," said Mitten. …. Last year, five high school players died playing football. That's more deaths than in college, semi-pro, or professional levels according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injuries.”

There has been a growing awareness about football injuries such as concussions which were not caught by the coach, so that the player was benched until he could recover sufficiently to play again. Football is a dangerous game, and it appears from the statistics above that it may be more dangerous for high school kids than older young men. To me, playing sports is only so useful, and it often takes precedence over the academic achievement of those kids. No child should be allowed to play on a sports team unless he reads and can perform in other subjects at an above average level. If he can’t do that, he should be spending time studying instead.

The purpose of a free public high school is to prepare EVERY child for a reasonably lucrative and successful adult life in some legal endeavor. Being a house burglar or a drug dealer is not acceptable. For most, that means college, and if they can’t make sufficiently good grades for that, then their football scholarship won’t make that much difference. If they are intellectually deficient, that is different, but if they are of normal intelligence, they should be able to qualify for further schooling of some kind.

A two year degree at a community college can be enough. A course in paraprofessional work of some kind, such as paralegal training, will make a huge difference in their ability to pay for a wife and some kids, which they will almost certainly produce if only by accident, and to provide housing of some kind. In places like NYC there are thousands of people who live their whole lives in apartments, so a free-standing house is not necessary, and it is more expensive. Too many of our teenagers have no notion of what they “want to be when they grow up,” so they don’t aim anywhere useful and therefore they don’t try to get there. That means they are almost unemployable except for construction, etc. – the police department, maybe. (I’m just joking, there!! Many city police departments now are requiring at least two years of college, and that’s a very good thing!)





http://www.cbsnews.com/news/medieval-skeleton-discovered-under-uprooted-tree/

Medieval skeleton discovered under uprooted tree
By JEANNA BRYNER LIVESCIENCE.COM
September 16, 2015

Photograph -- A medieval skeleton was unearthed, partly entangled in the roots of an old birch tree, during storms in Ireland in May. MARION DOWD
15 PHOTOS -- Medieval and ancient medicine we still use
Photograph -- medieval-skeleton-tree-7.jpg, Though the leg bones remained in the ground, when the tree uprooted during the storms, the upper part of the body, including the spine (shown here), was torn out of the ground. THORSTEN KAHLERT


When an old beech tree toppled over during winter storms in Ireland this year, a skeletal surprise was hiding in the gigantic mass of roots pulled from the ground: the remains of a medieval boy.

The 215-year-old tree was uprooted in May in Collooney, a town in the county of Sligo, on the northwest coast of Ireland. Preliminary analyses of the bones by osteoarchaeologist Linda Lynch and others at Sligo-Leitrim Archaeological Services (SLAS), a private consultancy, revealed the remains of a young man who was between 17 and 20 years old when he died.

The researchers also dated the bones by measuring the carbon-14, a naturally occurring radioactive isotope also called radiocarbon. Because this isotope (an element with a different number of neutrons in its nucleus) decays at a regular rate, scientists can tell how old an organic material is by measuring the amount of radiocarbon present. They found that the boy died during the medieval period, between A.D. 1030 and 1200. [See Photos of Medieval Skeleton Entangled in Tree Roots]

And apparently, his death was a violent one, as Lynch found several injuries on the ribs and hand that were likely inflicted by a knife. The entire skeleton was buried, but when the tree was uprooted, it ripped the upper part of the body, which was entangled in the roots, out of the ground.

"The entire skeleton had originally been present, but the upper part was quite damaged by tree-root activity," said archaeologist Marion Dowd, director of SLAS.

The juvenile was given a formal Christian burial, the researchers noted.

More history remains to be uncovered. "We did not encounter any other burials, but 19th-century records state there is a church and graveyard somewhere in the wider vicinity," Dowd told Live Science in an email.

The science team is continuing to investigate the remains. When the analysis is complete, the skeleton will be sent to the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin, "in accordance with archaeological legislation," Dowd said.




“The 215-year-old tree was uprooted in May in Collooney, a town in the county of Sligo, on the northwest coast of Ireland. Preliminary analyses of the bones by osteoarchaeologist Linda Lynch and others at Sligo-Leitrim Archaeological Services (SLAS), a private consultancy, revealed the remains of a young man who was between 17 and 20 years old when he died. …. The researchers also dated the bones by measuring the carbon-14, a naturally occurring radioactive isotope also called radiocarbon. Because this isotope (an element with a different number of neutrons in its nucleus) decays at a regular rate, scientists can tell how old an organic material is by measuring the amount of radiocarbon present. They found that the boy died during the medieval period, between A.D. 1030 and 1200. [See Photos of Medieval Skeleton Entangled in Tree Roots]. …. "The entire skeleton had originally been present, but the upper part was quite damaged by tree-root activity," said archaeologist Marion Dowd, director of SLAS. The juvenile was given a formal Christian burial, the researchers noted. More history remains to be uncovered. "We did not encounter any other burials, but 19th-century records state there is a church and graveyard somewhere in the wider vicinity," Dowd told Live Science in an email.”

Now this is my kind of science, requiring speculation and laboratory work as well, and leading me back in time to a point that excites me. Carbon dating and some even newer methods have made a huge difference in archaeology. I love biology, psychology and geology, but more than those, I love archaeology. I want to ponder about this young man, because that is what he was rather than “a boy.” He was probably a serf who worked on the land. He almost certainly had children and a wife or common law wife by that age. Only in modern society is a seventeen year old still considered a boy, and that’s partly why society has so much trouble with their criminal tendencies – they’re being treated like a boy when they are physically ready to have a lover or fight in a war.

I do hope more will be published about this case, or perhaps I can find more on “the Net.” Here is something fun to watch on Youtube, in which Lynch talks about her work, though not on this particular find.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZgyDYN8BBw

https://static.rasset.ie/documents/radio1/lindalynch-forrtewebsite-01-05-2014.pdf
The Irish Workhouse Past and Present Conference
Portuma, 18th May 2014
Osteoarchaeological Evidence from Irish Workhouses
Dr Linda G. Lynch MIAI
Consultant Human Osteoarchaeologist

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/creepy-surprise-medieval-skeleton-discovered-under-uprooted-tree-182520099.html?.tsrc=warhol
Creepy Surprise: Medieval Skeleton Discovered Under Uprooted Tree
LiveScience.comBy Jeanna Bryner | LiveScience.com – Wed, Sep 16, 2015.