Thousands of mourners and dozens of world leaders have gathered in Johannesburg, South Africa this morning to celebrate the life of the late Nelson Mandela.
SABC, South Africa’s public broadcaster, is live streaming its coverage. We’re live-blogging the event, here. We’ve embedded SABC’s coverage below:
A 23-year-old St. Louis woman who was badly beaten by her boyfriend blamed the act on 3 innocent black men. Police charged 25-year-old Justin Simms and his girlfriend Ashley DePew, 23, with filing false police reports.
The two insisted that DePew was sucker-punched by a “random thug” outside the Trophy Room bar in south city.
DePew told police and KMOV-TV (Channel 4) that she may have been the victim of the violent phenomenon turned national mania known as the “knockout game,” where groups, especially of teenagers, viciously attack random victims.
The fake knockout narrative went like this: DePew and Simms stopped by the Trophy Room on Arsenal early on November 17 to pick up a drunk friend. The couple was separated in the crowd gathered outside, and someone stepped forward to punch DePew in the face.
The truth is that the couple was arguing while driving when Simms struck DePew in the eye out of anger. The couple originally told the lie to DePew’s parents, who made the connection to the “Knockout” game. DePew filed a police report two days later.
DePew suffered from a double fracture and needed reconstructive surgery. Police noticed inconsistencies in DePew ‘s story early on which prompted them to further look into the case.
h/t – blackyouthproject
Great news for bored New Yorkers looking to spice up their cockroach life: a new species of roach has been discovered in Manhattan, and this one isn’t fazed by cold weather. The hearty new species Periplaneta japonica was discovered last year by an exterminator on the High Line; like most everyone else in that perpetually crowded elevated park, it ain’t from around here. The exterminator immediately knew there was something special about it, so he sent several carcasses to the University of Florida for analysis.
Rutgers insect biologists Jessica Ware and Dominic Evangelista were subsequently brought in to study the samples, and they concluded that the roach is common in Asia but has never been spotted in the U.S. “About 20 years ago colleagues of ours in Japan reared nymphs of this species and measured their tolerance to being able to survive in snow,” Ware tells Rutgers Today. “As the species has invaded Korea and China, there has been some confirmation that it does very well in cold climates, so it is very conceivable that it could live outdoors during winter in New York. That is in addition to its being well suited to live indoors alongside the species that already are here.”
Awesome, indoor-outdoor roaches. But before you surround the perimeter of your bed with glue traps, there’s a slight sprinkle of good news: these imported roaches’ weird foreign genitals don’t fit together with the normal genitals of our local roaches, so it’s unlikely they’re going to mate to produce mutant Godzilla-Sasquatch hybrid monster roaches. We’re just going to have tougher roaches now. Whatever; at this point we’ll take anything that isn’t bed bugs.
h /t – gothamist
“Dear Santa Claus,” the boy begins in cursive handwriting. “Will you please send me a box of paints, also a nine cent reader, and a school bag to put them in.”
He modestly continues, “And if you have any nuts, or candy, or toys to spare, would you kindly send me some.” If so, Homer concludes, “You will please a seven year old boy.”
The Mellen family kept and cherished this note for 98 years in a little box containing “private little things like locks of hair, or the first picture that was taken,” Mellen explained, in order to “put away for memories for grandchildren.”
And that’s exactly what Homer’s humble wish list had done, as his granddaughter, Laurie Bloomfield, 49, of Nova Scotia, shared it with us after reading a recent story about one little girl’s extravagant expectations from Santa this year.
“I’m a teacher, so as teacher I get to hear a lot of kids’ wishes,” Bloomfield said. “What I find with this generation is they want to talk a lot, they want to put out a lot of information. They have lots to say and want to tell it all.”
A man jumped to his death after a furious row with his girlfriend who insisted they go into another clothes shop.
CCTV shows Tao Hsiao, 38, escorting his girlfriend around a shopping mall in Xuzhou, Jiangsu
province, east China.
After five hours Tao finally had enough and demanded to go home.
Had enough: Tao Hsiao, 38, jumped to his death after a furious row with his girlfriend in a shopping mall
Eyewitnesses say he could be heard saying they already had more bags than they could carry, but she insisted on going into one more shop where the was a special offer on shoes.
An eyewitness said: ‘He told her she already had enough shoes, more shoes that she could wear in a
lifetime and it was pointless buying any more.
‘She started shouting at him accusing him of being a skinflint and of spoiling Christmas, it was a really heated argument.’
The shouting match ended when the man chucked the bags on the floor and jumped over the balcony, smashing into Christmas decorations on his way down before hitting the floor seven stories below causing shocked shoppers to flee in panic.
Emergency services arrived at the scene but Tao was killed immediately from the impact of the fall.
A shopping spokesman said: ‘His body was removed fairly quickly.
‘He actually landed on one of the stalls below and then fell to the floor so although the store was damaged it meant he didn’t hit anybody.
‘This is a tragic incident, but this time of year can be very stressful for many people.’
Read more: Daily Mail
Giving of course my humble opinion, I believe we are at the high water mark of the anti-union, pro-market-force, evaluation-by-testing mania that’s gripped education. Or I could be seriously deluded and education is going through a profound change that will see radically different protocols for years to come.
Monday is the National Day of Action, where schools and community organizations are rallying to focus public attention on how to improve schools and promote social justice. There is a set of principles behind this, and it represents a concerted effort to fight back against the corporitization of schools that started on the far right, but has been moving to the center for a few years. Even President Obama supports the principle of more testing and teacher evaluation models that erroneously support it.
But a larger issue is also part of this debate, and that’s the role of unions and associations in public education. Perhaps it is true that teachers unions are facing a moment of truth and that they will need to adapt to the changing landscape rather that being able to pull the country back to a position that supports the idea of collective rights. Many people who should be supporting unions and what they’ve won for workers are in fact opposing them on the grounds that everyone should suffer in a free-agent world, not that they should demand the rights that unionized workers have. Employers have gained the upper hand in salary negotiations and with the coming of the new health care landscape, will most likely be able to stop offering insurance and tell employees to buy on the exchanges. Teachers generally have better protections because they have representation, but that’s led mostly to resentment, not mobilization by other industries.
Another challenge, and perhaps the biggest, is that the teaching staff population is getting younger. Far younger. Most teachers have been on the job for less than ten years. More importantly, they grew up in a nation that didn’t value unions. Yes, Ronald Reagan did say that he supported unions, but his actions in firing the air traffic controllers in 1981 is a far more potent reminder of the power of the president to shape the national agenda through actions rather than words. Most of the newest teachers were young during the 1980s and 90s when the anti-union rhetoric became louder and there were fewer steel workers, miners, and automobile workers to remind them what unions could do. The technology economy rendered union protections less important when the ethos was that you could create your own wealth. It’s still a powerful message. The problem is that it only applies to a few workers. Evidence is showing that many of these younger teachers are not as committed to unions or at least want them to change in ways that unions might not want to. The NEA and AFT will need to adapt, and at the moment it’s unclear what direction they will take.
The infusion of right wing money into the privatization and testing movement has also undermined effective education because it essentially said that teachers were to blame and that unions were anti-reform because they stood in the way of change. Yes they did, and for good reason; using tests to evaluate teachers and students is a terrible strategy. It saps energy from the system because teachers are tethered even more closely to a curriculum that defines what’s important to learn, what’s on the test, and discards everything else.
My subject, history (not social studies by the way; HISTORY) has been left in the educational dust for years as math and language arts skills have become the de facto national curriculum. Then science was added. I have no problem with this. But we are raising a nation of students who have limited historical knowledge because they have limited access to ideas because history is not a tested subject, therefore it must be less important. The same goes for the practical, industrial, visual and performing arts. This is the legacy of the corporate influence in education. Will the Common Core Standards help? We’ll see, but if they don’t, we’ll have wasted time that could have been better utilized.
Monday’s National Day of Action should be a day that reminds us of what effect the power of people can have when it’s channeled for social justice and education. These are the bedrocks of solid citizenship and point to a return of a society where all people, not just those who can pay for SAT Preparation classes, have access to a quality education and control over their own lives. The promise of corporatization and testing is a false hope that will leave students on the sidelines and teachers in a system that rejects the basic premise of effective schools that have a collegial staff and a collective ethic meant to educate every child.
For more please go to:
www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives and Twitter @rigrundfest
The NYPD and the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications have fashioned an interactive crime map of the five boroughs.
Type in an address and you can see the locations of all reported felonies nearby for all months from January 2012 to October 2013, or you can see how felonies stack up by precinct.
“This administration has relied on data to drive its crime fighting, and this map helps enhance New Yorkers’ and researchers’ understanding of where felony and violent crime persists,” NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly says is a release.
The NYPD is notoriously selective with its information—stonewalling Freedom of Information Act requests with impunity and playing favorites with whom it shares data. Last week, individual precincts were ordered to withhold weekly crime data that had traditionally been available to local reporters. So why did the police release this map?
Because they had to, per a City Council ordinance passed in the spring. Also, this data has been available on the NYPD’s website since 2003.
Gothamist’s crime map—which culls scanner reports to provide you an up-to-the-minute look at what’s happening around the city—is currently under repair. Look for our new and improved crime map in a few weeks.
A 10-year-old girl was videotaped on surveillance footage attacking a baby in an elevator in China.
According to the video on ABC News, the girl grabs the little boy out of his stroller, and pulls him into a high-rise elevator where she then attacks him.
She first slams him to the floor and then proceeds to kick him repeatedly after the grandmother of the boy had the doors of the elevator shut on her before she could save him.
The doors finally open on the 25th floor where the girl then throws the baby outside of the elevator and onto the floor before she exits.
The poor infant is seen flailing on the ground just outside, before the elevator doors close and the footage cuts off.
In more disturbing news, ABC News reports:
Chongqing TV News reported that Mrs. Wu followed the girl up to the 25th floor and ran into her in the hall without Yuanyuan. The girl then apparently tried to comfort the distraught grandmother and told her than someone else took the baby and proceeded to search the apartment with her, the report said.
Minutes later, a security guard found the baby on the ground, with broken branches and twigs around puddles of blood.
He is now in the hospital in critical condition.
The site reports that the family of the boy does not know who the girl is or why she would attack their son.
We pray for the little boy from this horrible attack and hope he recovers soon.
SOURCE: ABC News
(AP) — A couple married just three weeks lured a Pennsylvania man to his death with a Craigslist ad because they wanted to kill someone together, police said.
Elytte Barbour told officers before his arrest Friday night that he and his wife, Miranda, had planned to kill before but their plans never worked out until last month when Troy LaFerrara responded to an online posting that promised companionship in return for money.
Elytte Barbour, 22, and Miranda Barbour, 18, both face criminal homicide charges in LaFerrara’s death. His body was found Nov. 12 in an alley in Sunbury, a small city northwest of Philadelphia. The couple recently moved to nearby Selinsgrove from North Carolina.
According to Sunbury police, Elytte Barbour told investigators he hid in the backseat of the couple’s SUV as his wife picked up LaFerrara at a mall on Nov. 11. He told police that, on his wife’s signal, he wrapped a cord around LaFerrara’s neck, restraining him while Miranda Barbour stabbed him.
The 42-year-old man was stabbed 20 times, police said.
Miranda Barbour was charged Wednesday. She initially denied knowing LaFerrara, but her story evolved as investigators gathered evidence, including the discovery that the last call received by the victim’s cellphone was made from her number, according to a police affidavit.
The affidavit said Miranda Barbour acknowledged meeting the victim in Selinsgrove then driving with him to Sunbury, where they parked. She said LaFerrara groped her and she took a knife from between the front seats and stabbed him after he put his hand around her throat, according to the affidavit.
Police said Miranda Barbour had told them she purchased cleaning supplies at a department store after stabbing LaFerrara, then picked up her husband and took him to a strip club for his birthday. On Friday, police said Elytte Barbour told them it was he that had purchased the cleaning products, an account investigators said was backed up by surveillance footage.
Following his wife’s arrest, Elytte Barbour told The Daily Item of Sunbury his wife, whom he married on Oct. 22, regularly hired herself out as a “companion” to men she met on various websites, a business venture he said he supported because it did not involve sexual contact.
Barbour said his wife made anywhere from $50 to $850 for meeting with men for such activities as having dinner or walking around a mall. The ads she placed on websites including Craigslist all said upfront that sex was not part of the deal, he said.
Late Saturday evening, 25-year-old mother of two, Michelle Rowling was found in her apartment stabbed to death. Already a sad and terrifying turn of events, it was uncovered soon after that Rowling, of East St. Louis, knew that an attempt on her life was coming.
Rowling had been dating 25-year-old Montrell Cooper on and off for more than three years, but her ex-boyfriend became so abusive that Cooper eventually wound up serving time for a domestic dispute in August. Ironically, he did jail time in 2012 for another domestic dispute where he reportedly stabbed her in the neck. For some reason, Rowling testified on his behalf in order to help Cooper get his sentence reduced to probation. This time around, after the incident in August, she didn’t testify, but was uncooperative in helping prosecutors with their case against Cooper so he was released on probation. The day he was released from jail on November 25, she posted this message on her Facebook, alarming friends and followers:
When a follower told her to cal the police, she responded with, “THE POLICE. ………….LOL IM GONE B GONE BOUT TIME THEY COME.” Unfortunately, by the 30th, Rowling was found in her apartment after police received a disturbance call, stabbed several times and bleeding out. She was rushed to the hospital, but died upon arrival. Now her family accuses Cooper of being behind the attack. The police can’t find him, but they did find his abandoned car. Anyone out there who knows of his whereabouts is of course asked to contact the police.
– See more at: Madamenoire.com
LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) — About 100 feet down, on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, divers had already pulled four bodies out of the sunken tugboat. Then a hand appeared on a TV screen monitoring the recovery.
Everyone assumed it was another corpse, and the diver moved toward it.
“But when he went to grab the hand, the hand grabbed him!” Tony Walker, project manager for the Dutch company DCN Diving, said of the rescue in May.
Harrison Odjegba Okene, the tug’s Nigerian cook, had survived for three days by breathing an ever-dwindling supply of oxygen in an air pocket. A video of Okene’s dramatic rescue — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArWGILmKCqE — was posted on the Internet more than six months after the rescue and has gone viral this week.
As the temperature dropped to freezing, Okene, dressed only in boxer shorts, recited a psalm his wife had sent him earlier by text message, sometimes called the Prayer for Deliverance. “Oh, God, by your name, save me. … The Lord sustains my life.”
To this day, Okene believes his rescue after 72 hours underwater was the result of divine deliverance. The 11 other seamen aboard the tug Jascon 4 died.
h/t – wtop
One of the warnings that veteran educators tried to sound was that the growth of charter schools would create two levels of opportunity: one for parents who were proactive and worked to get their children into top charter schools, and the rest of the population that either couldn’t compete or was shut out and stuck in the now-depleted public system. That seems to be happening in Newark, if this article is accurate. Yes, there are some significant successes if you count the students who are thriving in schools that can skim the best off the top and can generally avoid recruiting the poorest and least-able students. Test scores are up. There are fewer disruptions.
But it’s a false success if it means that other students are denied that quality of education. Free market principles are great for businesses, stock markets, and competitions for talent and ability. It can be deadly, however, when it comes to education.
Public schools by law must educate all children. Think about that: all children. Not one exception. And they need to educate them so they will be productive members of society. What the know-nothings have done is to criticize the public schools as unwieldy, rife with union activism, and failing our children. What they’ve created are academies that are exempt from the public school’s rules and worse, have created winners and losers. That’s not what education is about. As a matter of fact, it runs against every rational, reasonable and moral imperative that undergirds an education system in a compassionate society. It’s wonderful that more students are doing well and are thriving in these new schools. For the losers, though, it’s a life sentence.
As for the teachers, the know-nothings created a new evaluation system that is supposed to weed out the less effective educators from the classroom. What they’re created in reality is a time-wasting, money-sucking, mathematically-skewed nightmare that is taking money from school programs and budgets that can best be used in the classroom, and not on software that shows faculty members what an effective lesson looks like. We already know that.
With the Common Core Standards breathing down our necks, educators need more resources that students can use to learn, such as technology that works, interactive readings and mathematics lessons, and more time to plan collaboratively with teachers of other disciplines, grades, and expertise.
What we’re getting is a system that requires teachers to spend hours writing or rewriting lesson plans to meet the new guidelines, to meet with administrators to coordinate scoring rubrics, and to defend what we’ve always done in every other year, but now have to write down. If the goal was to create evaluations that mimicked the business world, then congratulations; it’s just as ineffective as your average corporate annual review.
Again, it’s the students who will really pay for the damage in time, in money and in lost resources. I give this new teacher ratings system about five years before the corporate world and the Koch brothers move on to something else they can try to ruin. Until then, the race to the bottom will be quick.
For more please go to:
www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives and Twitter @rigrundfest
