Jilly_in_VA
Jilly_in_VA's JournalA look at the groups supporting school board protesters nationwide
The Poway Unified School District, in San Diego County, Calif., was planning a pretty typical school board meeting in September. They were hearing reports from their student representatives and honoring their teachers and other staff members of the year.
Because of the pandemic, the general public has been asked to join and comment via livestream.
That hasn't stopped protesters from showing up in person.
"In the August meeting, they were pounding on the windows," said board member Darshana Patel. "So little by little it's been escalating — they've been antsy and escalating their hostility and aggression toward the board."
In several states and districts around the country, protestors have been disrupting school board meetings. They're opposed to mask policies. Vaccine mandates. LGBTQ rights. Sex education. Removing police from schools. Teaching about race and American history, or sometimes, anything called "diversity, equity and inclusion" or even "social-emotional learning."
The protests aren't ubiquitous, but they're widespread and intense enough that the National School Boards Association asked President Biden to step in, and Attorney General Merrick Garland then directed the FBI to help.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/26/1049078199/a-look-at-the-groups-supporting-school-board-protesters-nationwide
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They forgot Moms For Liberty, but otherwise comprehensive and informative.
Louisiana Deputy Who Slammed a Black Woman on the Pavement Was Named in Multiple Suits, Records Show
A Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputy with a long history of excessive-force complaints is the officer seen in a viral video on Sept. 20 slamming 34-year-old Shantel Arnold’s head repeatedly into the pavement with such force it ripped several braids from her scalp.
Multiple sources who have reviewed the video’s contents confirmed that the deputy was Julio Alvarado, a 16-year veteran of the Sheriff’s Office. Alvarado has been named in nine federal civil rights lawsuits, all involving the use of excessive force, the most of any deputy currently employed by the Sheriff’s Office. Two suits were settled, one of them involving the beating of a 14-year-old boy, and two are pending, with the remaining dismissed.
The Sheriff’s Office, in keeping with its usual policy, did not respond to a request to identify the deputy when asked Thursday. But the office has said it opened an internal probe into the deputy’s actions shortly after the incident, though Arnold did not file a complaint. That’s an action the Sheriff’s Office often does not take, even in cases where citizens complain about the inappropriate use of force.
The probe remains open. At the same time, the office issued a statement on Wednesday saying the video had been “selectively edited.” The statement asserted that Arnold was intoxicated and that she had been resisting arrest.
In that incident, Arnold was walking home around 2 p.m. when Alvarado pulled up in his vehicle and demanded she stop and talk to him, according to Arnold and two witnesses related to her, as well as their statements provided to a sheriff’s investigator. She told him that she had just been assaulted by several boys from the neighborhood and wanted to go home, and she continued walking. Arnold is 4-foot-8, about 100 pounds and is missing her left eye from a car accident.
https://www.propublica.org/article/louisiana-deputy-who-slammed-a-black-woman-on-the-pavement-was-named-in-multiple-suits-records-show
Audit Rips Apart Florida Program Created to Aid Brain-Damaged Kids
Case managers at Florida’s $1.5 billion compensation program for catastrophically brain-damaged children didn’t consult specialists to determine whether medications, therapy, medical supplies and surgical procedures were “medically necessary” to the health of children in the plan.
They relied on Google instead.
That was one of the findings of a state audit released this week of the Florida Birth-Related Neurological Injury Compensation Association, or NICA. The audit was ordered after the Miami Herald and ProPublica detailed how NICA has amassed nearly $1.5 billion in assets while sometimes arbitrarily denying or slow-walking care to severely brain-damaged children.
The report, from the Office of Insurance Regulation, which oversees the industry for the Florida Cabinet, also found that NICA arbitrarily decides who may be compensated for care — and how much. Administrators developed no system for resolving disputes with angry parents, discouraged parents from appealing denials to an administrative court, and didn’t maintain a system for storing and tracking denials or complaints, the audit said.
That was one of the findings of a state audit released this week of the Florida Birth-Related Neurological Injury Compensation Association, or NICA. The audit was ordered after the Miami Herald and ProPublica detailed how NICA has amassed nearly $1.5 billion in assets while sometimes arbitrarily denying or slow-walking care to severely brain-damaged children.
The report, from the Office of Insurance Regulation, which oversees the industry for the Florida Cabinet, also found that NICA arbitrarily decides who may be compensated for care — and how much. Administrators developed no system for resolving disputes with angry parents, discouraged parents from appealing denials to an administrative court, and didn’t maintain a system for storing and tracking denials or complaints, the audit said.
https://www.propublica.org/article/these-findings-boggle-my-mind-audit-rips-apart-florida-program-created-to-aid-brain-damaged-kids
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FloriDUH.
Three-Star System has a Secret That Might Violate Physics
Space is full of weird stuff, but more than 1,300 light-years from Earth, there’s a star system called GW Orionis that makes a lot of other bizarre phenomena seem outright dull.
For starters, GW Orionis has three stars rather than the usual one. Two orbit each other, and the third orbits the pair. Already we’re in territory stranger than Star Wars.
And that’s not all. The three stars with their clockwork orbits are surrounded by three rings of dust and gas. Such rings—called “protoplanetary disks,” since they possess the building blocks of larger objects like planets and moons—are common.
What’s uncommon is the orientation of GW Orionis’s disks. They’re misaligned, like a stack of plates with pebbles wedged between them. They are, in astronomical parlance, “torn.”
The disk-tearing is so strange that the only way astronomers who study GW Orionis can make sense of it all is to imagine there’s a giant planet there in the dust and gas, adding its own gravity to the mix.
The problem is, there’s no hard evidence the triple star system is home to any such planet. None. Zero. Zilch
https://www.thedailybeast.com/triple-star-system-gw-orionis-is-either-hiding-a-planet-or-a-physics-breaking-secret?ref=home
How Did No One See Kids Left Alone With Brother's Skeleton?
As Houston police investigate the house of horrors where three children and a skeleton of a fourth were abandoned found in “deplorable” conditions, one thing is becoming clear: Warning signs were missed.
The siblings, who range in age from 7 to 15, had not been enrolled in school since May 2020. A neighbor found the older boy sleeping in a playground. Another neighbor complained about the persistent foul odor coming from the apartment.
In the end, it was the teen who had been caring for the three younger kids— in the absence of any adults—who summoned police to the home over the weekend.
What they found was something that Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said was a shocking scenario he had never seen in all his years in law enforcement.
The skeletal remains of a 9-year-old who had died as long as a year ago were inside the apartment with his three surviving brothers, two of whom were deemed malnourished.
Police located the boys’ mother and her boyfriend and questioned the pair, but then released them. Authorities have not explained why the kids were alone, how they survived on their own, how one of them died, or how no one noticed what was happening.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/warning-signs-were-missed-in-houston-home-where-siblings-were-abandoned-with-brothers-skeleton?ref=home
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Bigger question: why were mother & BF released, and how badly did CPS drop this ball?
The Mystery Behind a Nearby Alien Beacon Is Solved
Back in April 2019, an Australian telescope picked up a very tantalizing radio signal that seemed to emanate from the sun's closest neighboring star. The signal didn’t have any obvious explanation. Instead, it seemed to possess the hallmarks of something created by intelligent alien life.
And in fact, that was the whole point of the research project that stumbled on the signal. Called Breakthrough Listen, the $100 million effort has spent the last five years using state-of-the-art telescopes around the world to listen in on signs of extraterrestrial life from around the galaxy.
The 2019 signal, called “blc1,” was exactly what the Breakthrough researchers were hoping to find. Detected by the Parkes Murriyang radio telescope in southeastern Australia, blc1 was coming right from Proxima Centauri, a star just 4.2 light-years away, and home to two planets—one of which is thought to be potentially habitable to life.
According to Sofia Sheikh from the Berkeley SETI Research Center, the signal was “uniquely similar to the kind of signal we would expect from space.” It was something that could only be made by technology—and technology from space to boot. It lasted several hours, which ruled out satellites or aircraft. If it had a natural origin, the signal should have repeated over time, but the team never observed it again in dozens of hours of follow-up observations of Proxima Centauri. Instead, it was the type of one-and-done signal expected from an intelligent civilization.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-blc1-alien-radio-signal-from-proxima-centauri-found-by-breakthrough-listen-finally-gets-explained?ref=home
A Scottish Judge Could Expose Trump's Shady Golf Finances
A judge in Scotland will hold a two-day hearing this week that could end up forcing former President Donald Trump to go through something he dreads and has successfully avoided for years back home: a financial colonoscopy.
Lord Sandison, the judge overseeing the case, will decide whether the Scottish government can use a new anti-money laundering tool to investigate how Trump suddenly came up with $60 million in cash to buy and establish the Trump Turnberry golf resort in 2014.
The purchase aroused suspicion because the all-cash deal was part of a multi-million dollar spending spree on three golf courses in the British Isles—at a time when his 10 percent stake in the casino business bearing his name, Trump Entertainment Resorts, was in peril as the company was filing for bankruptcy.
“Do we continue to ignore the towering cloud of suspicion over Trump Turnberry?” said Nick Flynn, legal director of a watchdog group that’s pressuring the Scottish government to act.
It’s a potential move that the Trump operations there stand strongly against.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/a-scottish-judge-could-expose-donald-trumps-shady-golf-finances-turnberry?ref=home
Judge finds teen committed sexual assault in Virginia school bathroom
In a case that has generated a political firestorm, a Virginia juvenile court judge found sufficient evidence during a trial Monday to sustain charges that a teen sexually assaulted a classmate in the girls’ bathroom of a Loudoun County high school in May.
The teenager, now 15, is also charged with the sexual assault of another student that occurred months later at a different Loudoun school. Loudoun County juvenile court Chief Judge Pamela L. Brooks said she would wait to sentence the teen until that case is decided in November.
The judge’s finding is the juvenile court equivalent of a guilty verdict in other courts.
The case generated local and national attention after the parents of the girl assaulted in May said the charged youth was “gender fluid,” prompting renewed backlash against a policy in Loudoun County schools that allows transgender students to use bathrooms that match their gender identity. That policy was adopted after the May assault.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/in-case-at-center-of-political-firestorm-judge-finds-teen-committed-sexual-assault-in-virginia-school-bathroom/2021/10/25/42c037da-35cc-11ec-8be3-e14aaacfa8ac_story.html
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This case is being used against transgender teens. It could as easily have happened if the teens were same sex. Think about it.
Should young children be made to wear face masks?
L
Like many children his age, three-year-old Eshan Evans is energetic and boisterous. But as soon as he has to put on a face mask at school, something changes. "You can see he's a different boy, much tamer and quieter," says his mother Herne.
In Singapore, where Eshan and his family live, children aged six and above are legally required to wear masks. But many kindergartens and pre-schools also strongly encourage the practice for younger children. It means that for roughly eight hours every weekday, except while eating, drinking, or napping, Eshan wears a disposable three-ply mask.
The moment he's let out, however, he rips off his mask, shoving it into his pocket or thrusting into his grandmother's hands. Once, on a particularly bad day in July, he threw his mask on the ground and ran out the school gates.
"He hates it," says his mother, who doesn't make her son wear a mask outside of school. "I have nothing against masks... but we don't want to force it on him and know he's uncomfortable."
The decision of whether to mask young children is one that many parents and regulators around the world are facing as they try to prevent new waves of Covid-19, while also allowing children to develop, socialise and thrive emotionally.
From a regulatory standpoint, as of early October, countries fall largely into three camps. Singapore and European countries such as France and Italy recommend masking up from the age of six. This is in line the World Health Organization's guidelines, which recommend that children over six wear masks in certain circumstances, for example when there is widespread transmission in their area. Some only apply the rule to specific indoor settings, such as school.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211025-how-face-masks-affect-young-children
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Thoughtful article. Of course, because it's somewhat scientific, too difficult for the maskholes to absorb......
Signs of first planet found outside our galaxy
Astronomers have found hints of what could be the first planet ever to be discovered outside our galaxy.
Nearly 5,000 "exoplanets" - worlds orbiting stars beyond our Sun - have been found so far, but all of these have been located within the Milky Way galaxy.
The possible Saturn-sized planet discovered by Nasa's Chandra X-Ray Telescope is in the Messier 51 galaxy.
This is located some 28 million light-years away from the Milky Way.
This new result is based on transits, where the passage of a planet in front of a star blocks some of the star's light and yields a characteristic dip in brightness that can be detected by telescopes.
This general technique has already been used to find thousands of exoplanets.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59044650
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Just because we can't see them does not mean they aren't there. Just because they haven't visited us doesn't mean they don't exist. We are an arrogant species.
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Gender: Do not displayCurrent location: Virginia
Member since: Wed Jun 1, 2011, 07:34 PM
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