Note: This article is about the UK, but things are even worse here, where the only facilities for youth are juvenile detention or (nearly unavailable) mental health centers.

Growing numbers of very vulnerable children in England are being detained in temporary accommodation under special court orders described as "draconian" by one senior judge.

In a rare move, the BBC has been given access to court proceedings and documents, which reveal the everyday impact these orders have on young people.

Holiday lets, caravans and canal boats, are just some of the temporary locations being used to house children - because there aren't enough suitable places in registered children's homes. Not only are these unsuitable, they are now illegal - unless a court rules otherwise.

Since September, any home for under 16s in care - either permanent or temporary - needs to be Ofsted registered. But because there aren't enough registered places available, councils looking for a way to keep the children in unregistered accommodation without breaking the law, are turning to the family courts to issue Deprivation of Liberty orders. These can allow children to be kept behind locked doors and windows, and even permit the use of medication without consent as a means of restraint.

Here are the stories of a number of teenagers.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-59147367

A Polish sausage store and an Eastern European bakery sit alongside a Yemeni department store and a Bengali clothing shop. Church bells ring out along with the Islamic call to prayer.

"The world in two square miles" - Hamtramck lives up to its slogan, with around 30 languages spoken within its 5 sq km area.

This month, the Midwestern city of 28,000 has reached a milestone. Hamtramck has elected an all-Muslim City Council and a Muslim mayor, becoming the first in the US to have a Muslim-American government.

Once faced with discrimination, Muslim residents have become integral to this multicultural city, and now make up more than half its population.

And despite economic challenges and intense cultural debates, residents in Hamtramck from different religious and cultural backgrounds coexist in harmony, making the city a meaningful case study for America's future of rising diversity.

But will Hamtramck be an exception or a rule?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59212355

At a September school board meeting in Southlake, Texas, a parent named Tara Eddins strode to the lectern during the public comment period and demanded to know why the Carroll Independent School District was paying counselors “at $90K a pop” to give students lessons on suicide prevention.

“At Carroll ISD, you are actually advertising suicide,” Eddins said, arguing that many parents in the affluent suburban school system have hired tutors because the district’s counselors are too focused on mental health instead of helping students prepare for college.

“Some of these kids, they’re just trying to get through the day, get through compacted math, get through algebra, go to cotillion on Sunday,” Eddins said. “They are not thinking about these issues.”

Two days after Eddins made the remarks, Southlake Families PAC — a group that has fought to stop a diversity plan at Carroll — sent an email to supporters calling on the school district to “Leave mental health and parenting to parents.”

Christina Edmiston, a Southlake resident and mother of two, was outraged when she saw the email. Earlier that month, Edmiston had pulled her 12-year-old son out of the Carroll district after he reported thoughts of suicide after having been bullied by classmates for his sexuality.

“You can’t expect just to teach kids arithmetic and reading and look at their test scores and expect them to be decent human beings,” Edmiston said. “I personally cannot understand why a parent would not want their children to have knowledge of what depression looks like, what anxiety looks like.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/parents-protesting-critical-race-theory-identify-new-target-mental-hea-rcna4991

When Byron Kominek returned home after the Peace Corps and later working as a diplomat in Africa, his family's 24-acre farm near Boulder, Colo., was struggling to turn a profit.

"Our farm has mainly been hay producing for fifty years," Kominek said, on a recent chilly morning, the sun illuminating a dusting of snow on the foothills to his West. "This is a big change on one of our three pastures."

That big change is certainly an eye opener: 3,200 solar panels mounted on posts eight feet high above what used to be an alfalfa field on this patch of rolling farmland at the doorstep of the Rocky Mountains.

Getting to this point, a community solar garden that sells 1.2 megawatts of power back into the local grid, wasn't easy, even in a progressive county like his that wanted to expand renewable energy. When Kominek approached Boulder County regulators about putting up solar panels, they initially told him no, his land was designated as historic farmland.

"They said, land's for farming, so go farm it," Kominek says. "I said, well, we weren't making any money, you all want to be 100% renewable at some point so how about we work together and sort this out."

https://www.npr.org/2021/11/14/1054942590/solar-energy-colorado-garden-farm-land

Dr. Joshua Yap has barely had a second to breathe since Texas passed the country’s most extreme abortion restriction.

Yap works at Planned Parenthood’s Tulsa clinic, which was already extremely busy before S.B. 8, a radical anti-abortion law, took effect in neighboring Texas on Sept. 1. Texas had effectively shut down clinics during the pandemic, so a large number of patients were already crossing the border to obtain services. But when S.B. 8 became law, Yap ― who is the only abortion provider at his clinic ― began working nonstop to accommodate the influx of Texans.

S.B. 8 banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and deputized private citizens to enforce it. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the law last week, and the majority of the justices hinted that they may allow legal challenges to it. But the legislation has had a significant impact on people seeking abortions in Texas: Many are leaving the state to receive care while other less privileged people are being forced into giving birth.

Before S.B. 8, Texas provided an average of 53,000 abortions every year. Now, the four clinics in Oklahoma are picking up the pieces by providing care for both Texans and Oklahomans. The two Planned Parenthood clinics in Oklahoma saw 35 patients from Texas between September and November 2020 — and 653 Texans during that same period in 2021.

“Trying to absorb all of these additional patients has been hard,” Yap said, noting that Oklahoma is a small state with only a few providers.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/day-in-the-life-oklahoma-abortion-provider-texas-sb8_n_618a9b26e4b0a518aca6693a

A Montana National Guard soldier became the first woman to finish the Army’s sniper course at Fort Benning, Georgia, military officials said.

The woman, who was not identified in a news release from the Army on Monday, completed the seven-week class Friday.

The military describes the course as a program to turn students into “the most feared weapon on the battlefield.”

The soldier, who enlisted in the National Guard in December, was sent to Fort Benning for basic and advanced individual training. Training staff members and others recommended that she take the sniper course because of her “superior performance,” the Army said.

“We are extremely proud of this soldier’s achievement and recognize that this is a milestone for not only Montana, but the entire National Guard and Army,” Maj. Gen. J. Peter Hronek, the adjutant general for Montana, said in a statement.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-milestone-first-woman-completes-us-army-sniper-course-rcna4885
________________________________________________________________________
Wonder if Sen. Haw Haw would like to meet her?

South Dakota’s House launched an investigation Tuesday into whether the state’s attorney general should be impeached for his conduct surrounding a car crash last year that killed a pedestrian.

A sizable majority of the Republican-dominated House voted to have a committee prepare a report and recommend whether Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg should be impeached. It could take weeks for the committee of seven Republicans and two Democrats to delve into the crash investigation. The committee is a mix of Ravnsborg’s political allies and those who have called for his ouster.

Ravnsborg, a Republican who was elected to his first term as attorney general in 2018, pleaded no contest in August to a pair of misdemeanors in the crash that killed 55-year-old Joseph Boever, who was walking along a rural stretch of highway when Ravnsborg struck him with his car. Ravnsborg has insisted that he did not realize he killed a man until he returned to the scene the next day and discovered his body.

House lawmakers said they first wanted to know whether Ravnsborg could be impeached for his misdemeanor convictions, the fact that he killed a man, or that law enforcement associations have said they no longer have confidence in his office.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/south-dakota-house-votes-begin-unprecedented-impeachment-probe-ag-rcna5067
_________________________________________________________________________
When even your friends are in on it, you are going DOWN!

The day she made the final payment on her house last spring, June Walker could barely contain her jubilation.

“I was running around the house, just thanking God,” said Walker, 65, who had scrimped and saved for more than two years, setting aside most of her disability check, to afford the $550 a month she needed to buy the $15,000 home.

Walker had transformed the cozy brick bungalow on Detroit’s east side since arriving in early 2019. Back then, the house had no furnace, no water heater and no plumbing under the kitchen sink. The basement was filled with sewage, she said.

By this April, Walker had made most of the major repairs. She’d gotten to know her neighborhood and loved watching her grandchildren play in the backyard. And now, after decades of homelessness, she’d made the final payment on her rent-to-own lease.

“A weight just lifted off of me,” Walker said. “It’s a small little bungalow, but when you pay for something out of your sweat and labor, you feel really good about it.”

But then, two months later, an eviction letter arrived, and the crushing truth about her house began to emerge: It’s not hers.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/fake-landlord-home-rental-scam-detroit-rcna4941

A South Carolina judge on Wednesday denied Alex Murdaugh, the embattled South Carolina lawyer facing a wild array of criminal charges, bond a second time after reviewing his court-mandated psychiatric evaluation.

Murdaugh, 53, was denied bail last month on charges stemming from an alleged scheme to steal millions from the family of his former housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield. At the time, South Carolina Judge Clifton Newman said he was worried Murdaugh’s admitted opioid addition and several other legal woes made him a danger to the community. Newman, however, concluded at the Oct. 19 hearing he would reconsider the possibility the legal scion—who is already facing charges for orchestrating his own murder for an insurance payout—could be released on bail to go back to his drug rehab center in Florida after undergoing undergo psychiatric evaluation.

“After considering the arguments of counsel, the evaluation submitted, pending charges and other investigations, and the apparent character and mental condition of the defendant, the Court finds that the Defendant is a danger both to himself and the community,” South Carolina Judge Clifton Newman wrote in a two-page order that does not detail the results of the evaluation.

The latest legal blow means Murdaugh must now remain at Richland County Detention Center while awaiting trial, marking the latest twist in the made-for-TV saga about the man whose family has been tantamount to the law in the South Carolina Lowcountry for decades.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/alex-murdaugh-denied-bondagainafter-psychiatric-evaluation?ref=home
______________________________________________________________________________
He can sweat it out in jail like an ordinary person!

t’s an idea that appears to be on two tracks. On an actual policy level, Congress and the Biden administration are moving toward requiring women to register for the draft, with the policy changes potentially becoming law by the end of the year. But on a political level, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and other Republicans appear to be seizing on the proposal as their latest weapon in the trenches of the culture war.

Just last week, Hawley introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to strip out language in the annual Pentagon policy bill that would make women subject to registering for the draft. Similar language has already passed the House in its NDAA bill and if both bills get through their respective chambers with the provisions, it’s almost certain the final version of the legislation would include the new policy.

Which is why Hawley is calling attention to the issue now, in advance of the NDAA hitting the Senate floor in the coming weeks.

“It is wrong to force our daughters, mothers, wives, and sisters to fight our wars,” Hawley said last week. “Our country is extremely grateful for the brave women who have volunteered to serve our country with and alongside our fighting forces. They have played a vital role in defending America at every point in our nation’s history. But volunteering for military service is not the same as being forced into it, and no women should be compelled to do so.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/josh-hawley-will-be-damned-if-he-allows-women-to-get-drafted?ref=home
________________________________________________________________________________
Joshie is a MANLY MAN!