Were Miami (BNO News) – Hurricane warnings on Saturday evening at Earl tropical storm, named storm of the 2010 season hurricanes in the Atlantic, is still to move in the direction of the Leeward Islands.
Ast starting from 11:00 (0300 UTC), located about 520 miles Earl (835 km) east of the Leeward Islands in the North is moving toward the west near 20 miles (32 kilometers) per hour.
Forecasters said weather in the United States and the Miami-based National Hurricane Center) Earl and maximum sustained winds near 65 miles (100 kilometers) per hour, and high wind. It is expected to be strengthened further in the coming hours, and is expected to become a hurricane storm on Sunday.
And issued a hurricane warning at 11 pm Ast (0300 UTC) for Antigua and Barbuda, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, Anguilla, St. Martin and St. Barthelemy. And a hurricane watch was issued for St. Martin, Saba, St. Eustatius, and the British Virgin Islands, U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. “Preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion,” said Miami-based center.
Forecasters say that a gradual shift in the direction of the west and northwest is expected on Sunday and Monday. It is expected to pass near the Earl or more of the northern Leeward Islands late on Sunday or Monday as a category 2 hurricane on the Saffir Simpson scale, wind storm, with winds 100 miles (160 kilometers) per hour.
According to expectations, it is expected that the circumstances of the hurricane to reach the islands within the warning on Sunday evening.
Meanwhile, Hurricane Danielle, which is located 335 miles (575 kilometers) east of Bermuda, heading north and north-east, away from the islands. The hurricane has sustained winds of 105 miles (165 kilometers) per hour, making it a Category 2 hurricane.
The NHC dangerous surfing conditions does not diminish the near Bermuda on Sunday, which swells from the hurricane is likely to cause serious disruption of currents over the weekend along parts of the eastern coast of the United States.
Wikileaks is an international organization, based in Sweden, which publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of otherwise unavailable documents while preserving the anonymity of sources. Its website, launched in 2006, is run by The Sunshine Press.[1] The organization has described itself as having been founded by Chinese dissidents, as well as journalists, mathematicians, and start-up company technologists from the U.S., Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa.[1] Newspaper articles and The New Yorker magazine (June 7, 2010) describe Julian Assange, an Australian journalist and Internet activist, as its director.Within a year of its launch, the site claimed a database that had grown to more than 1.2 million documents.
In April 2010, video posted on a website called Collateral Murder established Wikileaks as a prime portal for unauthorized, accurate accounts, documents and video from distant battlefields.[5][6] In July of the same year, Wikileaks released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 90,000 documents about the War in Afghanistan not previously available for public review.
History
Wikileaks first appeared on the Internet in January 2007.The site states that it was “founded by Chinese dissidents, journalists, mathematicians and start-up company technologists, from the US, Taiwan, Europe, Australia and South Africa”.The creators of Wikileaks have not been formally identified.[9] It has been represented in public since January 2007 by Julian Assange and others. Assange describes himself as a member of Wikileaks’ advisory board News reports in The Australian have called Assange the “founder of Wikileaks”.As of June 2009[update], the site had over 1,200 registered volunteers and listed an advisory board comprising Assange, Phillip Adams, Wang Dan, C. J. Hinke, Ben Laurie, Tashi Namgyal Khamsitsang, Xiao Qiang, Chico Whitaker and Wang Youcai.Despite appearing on the list, when contacted by Mother Jones magazine in 2010, Khamsitsang said that while he received an e-mail from Wikileaks, he had never agreed to be an advisor.
Wikileaks states that its “primary interest is in exposing oppressive regimes in Asia, the former Soviet bloc, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, but we also expect to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations.”
In January 2007, the website stated that it had over 1.2 million leaked documents that it was preparing to publish.[15] An article in The New Yorker said
One of the WikiLeaks activists owned a server that was being used as a node for the Tor network. Millions of secret transmissions passed through it. The activist noticed that hackers from China were using the network to gather foreign governments’ information, and began to record this traffic. Only a small fraction has ever been posted on WikiLeaks, but the initial tranche served as the site’s foundation, and Assange was able to say, “[w]e have received over one million documents from thirteen countries.”
Assange responded to the suggestion that eavesdropping on Chinese hackers played a crucial part in the early days of Wikileaks by saying “the imputation is incorrect. The facts concern a 2006 investigation into Chinese espionage one of our contacts were involved in. Somewhere between none and handful of those documents were ever released on WikiLeaks. Non-government targets of the Chinese espionage, such as Tibetan associations were informed (by us)”.The group has subsequently released a number of other significant documents which have become front-page news items, ranging from documentation of equipment expenditures and holdings in the Afghanistan war to corruption in Kenya.
Their stated goal is to ensure that whistle-blowers and journalists are not jailed for emailing sensitive or classified documents, as happened to Chinese journalist Shi Tao, who was sentenced to 10 years in 2005 after publicising an email from Chinese officials about the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
The project has drawn comparisons to Daniel Ellsberg’s leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971.[20] In the United States, the leaking of some documents may be legally protected. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution guarantees anonymity, at least in the area of political discourse.Author and journalist Whitley Strieber has spoken about the benefits of the Wikileaks project, noting that “Leaking a government document can mean jail, but jail sentences for this can be fairly short. However, there are many places where it means long incarceration or even death, such as China and parts of Africa and the Middle East.”
The site has won a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist magazine New Media Award,[22] and in June 2009, Wikileaks and Julian Assange won Amnesty International UK’s Media Award 2009 (in the category “New Media”) for the 2008 publication of “Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances”,[23] a report by the Kenyan National Commission on Human Rights about police killings in Kenya. In May 2010 it was rated number 1 of “websites that could totally change the news”.
Funding
On 24 December 2009, Wikileaks announced that it was experiencing a shortage of funds mand suspended all access to its website except for a form to submit new material. Material that was previously published was no longer available, although some could still be accessed on unofficial mirrors.Wikileaks stated on its website that it would resume full operation once the operational costs were covered.Wikileaks saw this as a kind of strike “to ensure that everyone who is involved stops normal work and actually spends time raising revenue”. While it was initially hoped that funds could be secured by 6 January 2010, it was only on 3 February 2010 that Wikileaks announced that its minimum fundraising goal had been achieved.
On 22 January 2010, PayPal suspended Wikileaks’ donation account and froze its assets. Wikileaks said that this had happened before, and was done for “no obvious reason”.The account was restored on 25 January 2010.
On May 18, 2010, Wikileaks announced that its website and archive were back up.
As of June 2010, Wikileaks was a finalist for a grant of more than half a million dollars from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation,but did not make the cut.Wikileaks commented, “Wikileaks was highest rated project in the Knight challenge, strongly recommended to the board but gets no funding. Go figure”. Wikileaks said that the Knight foundation announced the award to “‘12 Grantees who will impact future of news’ – but not WikiLeaks” and questioned whether Knight foundation was “really looking for impact”.A spokesman of the Knight Foundation disputed parts of Wikileaks’ statement, saying “WikiLeaks was not recommended by Knight staff to the board.”
However, he declined to say whether Wikileaks was the project rated highest by the Knight advisory panel, which consists of non-staffers, among them journalist Jennifer 8. Lee, who has done PR work for Wikileaks with the press and on social networking sites.
On July 17, Jacob Appelbaum spoke on behalf of Wikileaks at the 2010 Hackers on Planet Earth conference in New York City, replacing Assange due to the presence of federal agents at the conference.He announced that the Wikileaks submission system was again up and running, after it had been temporarily suspended.Assange was a surprise speaker at a TED conference on 19 July 2010 in Oxford, and confirmed that Wikileaks was now accepting submissions again.
Administration
According to a January 2010 interview, the Wikileaks team then consisted of five people working full-time and about 800 people who worked occasionally, none of whom were compensated.[30] Wikileaks has no official headquarters. The expenses per year are about €200,000, mainly for servers and bureaucracy, but would reach €600,000 if work currently done by volunteers were paid for. Wikileaks does not pay for lawyers, as hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal support have been donated by media organisations such as the Associated Press, The Los Angeles Times, and the National Newspaper Publishers Association.Its only revenue stream is donations, but Wikileaks is planning to add an auction model to sell early access to documents.According to the Wau Holland Foundation, Wikileaks receives no money for personnel costs, only for hardware, travelling and bandwidth.An article in TechEYE.net wrote
As a charity accountable under German law, donations for Wikileaks can be made to the foundation. Funds are held in escrow and are given to Wikileaks after the whistleblower website files an application containing a statement with proof of payment. The foundation does not pay any sort of salary nor give any renumeration [sic] to Wikileaks’ personnel, corroborating the statement of the site’s German representative Daniel Schmitt on national television that all personnel works voluntarily, even its speakers.
Hosting
Wikileaks describes itself as “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking”. Wikileaks is hosted by PRQ, a Sweden-based company providing “highly secure, no-questions-asked hosting services.” PRQ is said to have “almost no information about its clientele and maintains few if any of its own logs.” PRQ is owned by Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij who, through their involvement in The Pirate Bay, have significant experience in withstanding legal challenges from authorities. Being hosted by PRQ makes it difficult to take Wikileaks offline. Furthermore, “Wikileaks maintains its own servers at undisclosed locations, keeps no logs and uses military-grade encryption to protect sources and other confidential information.” Such arrangements have been called “bulletproof hosting.”
Technology
The “about” page originally read: “To the user, Wikileaks will look very much like Wikipedia. Anybody can post to it, anybody can edit it. No technical knowledge is required. Leakers can post documents anonymously and untraceably. Users can publicly discuss documents and analyze their credibility and veracity. Users can discuss interpretations and context and collaboratively formulate collective publications. Users can read and write explanatory articles on leaks along with background material and context. The political relevance of documents and their verisimilitude will be revealed by a cast of thousands.”
However, Wikileaks established an editorial policy that accepted only documents that were “of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical interest”. This coincided with early criticism that having no editorial policy would drive out good material with spam and promote “automated or indiscriminate publication of confidential records.”It is no longer possible for anybody to post to it or edit it, as the original FAQ promised. Instead, submissions are regulated by an internal review process and some are published, while documents not fitting the editorial criteria are rejected by anonymous Wikileaks reviewers. By 2008, the revised FAQ stated that “Anybody can post comments to it. [...] Users can publicly discuss documents and analyze their credibility and veracity.”After the 2010 relaunch, posting new comments to leaks was not possible any more.
Wikileaks is based on several software packages, including MediaWiki, Freenet, Tor, and PGP.Wikileaks strongly encouraged postings via Tor due to the strong privacy needs of its users.
Police raid on German Wikileaks domain holder’s home
The home of Theodor Reppe, registrant of the German Wikileaks domain name, Wikileaks.de, was raided on 24 March 2009 after Wikileaks released the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) censorship blacklist.The site was not affected.
Chinese censorship
The Chinese government currently attempts to censor every web site with “wikileaks” in the URL, including the primary .org site and the regional variations .cn and .uk. However, the site is still accessible from behind the Chinese firewall through one of the many alternative names used by the project, such as “secure.sunshinepress.org”. The alternate sites change frequently, and Wikileaks encourages users to search “wikileaks cover names” outside mainland China for the latest alternative names. Mainland search engines, including Baidu and Yahoo, also censor references to “wikileaks”.
Potential future Australian censorship
Wikinews has related news: Portions of Wikileaks, Wikipedia blocked in Australia
On 16 March 2009, the Australian Communications and Media Authority added Wikileaks to their proposed blacklist of sites that will be blocked for all Australians if the mandatory internet filtering censorship scheme is implemented as planned.
Harassment and surveillance
According to The Times, Wikileaks and its members have complained about continuing harassment and surveillance by law enforcement and intelligence organizations, including extended detention, seizure of computers, veiled threats, “covert following and hidden photography.”
After the release of the 2007 airstrikes video and as they prepared to release film of the Granai massacre, Julian Assange has said that his group of volunteers came under intense surveillance. In an interview and Twitter posts he said that a restaurant in Reykjavik where his group of volunteers met came under surveillance in March; there was “covert following and hidden photography” by police and foreign intelligence services; that an apparent British intelligence agent made thinly veiled threats in a Luxembourg car park; and that one of the volunteers was detained by police for 21 hours. Another volunteer posted that computers were seized, saying “If anything happens to us, you know why … and you know who is responsible.”According to the Columbia Journalism Review, “the Icelandic press took a look at Assange’s charges of being surveilled in Iceland [...] and, at best, have found nothing to substantiate them.”
Wikileaks has claimed that Facebook deleted their fan page, which had 30,000 fans.
Verification of submissions
Wikinews has news on these topics:
* Huge interest takes Wikileaks offline
* Church of Scientology’s ‘Operating Thetan’ documents leaked online
* Wikileaks spokesperson discusses recent court case with Wikinews
* Representative for ACLU tells Wikinews their opinion on lifting of Wikileaks court injunction
* Wikileaks.org restored as injunction is lifted
* Wikileaks claims ‘abuse of process’ in court case that resulted in wikileaks.org being take offline
* Rights groups: Forcing Wikileaks.org offline raises ’serious First Amendment concerns’
* ‘Wikileaks.org’ taken offline in many areas after fire, court injunction
Wikileaks states that it has never released a misattributed document. Documents are assessed before release. In response to concerns about the possibility of misleading or fraudulent leaks, Wikileaks has stated that misleading leaks “are already well-placed in the mainstream media.is of no additional assistance.”The FAQ states that: “The simplest and most effective countermeasure is a worldwide community of informed users and editors who can scrutinize and discuss leaked documents.”
According to statements by Assange in 2010, submitted documents are vetted by a group of five reviewers, with expertise in different fields such as language or programming, who also investigate the background of the leaker if his or her identity is known.In that group, Assange has the final decision about the assessment of a document.
Icelandic Modern Media Initiative
In August 2009 Kaupthing, a large bank, succeeded in obtaining a court order gagging Iceland’s national broadcaster, RUV, from broadcasting a risk analysis report showing the bank’s substantial exposure to debt default risk. This information had been leaked by a whistleblower to Wikileaks and remained available on the Wikileaks site. Citizens of Iceland felt outraged that RUV was prevented from broadcasting news of relevance.Therefore, Wikileaks has been credited with inspiring the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative, a bill meant to reclaim Iceland’s 2007 Reporters Sans Frontieres ranking as first in the world for free speech. It aims to enact a range of protections for sources, journalists, and publishers.Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of both Wikileaks and the Icelandic parliament, helped with passage of the bill.
Notable leaks
Pre-2009
Apparent Somali assassination order
Wikileaks posted its first document in December 2006, a decision to assassinate government officials signed by Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys.The New Yorker has reported that. Assange and the others were uncertain of its authenticity, but they thought that readers, using Wikipedia-like features of the site, would help analyze it. They published the decision with a lengthy commentary, which asked, “Is it a bold manifesto by a flamboyant Islamic militant with links to Bin Laden? Or is it a clever smear by US intelligence, designed to discredit the Union, fracture Somali alliances and manipulate China?” … The document’s authenticity was never determined, and news about WikiLeaks quickly superseded the leak itself.
The document was covertly acquired by tapping into the Tor network, which was being used by other hackers in China to gather information on foreign governments.
Daniel arap Moi family corruption
On 31 August 2007, The Guardian (Britain) featured on its front page a story about corruption by the family of the former Kenyan leader Daniel arap Moi. The newspaper stated that the source of the information was Wikileaks.
Bank Julius Baer lawsuit
Main article: Bank Julius Baer vs. Wikileaks lawsuit
In February 2008, the Wikileaks.org domain name was taken offline after the Swiss Bank Julius Baer sued Wikileaks and the wikileaks.org domain registrar, Dynadot, in a court in California, United States, and obtained a permanent injunction ordering the shutdown.Wikileaks had hosted allegations of illegal activities at the bank’s Cayman Island branch.Wikileaks’ U.S. Registrar, Dynadot, complied with the order by removing its DNS entries. However, the website remained accessible via its numeric IP address, and online activists immediately mirrored Wikileaks at dozens of alternate websites worldwide.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a motion protesting the censorship of Wikileaks. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press assembled a coalition of media and press that filed an amicus curiae brief on Wikileaks’ behalf. The coalition included major U.S. newspaper publishers and press organisations, such as: the American Society of Newspaper Editors, The Associated Press, the Citizen Media Law Project, The E.W. Scripps Company, the Gannett Company, The Hearst Corporation, the Los Angeles Times, the National Newspaper Publishers Association, the Newspaper Association of America, The Radio-Television News Directors Association, and The Society of Professional Journalists. The coalition requested to be heard as a friend of the court to call attention to relevant points of law that it believed the court had overlooked (on the grounds that Wikileaks had not appeared in court to defend itself, and that no First Amendment issues had yet been raised before the court). Amongst other things, the coalition argued that:
“Wikileaks provides a forum for dissidents and whistleblowers across the globe to post documents, but the Dynadot injunction imposes a prior restraint that drastically curtails access to Wikileaks from the Internet based on a limited number of postings challenged by Plaintiffs. The Dynadot injunction therefore violates the bedrock principle that an injunction cannot enjoin all communication by a publisher or other speaker.”
The same judge, Judge Jeffrey White, who issued the injunction vacated it on 29 February 2008, citing First Amendment concerns and questions about legal jurisdiction.Wikileaks was thus able to bring its site online again. The bank dropped the case on 5 March 2008.The judge also denied the bank’s request for an order prohibiting the website’s publication.
The Executive Director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Lucy Dalglish, commented:
“It’s not very often a federal judge does a 180 degree turn in a case and dissolves an order. But we’re very pleased the judge recognized the constitutional implications in this prior restraint.”
Guantánamo Bay procedures
A copy of Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta–the protocol of the U.S. Army at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp–dated March 2003 was released on the Wikileaks website on 7 November 2007.The document, named “gitmo-sop.pdf”, is also mirrored at The Guardian. Its release revealed some of the restrictions placed over detainees at the camp, including the designation of some prisoners as off-limits to the International Committee of the Red Cross, something that the U.S. military had in the past repeatedly denied.
On 3 December 2007, Wikileaks released a copy of the 2004 edition of the manual, together with a detailed analysis of the changes.
Scientology
On 7 April 2008, Wikileaks reported receiving a letter (dated 27 March) from the Religious Technology Centre claiming ownership of several recently leaked documents pertaining to OT Levels within the Church of Scientology. These same documents were at the centre of a 1994 scandal. The email stated:
“ The Advanced Technology materials are unpublished, copyrighted works. Please be advised that your customer’s action in this regard violates United States copyright law. Accordingly, we ask for your help in removing these works immediately from your service.
Moxon and Kobrin
”
The letter continued on to request the release of the logs of the uploader, which would remove their anonymity. Wikileaks responded with a statement released on Wikinews stating: “in response to the attempted suppression, Wikileaks will release several thousand additional pages of Scientology material next week”,and did so.
In September 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaigns, the contents of a Yahoo account belonging to Sarah Palin (the running mate of Republican presidential nominee John McCain) were posted on Wikileaks after being hacked into by members of Anonymous.[86] The contents of the mailbox seemed to suggest that she used the private Yahoo account to send work-related messages in order to evade public record laws.[87] The hacking of the account was widely reported in mainstream news outlets.[88][89][90] Although Wikileaks was able to conceal the hacker’s identity, the source of the Palin emails was eventually publicly identified in another way as being David Kernell, a 20-year-old economics student at the University of Tennessee and the son of Democratic Tennessee State Representative Mike Kernell from Memphis.Kernell attempted to conceal his identity by using the anonymous proxy service ctunnel.com, but, because of the illegal nature of the access, ctunnel website administrator Gabriel Ramuglia assisted the FBI in tracking down the source of the hack.
BNP membership list
After briefly appearing on a blog, the membership list of the far-right British National Party was posted to Wikileaks on 18 November 2008. The name, address, age and occupation of many of the 13,500 members were given, including several police officers, two solicitors, four ministers of religion, at least one doctor, and a number of primary and secondary school teachers. In Britain, police officers are banned from joining or promoting the BNP, and at least one officer was dismissed for being a member.The BNP was known for going to considerable lengths to conceal the identities of members. On 19 November, BNP leader Nick Griffin stated that he knew the identity of the person who initially leaked the list on 17 November, describing him as a “hardliner” senior employee who left the party in 2007.On 20 October 2009, a list of BNP members from April 2009 was leaked. This list contained 11,811 members.
2009
In January 2009, over 600 internal United Nations reports (60 of them marked “strictly confidential”) were leaked.
On 7 February 2009, Wikileaks released 6,780 Congressional Research Service reports.
In March 2009, Wikileaks published a list of contributors to the Norm Coleman senatorial campaign[101] and a set of documents belonging to Barclays Bank that had been ordered removed from the website of The Guardian.
Climatic Research Unit emails
Main article: Climatic Research Unit email controversy
In November 2009, controversial documents, including e-mail correspondence between climate scientists, were leaked from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia to various sites; one prominent host of the full 120MB archive was Wikileaks.
Internet censorship lists
Wikileaks has published the lists of forbidden or illegal web addresses for several countries.
On 19 March 2009, Wikileaks published what was alleged to be the Australian Communications and Media Authority’s blacklist of sites to be banned under Australia’s proposed laws on Internet censorship.[106] Reactions to the publication of the list by the Australian media and politicians were varied. Particular note was made by journalistic outlets of the type of websites on the list; while the Internet censorship scheme submitted by the Australian Labor Party in 2008 was proposed with the stated intention of preventing access to child pornography and sites related to terrorism,the list leaked on Wikileaks contains a number of sites unrelated to sex crimes involving minors.When questioned about the leak, Stephen Conroy, the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy in Australia’s Rudd Labor Government, responded by claiming that the list was not the actual list, yet threatening to prosecute anyone involved in distributing it. On 20 March 2009, Wikileaks published an updated list, dated 18 March 2009; it more closely matches the claimed size of the ACMA blacklist, and contains two pages which have been independently confirmed to be blacklisted by ACMA.
Wikileaks also contains details of Internet censorship in Thailand, including lists of censored sites dating back to May 2006.
A civil case against the West Australian Police for human rights violation is currently before the Supreme Court. The plaintiff is a whistleblower (a victim of Active-Profiling who was drugged by The West Australian Police Force) who attempted to leak the details to Wikileaks. Prior to this, the plaintiff could access the secure site, but when he returned a couple days later with the leaked report, access to the secure site was blocked. Access was also denied from the local library. The plaintiff lives in Bunbury, West Australia area code 6233.
Bilderberg Group meeting reports
Since May 2009, Wikileaks has made available reports of several meetings of the Bilderberg Group.It includes the group’s history and meeting reports from the years 1955, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1960, 1962, 1963 and 1980.
2008 Peru oil scandal
On 28 January 2009, Wikileaks released 86 telephone intercept recordings of Peruvian politicians and businessmen involved in the “Petrogate” oil scandal. The release of the tapes led the front pages of five Peruvian newspapers.
Toxic dumping in Africa: The Minton report
In September 2006, commodities giant Trafigura commissioned an internal report about a toxic dumping incident in the Ivory Coast, which (according to the United Nations) affected 108,000 people. The document, called the Minton Report, names various harmful chemicals “likely to be present” in the waste — sodium hydroxide, cobalt phthalocyanine sulfonate, coker naphtha, thiols, sodium alkanethiolate, sodium hydrosulfide, sodium sulfide, dialkyl disulfides, hydrogen sulfide — and notes that some of them “may cause harm at some distance”. The report states that potential health effects include “burns to the skin, eyes and lungs, vomiting, diarrhea, loss of consciousness and death”, and suggests that the high number of reported casualties is “consistent with there having been a significant release of hydrogen sulphide gas”.
On September 11, 2009, Trafigura’s lawyers, Carter-Ruck, obtained a secret “super-injunction”against The Guardian, banning that newspaper from publishing the contents of the document. Trafigura also threatened a number of other media organizations with legal action if they published the report’s contents, including the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation and The Chemical Engineer magazine.On 14 September 2009, Wikileaks posted the report.
On 12 October, Carter-Ruck warned The Guardian against mentioning the content of a parliamentary question that was due to be asked about the report. Instead, the paper published an article stating that they were unable to report on an unspecified question and claiming that the situation appeared to “call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1689 Bill of Rights”. The suppressed details rapidly circulated via the internet and Twitter and, amid uproar, Carter-Ruck agreed the next day to the modification of the injunction before it was challenged in court, permitting The Guardian to reveal the existence of the question and the injunction.The injunction was lifted on 16 October.
Kaupthing Bank
Wikileaks has made available an internal document[125] from Kaupthing Bank from just prior to the collapse of Iceland’s banking sector, which led to the 2008–2009 Icelandic financial crisis. The document shows that suspiciously large sums of money were loaned to various owners of the bank, and large debts written off. Kaupthing’s lawyers have threatened Wikileaks with legal action, citing banking privacy laws. The leak has caused an uproar in Iceland.Criminal charges relating to the multibillion euro loans to Exista and other major shareholders are being investigated. The bank is seeking to recover loans taken out by former bank employees before its collapse.
9/11 pager messages
On 25 November 2009, Wikileaks released 570,000 intercepts of pager messages from the day of the September 11 attacks.[128] Among the released messages are communications between Pentagon officials and New York City Police Department.Bradley Manning (see below) commented that those were obvious NSA intercepts.
2010
U.S. Intelligence report on Wikileaks
On 15 March 2010, Wikileaks released a secret 32-page U.S. Department of Defense Counterintelligence Analysis Report from March 2008. The document described some prominent reports leaked on the website which related to U.S. security interests and described potential methods of marginalizing the organization. Wikileaks editor Julian Assange said that some details in the Army report were inaccurate and its recommendations flawed, and also that the concerns of the US Army raised by the report were hypothetical.The report discussed deterring potential whistleblowers via termination of employment and criminal prosecution of any existing or former insiders, leakers or whistleblowers. Reasons for the attack include notable leaks such as U.S. equipment expenditure, human rights violations in Guantanamo Bay and the battle over the Iraqi town of Fallujah.
Baghdad airstrike video
On 5 April 2010, Wikileaks released classified U.S. military footage from a series of attacks on 12 July 2007 in Baghdad by a U.S. helicopter that killed 12, including two Reuters news staff, Saeed Chmagh and Namir Noor-Eldeen, on a website called “Collateral Murder”. The footage consisted of a 39-minute unedited version and an 18-minute version which had been edited and annotated. Analysis of the video indicates that one man was thought to have been carrying an AK-47 assault rifle and another an RPG (rocket propelled grenade), though “none were assuming a hostile posture.”
The military conducted an “informal” investigation into the incident, but has yet to release the investigative materials (such as the sworn statements of the soldiers involved or the battle damage assessment) that were used, causing the report to be criticized as “sloppy.”
In the week following the release, “Wikileaks” was the search term with the most significant growth worldwide in the last seven days as measured by Google Insights.
Arrest of Bradley Manning
A 22-year-old US Army intelligence analyst, PFC (formerly SPC) Bradley Manning has been arrested after alleged chat logs were turned in to the authorities by former hacker Adrian Lamo, in whom he had confided. Manning reportedly told Lamo he had leaked the “Collateral Murder” video, in addition to a video of the Granai airstrike and around 260,000 diplomatic cables, to Wikileaks.Wikileaks said “allegations in Wired that we have been sent 260,000 classified US embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect.”[136] Wikileaks have said that they are unable as yet to confirm whether or not Manning was actually the source of the video, stating “we never collect personal information on our sources”, but that they have nonetheless “taken steps to arrange for his protection and legal defence.”On June 21, Julian Assange told The Guardian that WikiLeaks had hired three US criminal lawyers to defend Manning but that they had not been given access to him.
Manning reportedly wrote, “Everywhere there’s a U.S. post, there’s a diplomatic scandal that will be revealed.”According to the Washington Post, he also described the cables as, “explaining how the first world exploits the third, in detail, from an internal perspective.”
Afghanistan War Logs
In July 2010, Wikileaks released to The Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel over 92,000 documents related to the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and the end of 2009. The logs detail individual incidents including friendly fire and civilian casualties.The scale of leak was described by Julian Assange as comparable to that of the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s. On July 25, 2010, the logs were released to the public.
Upcoming
Wikileaks have said they have video footage of a massacre of civilians in Afghanistan by the US military, perhaps the Granai massacre, which they are preparing to release shortly.
In an interview with Chris Anderson on July 19, Assange said that Wikileaks were “getting an enormous quantity of whistle-blower disclosures of high caliber” including much material relating to the 2010 BP oil spill, but that they have not been able to verify and release the material because they do not have enough volunteer journalists.
Criticism
The Australia Defence Association (ADA) stated that Wikileaks’ Julian Assange “could have committed a serious criminal offence in helping an enemy of the Australian Defence Force (ADF).”Neil James the executive director of ADA states: “Put bluntly, Wikileaks is not authorised in international or Australian law, nor equipped morally or operationally, to judge whether open publication of such material risks the safety, security, morale and legitimate objectives of Australian and allied troops fighting in a UN-endorsed military operation.”
Wikileaks’ recent leaking of classified US intelligence has been described by commentator of The Wall Street Journal as having “endangered the lives” of Afghan informants” and “the dozens of Afghan civilians named in the document dump as U.S. military informants. Their lives, as well as those of their entire families, are now at terrible risk of Taliban reprisal.”[147] When interviewed, Assange stated that Wikileaks has withheld some 15,000 documents that identify informants to avoid putting their lives at risk. Greg Gutfeld of Fox News described the leaking as “WikiLeaks’ Crusade Against the U.S. Military.”
A bit of bad luck has befallen Ekpe Udoh, the 6-foot-10 fuel forward out of Baylor, who was drafted 6th overall in the 2010 NBA Draft by the Golden State Warriors.
Udoh injured his wrist while working out amidst teammate Stephen Curry and Summer League teammate, Joe Ingles.
At the time, the extent of the injury was not clear, but now according to a sum of reports, Udoh just now underwent surgery to repair a torn wrist ligament suffered in the workout and will miss six months.
According to Marcus Thompson II of the Contra Costa Times, “His wrist will be immobilized for 10 weeks, followed by rehabilitation.”
Ouch.
For the 23-year-old forward, who recently signed his rookie contract with the team, Udoh’s injury will not have come at a worse time, not clearly for the rookie, which goes without saying, but also for the team.
With fellow gas forward, Brandan Wright and center, Andris Biedrins, rehabilitating their own injuries, it was thought such a Udoh could provide enduring front court minutes for the Warriors.
Now Golden State will have to wait until at least January for its 2010 primarily round pick to bring in his debut.
The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (often abbreviated in print as NCLB and sometimes shortened in pronunciation to “nicklebee”) is a United States Act of Congress that was originally proposed by the administration of President George W. Bush immediately after taking office.[4] The bill, shepherded through the Senate by Senator Ted Kennedy, one of the bill’s sponsors, received overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress.[5] The House of Representatives passed the bill on May 23, 2001 (voting 384-45),[6] and United States Senate passed it on June 14, 2001 (voting 91-8). President Bush signed it into law on January 8, 2002.
NCLB is the latest federal legislation that enacts the theories of standards-based education reform, which is based on the belief that setting high standards and establishing measurable goals can improve individual outcomes in education. The Act requires states to develop assessments in basic skills to be given to all students in certain grades, if those states are to receive federal funding for schools. The Act does not assert a national achievement standard; standards are set by each individual state.
Since enactment, Congress increased federal funding of education, from $42.2 billion in 2001 to $54.4 billion in 2007. No Child Left Behind received a 40.4% increase from $17.4 billion in 2001 to $24.4 billion. The funding for reading quadrupled from $286 million in 2001 to $1.2 billion.
Favorable claims
Question book-new.svg
This section needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (March 2008)
Support for NCLB can be organized into the following categories:
Improved test scores
The Department of Education points to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results, released in July 2005, showing improved student achievement in reading and math:
* More progress was made by nine-year-olds in reading in the last five years than in the previous 28 years combined.
* America’s nine-year-olds posted the best scores in reading (since 1971) and math (since 1973) in the history of the report. America’s 13-year-olds earned the highest math scores the test ever recorded.
* Reading and math scores for black and Hispanic nine-year-olds reached an all-time high.
* Achievement gaps in reading and math between white and black nine-year-olds and between white and Hispanic nine-year-olds are at an all-time low.
* Forty-three states and the District of Columbia either improved academically or held steady in all categories (fourth- and eighth-grade reading and fourth- and eighth-grade math)..
Many argue that these statistics are misleading. They compare 2005 with 2000, when No Child Left Behind didn’t even take effect until 2003. They point out that the increase in scores between 2000 and 2003 was roughly the same as the increase between 2003 and 2005, which calls into question how any increase can be attributed to No Child Left Behind. They also argue that some of the subgroups are cherry-picked — that in other subgroups scores remained the same or actually fell.
Improvement over local standards
Many argue that local government had failed students, necessitating federal intervention to remedy issues like teachers teaching outside their areas of expertise, and complacency in the face of continually failing schools.[11] Some local governments, notably New York State, have voiced support for NCLB provisions, because local standards had failed to provide adequate oversight over special education, and that NCLB would allow longitudinal data to be more effectively used to monitor Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP).[12] States all over the United States have shown improvements in their progress as a result of NCLB. For example, Wisconsin ranks first of all fifty states, and the District of Columbia at ninety-eight percent of its schools, achieving the No Child Left Behind Standards.
Increased accountability
Supporters of NCLB claim the legislation encourages accountability in public schools, offers parents greater educational options for their children, and helps close the achievement gap between minority and white students.[14] NCLB aims to show achievement toward these goals through federally mandated standardized testing.
In addition to and in support of the above points, proponents claim that No Child Left Behind:
* Links State academic content standards with student outcomes.
* Measures student performance: a student’s progress in reading and math must be measured annually in grades 3 through 8 and at least once during high school via standardized tests.
* Provides information for parents by requiring states and school districts to give parents detailed report cards on schools and districts explaining the school’s AYP performance. Schools must also inform parents when their child is being taught by a teacher or para-professional who does not meet “highly qualified” requirements.
* Establishes the foundation for schools and school districts to significantly enhance parental involvement and improved administration through the use of the assessment data to drive decisions on instruction, curriculum and business practices.
Attention to minority populations
* Seeks to narrow class and racial gaps in school performance by creating common expectations for all.
* Requires schools and districts to focus their attention on the academic achievement of traditionally under-served groups of children, such as low-income students, students with disabilities, and students of “major racial and ethnic subgroups”.[15] Each state is responsible for defining major racial and ethnic subgroups itself.[15] Many previous state-created systems of accountability only measured average school performance, allowing schools to be highly rated even if they had large achievement gaps between affluent and disadvantaged students.
Quality of education
* Ideally, increases the quality of education by requiring schools to improve their performance
* Improves quality of instruction by requiring schools to implement “scientifically-based research” practices in the classroom, parent involvement programs, and professional development activities for those students that are not encouraged or expected to attend college.
* Supports early literacy through the Early Reading First initiative .
* Emphasizes reading, writing, mathematics and science achievement as “core academic subjects”.
School choice
* Gives options to students enrolled in schools failing to meet AYP. If a school fails to meet AYP targets two or more years running, the school must offer eligible children the chance to transfer to higher-performing local schools, receive free tutoring, or attend after-school programs.
* Gives school districts the opportunity to demonstrate proficiency, even for subgroups that do not meet State Minimum Achievement standards, through a process called “safe harbor,” a precursor to growth-based or value-added assessments.
Funding
As part of their support for NCLB, the administration and Congress backed massive increases in funding for elementary and secondary education funding. Title I funding to districts for disadvantaged children increased from $42.2 billion to $55.7 billion from 2001, the fiscal year before the law’s passage, to fiscal year 2004.[16] A new $1 billion Reading First program was created, distributing funds to local schools to improve the teaching of reading, and over $100 million for its companion, Early Reading First.[17] Numerous other formula programs received large increases as well. This was consistent with the administration’s position of funding formula programs, which distribute money to local schools for their use, and grant programs, where particular schools or groups apply directly to the federal government for funding. In total, federal funding for education increased 59.8% from 2000 to 2003.
Funding for school technology used in classrooms as part of NCLB, is administered by the Enhancing Education Through Technology Program (EETT). Funding sources are used for equipment, professional development and training for educators, and updated research. EETT allocates funds by formula to states. The states in turn reallocate 50% of the funds to local districts by Title I formula and 50% competitively. While districts must reserve a minimum of 25% of all EETT funds for professional development, recent studies indicate that most EETT recipients use far more than 25% of their EETT funds to train teachers to use technology and integrate it into their curricula. In fact, EETT recipients committed more than $159 million in EETT funds towards professional development during the 2004-05 school year alone. Moreover, even though EETT recipients are afforded broad discretion in their use of EETT funds, surveys show that they target EETT dollars towards improving student achievement in reading and math, engaging in data driven decision making, and launching online assessment programs.
In addition, the provisions of NCLB permitted increased flexibility for state and local agencies in the use of federal education money.
The NCLB increases were companions to another massive increase in federal education funding at that time. The Bush administration and congress passed very large increases in funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) at the same time as the NCLB increases. IDEA Part B, a state formula-funding program that distributes money to local districts for the education of students with disabilities, was increased from $6.3 billion in 2001 to $10.1 billion in 2004.[21] Because a district’s and state’s performance on NCLB measures depended on improved performance by students with disabilities, particularly students with learning disabilities, this 60 percent increase in funding was also an important part of the overall approach to NCLB implementation.
Public perception of public education
* Addresses widespread perceptions that public education results fall short of expectations.
Criticisms
The desirability of NCLB’s measures are hotly debated. It is very difficult to assess the effectiveness of the act per se, because it applied to all states making it difficult to infer what would have happened without the act. However, analyses of the state accountability systems that were in place before NCLB indicate that accountability for outcomes led to faster growth in achievement for the states that introduced such systems.[22] The direct analysis of state test scores before and after enactment of NCLB also supports its positive impact.[23] A primary criticism asserts that NCLB could reduce effective instruction and student learning because it may cause states to lower achievement goals and motivate teachers to “teach to the test.” A primary supportive claim asserts that systematic testing provides data that shed light on which schools are not teaching basic skills effectively, so that interventions can be made to improve outcomes for all students while reducing the achievement gap for disadvantaged and disabled students.
Critiques of NCLB can be organized into the following categories:
“Gaming” the system
The system of incentives and penalties sets up a strong motivation for schools, districts, and states to manipulate test results. For example, schools have been shown to employ “creative reclassification” of drop-outs (to reduce unfavorable statistics).
Critics argue that these and other strategies create an inflated perception of NCLB’s successes, particularly in states with high minority populations.
The incentives for an improvement also may cause states to lower their official standards. Because each state can produce its own standardized tests, a state can make its statewide tests easier to increase scores.[27] Missouri, for example, improved testing scores but openly admitted that they lowered the standards.[28] A 2007 study by the U.S. Dept. of Education indicates that the observed differences in states’ reported scores is largely due to differences in the stringency of their standards.
Problems with standardized tests
Critics have argued that the focus on standardized testing (all students in a state take the same test under the same conditions) as the means of assessment encourages teachers to teach a narrow subset of skills that will increase test performance rather than focus on deeper understanding that can readily be transferred to similar problems.[30] For example, if the teacher knows that all of the questions on a math test are simple addition equations (e.g., 2+3=5), then the teacher might not invest any class time on the practical applications of addition (e.g., story problems) so that there will be more time for the material which is assessed on the test. This is colloquially referred to as “teaching to the test.”
Moreover, many teachers who practice “teaching to the test” actually misinterpret the educational outcomes the tests are designed to measure. On two state tests (New York State and Michigan) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) almost two-thirds of eighth graders missed math word problems that required an application of the Pythagorean theorem to calculate the distance between two points.[31] Wiggins and McTighe blamed the low success rate on teachers who correctly anticipated the content of the tests, but incorrectly assumed each test would present rote knowledge/skill items rather than well-constructed, higher-order items.
The practice of giving all students the same test, under the same conditions, has been accused of inherent cultural bias because different cultures may value different skills. It also may conflict with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which states that schools must accommodate disabled students.[32] For example, it is normally acceptable for visually impaired students to be read test material aloud. However, on a NCLB-mandated test, a group of blind students had their scores invalidated (reported as zeros) because the testing protocol did not specifically allow for test readers to speak.
The practice of determining educational quality by testing students has been called into question.
Incentives against low-performing students
Because the law’s response if the school fails to make adequate progress is not only to provide additional help for students, but also to impose punitive measures on the school, the incentives are to set expectations lower rather than higher.
Incentives against gifted, talented, and high-performing students
Some local schools are only funding instruction for core subjects or for remedial special education. NCLB puts pressure on schools to guarantee that nearly all students will meet the minimum skill levels (set by each state) in reading, writing, and arithmetic, but requires nothing beyond these minimums. Programs that are not essential to achieving the mandated minimum skills are neglected or canceled by those districts. In particular, NCLB does not require any programs for gifted, talented, and other high-performing students.While federal law is silent on the requirement for funding gifted programs, the practice can violate the mandates of several states (such as Arizona, California, Virginia, and Pennsylvania) to identify gifted students and provide them with an appropriate education, including grade advancement.
State refusal to produce non-English assessments
All students who are learning English have an automatic three-year window to take assessments in their native language, after which they must normally demonstrate proficiency on an English-language assessment. However, the local education authority may grant an exception to any individual English learner for another two years’ testing in his or her native language on a case-by-case basis.
In practice, however, only 10 states choose to test any English language learners in their native language (almost entirely Spanish speakers). The vast majority of English language learners are given English language assessments.
Many schools test or assess students with limited English proficiency even when the students are exempt from NCLB-mandated reporting, because the tests may provide useful information to the teacher and school. In certain schools with large immigrant populations, this exemption comprises a majority of young students.
Narrow curriculum
NCLB’s focus on math and English language skills (and eventually science) may elevate scores on two fundamental skills while students lose the benefits of a broad education.
Surveys of public school principals indicate that since the implementation of NCLB, 71% believe instructional time has increased for reading, writing, and math (subjects tested under the law), and decreased for the arts, elementary social studies, and foreign languages.
In some places, the implementation of NCLB during a time of budget restraints has been blamed for the elimination of classes and activities which are outside of NCLB’s focus area. “It hurts me to give up art, but it hurts me even more to have kids who can’t read,” said school Principal Kathy Deck in Indianapolis, Indiana.These restraints may have affected humanities and social studies curricula as well. Common Core, a group that encourages a broad inclusive curriculum, recently found that many American high school students lack basic knowledge in history, civics, and literature. The group blamed NCLB for not including these topics in its focus.
Narrow definition of research
Some school districts and researchers object to the limitation created by the “scientifically based research standard.” Research based on case studies, ethnographies, clinical interviews, discourse analysis, grounded theory, action research, teaching experiments, design research and other forms of qualitative research are generally excluded from this category. Furthermore, the inability to employ random assignment for important educational predictors such as race and socio-economic status may exclude a large amount of quasi-experimental work that could contribute to educational knowledge.
Limitations on local control
Some conservative or libertarian critics have argued that NCLB sets a new standard for federalizing education and setting a precedent for further erosion of state and local control. Libertarians and some conservatives further argue that the federal government has no constitutional authority in education, which is why participation in NCLB is technically optional: States need not comply with NCLB, as long as they are willing to forgo the federal funding that comes with it. The states that choose not to receive funding will have their taxes used in another state instead.
Facilitates military recruitment
NCLB (In section 9528) requires public secondary schools to provide military recruiters the same access to facilities as a school provides to higher education institution recruiters. Schools are also required to provide contact information for every student to the military if requested. If the school refuses to provide the information, that school can lose all of its federal funding until it provides such information. [47] Students or parents can opt out of having their information shared, and educational institutions receiving funding under the act are required to inform parents that they have this option.[48][49] Currently, many school districts have a generic opt out form which, if filled out and turned in, withholds students’ information from college and job recruiters as well as the military. Section 9528 of the NCLB also states that military recruiters are permitted to speak to students as well as take them to various military functions, provide transportation to/from a recruiting office and to the school of the student and from school to the registered home address of the student as long as the student is of the age of 17 and the student provides consent.
Variability in student potential and 100% compliance
The Act is promoted as requiring 100% of students (including disadvantaged and special education students) within a school to reach the same state standards in reading and mathematics by 2014. Critics charge that a 100% goal is unattainable. Critics of the NCLB requirement for “one high, challenging standard” claim that some students are simply unable to perform at the level for their age, no matter how good the teacher is.[50] While statewide standards reduce the educational inequality between privileged and underprivileged districts in a state, they still impose a “one size fits all” standard on individual students. Particularly in states with high standards, schools can be punished for not being able to dramatically raise the achievement of students that have below-average capabilities, such as students with mental retardation.
In fact, the “all” in NCLB means only 95% of students, because states must report the assessment scores of 95% of students when calculating Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) scores.[51] Students who have an Individual Education Plan (IEP) and who are assessed must receive the accommodations specified in the IEP during assessment; if these accommodations do not change the nature of the assessment, then these students’ scores are counted the same as any other student’s score. Common acceptable changes include extended test time, testing in a quieter room, translation of math problems into the student’s native language, or allowing a student to type answers instead of writing them by hand.
Simply being classified as having special education needs does not automatically exempt students from assessment. Most students with mild disabilities or physical disabilities take the same test as non-disabled students.
In addition to not requiring 5% of students to be assessed at all, regulations allow schools to use alternate assessments to declare up to 1% of all students proficient for the purposes of the Act.States are given broad discretion in selecting alternate assessments. For example, a school may accept an Advanced Placement test for English in lieu of the English test written by the state, and simplified tests for students with significant cognitive disabilities. The Virginia Alternate Assessment Program (VAAP) and Virginia Grade Level Alternative (VGLA) options, for example, are portfolio assessments.
Organizations that support NCLB assessment of disabled or LEP students say that inclusion ensures that deficiencies in the education of these disadvantaged students are identified and addressed. Opponents say that testing students with disabilities violates the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) by making students with disabilities learn the same material as non-disabled students .
Funding
Several provisions of NCLB, such as a push for quality teachers and more professional development, place additional demands on local districts and state education agencies. Some critics claim that extra expenses are not fully reimbursed by increased levels of federal NCLB funding. Others note that funding for the law increased massively following passage[55] and that billions in funds previously allocated to particular uses could be reallocated to new uses. Even before the law’s passage, Secretary of Education Rod Paige noted ensuring that children are educated remained a state responsibility regardless of federal support:
Washington is willing to help [with the additional costs of federal requirements], as we’ve helped before, even before we [proposed NCLB]. But this is a part of the teaching responsibility that each state has. … Washington has offered some assistance now. In the legislation, we have … some support to pay for the development of tests. But even if that should be looked at as a gift, it is the state responsibility to do this.
Various early Democratic supporters of NCLB criticize its implementation, claiming it is not adequately funded by either the federal government or the states. Ted Kennedy, the legislation’s initial sponsor, has stated: “The tragedy is that these long overdue reforms are finally in place, but the funds are not.”[57] Susan B. Neuman, U.S. Department of Education’s former Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education, commented about her worries of NCLB in a meeting of the International Reading Association
In [the most disadvantaged schools] in America, even the most earnest teacher has often given up because they lack every available resource that could possibly make a difference. . . . When we say all children can achieve and then not give them the additional resources … we are creating a fantasy.
Organizations have particularly criticized the unwillingness of the federal government to “fully fund” the act. Noting that appropriations bills always originate in the House of Representatives, it is true that during the Bush Administration, neither the Senate nor the White House has even requested federal funding up to the authorized levels for several of the act’s main provisions. For example, President Bush requested only $13.3 of a possible $22.75 billion in 2006.Advocacy groups note that President Bush’s 2008 budget proposal allotted $61 billion for the Education Department, cutting funding by $1.3 billion from the year before. 44 out of 50 states would receive reductions in federal funding if the budget passes as is.Specifically, funding for the Enhancing Education Through Technology Program (EETT) has continued to drop while the demand for technology in schools has increased (Technology and Learning, 2006). However, these claims focused on reallocated funds, as each of President Bush’s proposed budgets increased funding for major NCLB formula programs such as Title I, including his final 2009 budget proposal.
Members of Congress have viewed these authorized levels as spending caps, not spending promises. Some opponents argue that these funding shortfalls mean that schools faced with the system of escalating penalties for failing to meet testing targets are denied the resources necessary to remedy problems detected by testing. However, federal NCLB formula funding increased by billions during this period[62] and state and local funding increased by over $100 billion from school year 2001-02 through 2006-07.
State education budgets
According to the book, NCLB Meets School Realities, the act was put into action during a time of fiscal crisis for most states.[64] While states were being forced to make budget cuts, including in the area of education, they had to incur additional expenses to comply with the requirements of the NCLB Act. The funding they received from the federal government in support of NCLB was not enough to cover the added expense necessary to adhere to the new law.
Proposals for reform
The Joint Organizational Statement on No Child Left Behind is a proposal by more than 135 national civil rights, education, disability advocacy, civic, labor and religious groups that have signed on to a statement calling for major changes to the federal education law. The National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) initiated and chaired the meetings that produced the statement, originally released in October 2004. The statement’s central message is that “the law’s emphasis needs to shift from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to holding states and localities accountable for making the systemic changes that improve student achievement.” The number of organizations signing the statement has nearly quadrupled since it was launched in late 2004 and continues to grow. The goal is to influence Congress, and the broader public, as the law’s scheduled reauthorization approaches.
Education critic Alfie Kohn argues that the NCLB law is “unredeemable” and should be scrapped. He is quoted saying “[I]ts main effect has been to sentence poor children to an endless regimen of test-preparation drills”.
In February 2007, former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson and former Georgia Governor Roy Barnes, Co-Chairs of the Aspen Commission on No Child Left Behind, announced the release of the Commission’s final recommendations for the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.The Commission is an independent, bipartisan effort to improve NCLB and ensure it is a more useful force in closing the achievement gap that separates disadvantaged children and their peers. After a year of hearings, analysis and research, the Commission uncovered the successes of NCLB, as well as provisions which need to be changed or significantly modified.
The Commission’s goals are summarized as follows:
* Effective Teachers for All Students, Effective Principals for All Communities
* Accelerating Progress and Closing Achievement Gaps Through Improved Accountability
* Moving Beyond the Status Quo to Effective School Improvement and Student Options
* Fair and Accurate Assessments of Student Progress
* High Standards for Every Student in Every State
* Ensuring High Schools Prepare Students for College and the Workplace
* Driving Progress Through Reliable, Accurate Data
* Parental involvement and empowerment
The Forum on Educational Accountability (FEA), a working group of signers of the Joint Organizational Statement on NCLB has offered an alternative proposal. It proposes to shift NCLB from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to supporting state and communities and holding them accountable as they make systemic changes that improve student learning.
A tax holiday is a temporary reduction or elimination of a tax. Governments usually create tax holidays as incentives for business investment. The taxes that are most commonly reduced by national and local governments are sales taxes. In developing countries, governments sometimes reduce or eliminate corporate taxes for the purpose of attracting Foreign Direct Investment or stimulating growth in selected industries.
Tax holiday is given in respect of particular activities, and sometimes also only in particular areas with a view to develop that area of business.
- 1 Sales tax holidays in the United States
- 2 See also
- 3 References
- 4 External links
|
[edit] Sales tax holidays in the United States
A statewide sales tax holiday was first enacted by the New York Legislature in 1996 and enabled the first tax-free week in January of 1997. Local governments in New York were given the option of whether or not to participate. [1] Since then, the initiative has been adopted by thirteen states. It commonly takes place as a form of tax-free weekend lasting Friday through Sunday, usually during a major shopping period for necessities, such as just before school starts. During that period, sales tax is not collected on selected items, such as clothing and school supplies. The items subject to the sales tax exemption may also be restricted by price (for example, clothing up to $100), but consumers are free to buy unlimited quantity of items.
As with other sales taxes, visiting residents of non-participating states who purchase tax-free goods (holiday or not) may still have to pay “use tax” on their goods that they take home.
| State (Or Capital) |
Items Included |
Period |
Days |
| Alabama |
clothing, computers, school supplies, books |
1st weekend in August |
3 |
| Connecticut |
clothing |
3rd week in August |
7 |
| District of Columbia |
clothing, school supplies |
August and November |
9 |
| Georgia |
clothing, school supplies, computers |
1st weekend of August |
4 |
| Iowa |
clothing |
1st weekend of August |
2 |
| Massachusetts[2] |
school supplies, computers, sports equipment, health & beauty aid |
2nd weekend of August |
2 |
| Missouri |
clothing, school supplies, computers |
1st weekend in August |
- |
| New Mexico |
clothing, school supplies, computers |
1st weekend of August |
3 |
| North Carolina |
clothing, school supplies, computers, sport equipment |
1st weekend of August |
3 |
| Oklahoma |
clothing |
1st weekend of August |
3 |
| South Carolina |
clothing, school supplies, computers |
1st weekend of August |
3 |
| Tennessee |
clothing, school supplies, computers |
1st weekend of August |
3 |
| Texas[3] |
Cd’s, DVD Movies,cigarettes, cigars, tobacco, clothing, diapers, backpacks , school supplies |
3rd weekend of August |
3 |
| Virginia |
clothing, school supplies |
1st weekend of August |
3 |
Seven states in the U.S. (Alaska, Hawaii, Delaware, Texas, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon) do not impose general sales taxes at all (but may still tax gas, cigarettes, alcohol, meals, etc). See Sales taxes in the United States for details.
Crop circles are patterns created by the flattening of crops such as wheat, barley, rapeseed (also called “canola”), rye, corn, linseed and soy.
The term was first used by paranormal researcher Colin Andrews to describe simple circles he was researching. While patterns involving complex geometries have been observed, the term circle has stuck as a generic term crop patterns.
Many circles are known to be man-made, such as those created by Doug Bower, Dave Chorley, and John Lundberg. [6][9] Bower and Chorley were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in 1992 for their crop circle hoaxing.
Various hypotheses have been offered to explain the formation of crop circles of unknown origin, ranging from the naturalistic to the paranormal. The main naturalistic explanation is that all crop circles are man-made, primarily as a hoax. Another naturalistic explanation is that they are caused by ball lightning. Paranormal explanations suggest that, while some crop circles are man-made, others are the product of alien spacecraft or supernatural processes such as communication from Gaia or from extraterrestials in a Galactic Federation.
History
The earliest recorded image resembling a crop circle is depicted in a 17th-century English woodcut called the “Mowing-Devil”. The image depicts the devil with a scythe mowing (cutting) a circular design in a field of oats. The pamphlet containing the image states that the farmer, disgusted at the wage his mower was demanding for his work, insisted that he would rather have “the devil himself” perform the task. That night, the crop appeared as if it were on fire, then in the morning a circular pattern had mysteriously appeared.
1678 pamphlet on the “Mowing-Devil”
A more recent historical report of crop circles was republished (from Nature, volume 22, pp. 290-291, 29 July 1880) in the January 2000 issue of the Journal of Meteorology.It describes the 1880 investigations by amateur scientist John Rand Capron:
“The storms about this part of Western Surrey have been lately local and violent, and the effects produced in some instances curious. Visiting a neighbour’s farm on Wednesday evening (21st), we found a field of standing wheat considerably knocked about, not as an entirety, but in patches forming, as viewed from a distance, circular spots….I could not trace locally any circumstances accounting for the peculiar forms of the patches in the field, nor indicating whether it was wind or rain, or both combined, which had caused them, beyond the general evidence everywhere of heavy rainfall. They were suggestive to me of some cyclonic wind action,…”
In 1966, one of the most famous accounts of UFO traces happened in the small town of Tully, Queensland, Australia. A sugarcane farmer said he witnessed a saucer-shaped craft rise 30 or 40 feet (12 m) up from a swamp and then fly away, and when he went to investigate the location where he thought the saucer had landed, he found the reeds intricately weaved in a clockwise fashion on top of the water.The woven reeds could hold the weight of 10 men.
There are also many other anecdotal accounts of crop circles in Ufology literature that predate the modern crop circle phenomena, though some cases involve crops which were cut or burnt, rather than flattened.
Crop circles rose in prominence in 1975 as circles began appearing throughout the English countryside. The phenomenon of crop circles became widely known in the late 1980s, after the media started to report crop circles in Hampshire and Wiltshire and corresponding phenomena were reported from locations as diverse as Penrith in Australia and Minnesota in the United States. To date, approximately 12,000 crop circles have been discovered in sites across the world, from locations such as the former Soviet Union, the UK and Japan, as well as the U.S. and Canada. Skeptics note a correlation between crop circles, recent media coverage, and the absence of fencing and/or anti-trespassing legislation.However, proponents point to the simple profusion of these events prior to and continuing after the decline in media coverage as rendering the amateur crank phenomenon unlikely.
Although farmers have expressed concern at the damage caused to their crops, local response to the appearance of crop circles can often be enthusiastic, with locals taking advantage of the tourist potential of circles. Past responses have included bus or helicopter tours of circle sites, walking tours, t-shirts and book sales. Potential markets include curious tourists, scientists, crop circle researchers, and individuals seeking a spiritual experience by praying to and communing with spirits.Notably also, the crop generally continues to ripen in a ‘genuine’ circle, being laid flat rather than broken. Some researchers have found that the corn appears to have bent at the nodes of the stalks, showing that can only be replicated in the lab using a microwave oven. In rarer cases, this has occurred near the top of the stems, not the bottom, all but ruling out human involvement .
In 1996, a circle appeared near Stonehenge, and the farmer set up a booth and charged a fee. He collected £30,000 in four weeks. The value of the crop had it been harvested was probably about £150.
Crop circle designs
Wheat pattern about 150 feet (46 m) in diameter with crop laid down in counterclockwise circles discovered on May 14, 2007, by Monroe County, Tennessee, Sheriff’s Department Patrol Captain Bryan Graves while flying. First aerial photographs on Tuesday, May 22, 2007.
Early examples of crop circles were usually simple circular patterns of various sizes. After some years, more complex geometric patterns emerged. In addition to circle designs based on sacred geometry, some of the later formations, those occurring after 2000, are based on other principles, including fractals. Many crop circles now have fine intricate detail, regular symmetry and careful composition, and elements of three-dimensionality have been introduced.
Crop circle maker John Lundberg, in an interview with Mark Pilkington, spoke about this change in crop circle designs: “I am rather envious of circlemakers in other countries. Expectations about the size and complexity of formations that appear in the UK are now very high, whereas the rather shabby looking Russian formation made the national news. Even Vasily Belchenko, deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council, was on site gushing about its origin: ‘There is no doubt that it was not man made… an unknown object definitely landed there.’ If the same formation appeared in the UK it would undoubtedly be virtually ignored by researchers and the media alike.”
2009 season
Often crop circle seasons begin with a few simple patterns. The 2009 season began with complex and numerous formations.[20] The 2009 season also unusually began with six large formations in rapeseed. “The crop is tougher and more brittle than corn or barley.”During May, June and July crop circles in the UK have pointed to the date July 7th 2009 hinting at solar activity.
Creators of crop circles
A 780 ft. crop circle in the form of a double (six-sided) triskelion composed of 409 circles. Location: Milk Hill, 2001.
In 1991, two men from Southampton, England, announced that they had conceived the idea as a prank at a pub near Winchester, Hampshire, during an evening in 1976. Inspired by the 1966 Tully Saucer Nests, Doug Bower and Dave Chorley made their crop circles using planks, rope, hats and wire as their only tools: using a four-foot-long plank attached to a rope, they easily created circles eight feet in diameter. The two men were able to make a 40-foot (12 m) circle in 15 minutes.
The pair became frustrated when their work did not receive significant publicity, so in 1981, they created a circle in Matterley Bowl, a natural amphitheatre just outside Winchester, Hampshire-an area surrounded by roads from which a clear view of the field is available to drivers passing by. Their designs were at first simple circles. When newspapers claimed that the circles could easily be explained by natural phenomena, Bower and Chorley made more complex patterns. A simple wire with a loop, hanging down from a cap-the loop positioned over one eye-could be used to focus on a landmark to aid in the creation of straight lines. Later designs of crop circles became increasingly complicated.
Bower’s wife had become suspicious of him, noticing high levels of mileage in their car. Eventually, fearing that his wife suspected him of adultery, Bower confessed to her, and subsequently, he and Chorley informed a British national newspaper. Chorley died in 1996, and Doug Bower has made crop circles as recently as 2004. Bower has said that, had it not been for his wife’s suspicions, he would have taken the secret to his deathbed, never revealing that it was a hoax.
Circlemakers.org, a group of crop circle makers founded by John Lundberg, have demonstrated that making what self-appointed cereologist experts state are “unfakeable” crop circles is possible. On more than one occasion, such cereologists have claimed that a crop circle was “genuine” when in fact the people making the circle had previously been filmed making the circle.
A crop circle in Switzerland
Scientific American published an article by Matt Ridley,who started making crop circles in northern England in 1991. He wrote about how easy it is to develop techniques using simple tools that can easily fool later observers. He reported on “expert” sources such as the Wall Street Journal who had been easily fooled and mused about why people want to believe supernatural explanations for phenomena that are not yet explained. Methods to create a crop circle are now well documented on the Internet.
On the night of July 11-12, 1992, a crop-circle making competition, for a prize of several thousand UK pounds (partly funded by the Arthur Koestler Foundation), was held in Berkshire. The winning entry was produced by three helicopter engineers, using rope, PVC pipe, a trestle and a ladder. Another competitor used a small garden roller, a plank and some rope.
Gábor Takács and Róbert Dallos, both then 17, were the first people to be legally charged with creating a crop circle. Takács and Dallos, of the St. Stephen Agricultural Technicum, a high school in Hungary specializing in agriculture, created a 36-meter diameter crop circle in a wheat field near Székesfehérvár, 43 miles (69 km) southwest of Budapest, on June 8, 1992. On September 3, they appeared on a Hungarian TV show and exposed the circle as a hoax, showing photos of the field before and after the circle was made. As a result, Aranykalász Co., the owners of the land, sued the youngsters for 630,000 HUF (approximately $3000 USD) in damages. The presiding judge ruled that the students were only responsible for the damage caused in the 36-meter diameter circle, amounting to about 6,000 HUF (approximately $30 USD), and that 99% of the damage to the crops was caused by the thousands of visitors that flocked to Székesfehérvár following the media’s promotion of the circle. The fine was eventually paid by the TV show, as were the students’ legal fees.
Not everybody accepts that circles are man-made, believing instead that many designs are too perfect and that they lack signs of human interaction. They also point out that it is highly unlikely that an international wave of highly covert amateur pranksters could have developed prior to the 1991 publicity gained by Bower and Chorley, and that this is far more likely to be a ‘reverse prank’, where credit is taken for an existing phenomenon and an explanation offered in order to garner media attention. The fact that crop circles were widely attested internationally by the late 1980s is thought to have caused the British men to devise a stunt. Among these critics was British-born astronomer Gerald Hawkins, who, prior to his death, argued that some circles displayed a level of complexity and accuracy that would be difficult to recreate on paper, let alone in a field after dark.[19] In response, circle-creating groups and proponents of the man-made hypothesis state that it is possible to create a complex design by marking radii and angles with rope, and to enter and to move about a field using landscape features and tractor trails in order to avoid leaving other marks.
Scientific analysis
In 2002, Discovery Channel commissioned five aeronautics and astronautics students from MIT to create crop circles of their own. Discovery’s production team consulted with crop-circle researcher Nancy Talbott, who provided them with three attributes that she believed set “real” crop circles apart from known man-made circles, such as those created by Doug Bower and Dave Chorley.These criteria were:
1. Elongated apical plant stem nodes
2. Expulsion cavities in the plant stems
3. The presence of 10-50 micrometre diameter magnetized iron spheres in the soils, distributed linearly
Over the course of a single night, the team was able to create a stereotypical “man-made” circle that they then attempted to enhance using the three criteria. The team used lengths of rope to plot their design and trampled the wheat down in a spiral pattern using lengths of wooden board attached to loops of rope. To meet criterion 2, they constructed a portable microwave emitter, using it to superheat the moisture inside the corn stalks until it burst out as steam. To meet criterion 3, they built a device-dubbed the Flammenwerfer (”flamethrower”)-that sprayed iron particles through a heated ring. However, the device proved to be too time-consuming to use, and they were forced to finish the task by using a pyrotechnic charge to distribute the iron around the circle. The circle was later analyzed by graduate students from MIT, who declared it to be “on a par with any of the documented cases”. Their conclusion was later questioned by Talbott, who noted that the team had only been able to recreate two of the three criteria. Talbott also expressed concerns that the iron particles were not distributed laterally. Furthermore, she felt that the team’s use of night-vision headsets and other technologically advanced items would be out of reach for the average hoaxer.[28] This would have been even more so in the ’70s and ’80s when night-vision equipment was rare outside official use.
The creation of the circle was recorded and used in the Discovery Channel documentary Crop Circles: Mysteries in the Fields.
Paranormal and alternative explanations
Since appearing in the media in the 1970s, crop circles have become the subject of various paranormal and fringe beliefs, ranging from the hypothesis that they are created by freak meteorological phenomena to the belief that they represent messages from extraterrestrials.
According to material published by the BLT institute, anomalies found at some circle sites in England and the US are consistent with them having been created when localized columns of ionized air (dubbed plasma vortices/vortexes) form over standing crops.[32] Minuscule spheres of magnetic iron have also been found, distributed either around the perimeter of the circle or linearly, which suggests a very complex delivery system.Bent or extended nodes in the stems of cereal grasses have also been found, suggesting that the crop has been subjected to a very rapid electromagnetic burst, causing the moisture inside the stems to expand, stretching or bending the nodes to almost three times their length. Holes have been found in the nodes, suggesting a rapid microwave burst, causing the moisture to turn into steam, which then forces its way out, leaving expulsion cavities.
Other hypotheses attribute them to atmospheric phenomena, such as freak tornadoes or ball lightning.
The location of many crop circles near ancient sites such as Stonehenge, barrows, and chalk horses has led to many New Age belief systems incorporating crop circles, including the beliefs that they are formed in relation to ley lines and that they give off energy that can be detected through dowsing. New Age followers sometimes gather at crop-circle sites in order to meditate, or because they believe that they can use the circle in order to contact spirits.
UFOs and other lights in the sky have been reported in connection with many crop-circle sites, leading to their becoming associated with UFOs and aliens. Some people claim to have seen images of UFOs forming crop circles or overflying them, though photographs have been dismissed by experts as being indistinct or clear hoaxes.
Analysis
The main criticism of non-human creation of crop circles is that evidence of these origins, besides eyewitness testimonies, is scant. Crop circles are sometimes explicable as the result of human pranksters. There have also been cases in which researchers declared crop circles to be “the real thing”, only to be confronted soon after with the people who created the circle and documented the fraud (see above). Many others have demonstrated how complex crop circles are created.
The main criticism of human creation of crop circles is that Bower and Chorley could not have covertly travelled internationally and executed all if indeed any known circles prior to their claims in 1991, and that still-secret cells of hoaxers are very unlikely to have spontaneously and successfully joined the game. It is more likely that their “hoax” consisted merely of claiming to have begun the practice years earlier. All subsequent human circle creators derive from the 1991 publicity, and devote their efforts to maintaining the hoax, i.e. to proving the implausible proposition that Bower and Chorley created a world-wide plethora of crop circles in total secrecy. In hoaxer terms, this represents a classic success, an “I’m Brian” scenario.
In his 1997 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Carl Sagan discussed alien-based theories of crop circle formation. Sagan concluded that no empirical evidence existed to link UFOs with crop circles. Specifically, that there were no credible cases of UFOs being observed creating a circle, yet there were many cases when it was known that human agents, such as Doug Bower and Dave Chorley, were responsible.Circle creators Doug Bower and Dave Chorley concur.
In 1999, researcher Colin Andrews received funding from Laurence Rockefeller to conduct a two- year investigation into crop-circle hoaxing. Andrews put together a team that studied crop circles that had been commissioned by various media outlets and infiltrated several groups known to be creating man-made circles. Using these man-made circles as a base, Andrews went on to study data from circles found in England in 1999 and 2000. Andrews concluded that 80% of all circles studied showed “unassailable” signs of having been man-made, including post holes used to demarcate circle layouts or evidence of human tracks underlying the circle sites, but could not account for the remaining 20%, for which he was unable to find signs of human interaction.Andrews’s figures have been disputed by CSICOP, who argue that Andrews’s criteria for distinguishing between man-made circles and non-man-made circles were insufficient, as no official standard exists for determining the nature of a crop circle.Furthermore, these circles were in England, where the hoax is most operative.
In 2002, Freddy Silva published Secrets in the Fields (2002).He paraphrases Gerald Hawkins’ summary: “If crop circles are made by hoaxers, then they should stop doing it, because they are breaking the law and damaging the food supply. If they are made by UFO aliens, they shouldn’t give us back the dates of our trips to Mars and the names of the men from the Titanic era – famous, clever, but now forgotten. If some are transcendental, the power behind it should realize that our culture is not now willing to accept transcendental happenings. But if they are indeed transcendental, then society will have to make a big adjustment in the years ahead.” (p. 299)
Critics have cited what they refer to as the “shyness factor”. This alludes to the fact that no crop-circle makers have been caught in the act. This assertion is not true however, and there are cases of circle makers being apprehended, including one high-profile case in 1998 when a circle was made for the media and the makers interrupted when seen in the act. In most cases, it appears that the creation of crop circles is a nocturnal activity. Usually nothing is reported, and during one attempt to observe the creation of a crop circle, numerous individuals witnessed nothing out of the ordinary, yet were astounded to see a crop circle in the field only a short distance away from the one they had been watching the next morning.Crop circles known to have formed during daylight have not revealed the presence of hoaxers.[citation needed]
Similar phenomena
* Lawn Cross of Eisenberg an der Raab
* Unusual ground markings
* Nazca lines
* Fairy rings: An unrelated phenomenon where fungal circles are formed by a spreading mycelium. Older, larger fungal circles are not recognized when they have broken into arcs or patches. In Scandinavia and in Britain, the phenomenon of mushrooms or puffballs forming circles in a patch of meadow or pasture was referred to in folklore as “älvringar”, “heksering”, “pixie circles” or “elf circles” and was attributed by countryfolk to mystical forces. This phenomenon is commonplace and is recognized[41] as the natural growth of fungus colonies.
* Crop marks: Variances in subsoil conditions can cause differences in the growth pattern of a crop that can appear from an aerial survey to be similar to crop circles. In 2009, investigation of such crop marks near Stonehenge led to the discovery of 6,000 year old tombs and other prehistoric subterranean structures.
The UK-based artists Circlemakers.org have been asked to create numerous crop circles since the mid 1990s for movies, TV shows, music videos, adverts and PR stunts.[citation needed] Clients to date have included Royal Bank of Scotland, Scope, Xbox, Disney, NBC, UKTV, Red Bull, Greenpeace, Microsoft, Nike, Shredded Wheat, AMD, Hello Kitty, Pepsi, Weetabix, BBC, The Sun, Mitsubishi, O2, Big Brother, National Geographic, NBC-TV, Orange Mobile, History Channel and the Discovery Channel.
New Age author Dan Joy in 1991 humorously suggested that crop circles are an advertising campaign displaying the logos of galaxy-wide corporations, preparing Earth for its forthcoming admission to the Galactic Federation of Planets
Looks at the risk factors in male suicide and what each of us can do to help.
Suicide is a major cause of preventable death. The number of men ending their own lives has fallen, but too many men still commit suicide.
Who’s at risk?
People who already have a mental health issues are at a greater risk, along with those experiencing depression.
The teenage years can be difficult at the best of times. Emotional and physical development brings the turmoil associated with body changes and a desire for independence.
Problems with alcohol and drugs, the law and school are common at this point in life and are associated with a higher risk.
At the other end of the spectrum, getting older brings bereavement for many people. Loved ones and friends pass on, ill health and loss of independence are more common.
Tragically, in the UK, this usually culminates in social isolation as older people are forgotten about and ignored.
Risk factors
We all feel down from time to time, but most of us don’t think things are so bad life isn’t worth continuing. However, some things do put a person at greater risk of suicide.
Having tried once, someone is far more likely to try again – and to be successful. One in ten teenagers who takes an overdose will kill themselves within a few years.
Living alone and feeling isolated, whether because of divorce, unemployment or bereavement, often makes people question if life is worth living.
A painful chronic illness that prevents someone getting on with their life, or mental health issues such as severe depression, alcoholism or drug misuse, for example, should flag up the possibility that a person is more likely to consider suicide as a solution to their problems.
Being able to tick one or more of these risk factors doesn’t mean, however, that someone is definitely going to kill him or herself. Likewise, crossing them out doesn’t mean everything’s all right. It’s important to be aware, and be prepared.
Offering support
There are people who would argue that if somebody is intent on killing themselves then there’s little any of us can do to prevent it. To a degree this may be true, but it doesn’t mean we should sit back and let them get on with it.
Get the person to talk about the way they’re feeling, why they want to die, and just listen to them. There’s no need to dive in with miraculous solutions to their problems. A person considering suicide needs support, understanding and to know there’s professional help available for them.
It’s important that the person offering support knows they’re not alone in this, too. It can be a frightening and stressful experience to go through.
“NO one knows what we look like,” said Biz Stone, a 35-year-old college dropout who’s dressed like a high-school student, in a shapeless black T-shirt, jeans and high tops, and is one of the three co-founders of Twitter. “So no one treats us like celebrities.”
Evan Williams, 37, also a Twitter founder, seemed astounded by the venture’s success. Referring to his sister, who works as a waitress, he said: “A customer asked, ‘Can you explain this Twitter thing?’ If she said, ‘My brother is the C.E.O.,’ no one would believe her.”
Mr. Stone weighed in. “They’d say, ‘Why do they need a C.E.O. at Twitter? To tell people, Oops, your tweet went over 140 characters?’ “
Twitter is the public’s latest fascination. Mr. Stone and Mr. Williams made Time magazine’s new list of the 100 most influential people in the world.
But Twitter has come under fire. The company doesn’t make much money. People complain that the service is trivial and solipsistic. Asked about the criticism, Mr. Stone smiled and said, “That’s like people saying, ‘Why would I ever carry a phone around when I have one in my kitchen?’ “
Seated with friends on a recent Thursday night at Millennium, a vegan restaurant in San Francisco, Mr. Stone and Mr. Williams are hardly nonchalant about Twitter’s popularity. In February 2009, the site, which is free, expanded at a rate of 1,382 percent; since Oprah joined on April 17, traffic to Twitter has jumped 43 percent.
“Sometimes we think this is an elaborate edition of ‘Punked,’ ” Mr. Stone said, “where someone is going to pop out of the closet and say, ‘Ha, ha, we nailed you guys.’ It’s like we’re on a rocket ship that we were just painting and suddenly it took off and we’re holding on to the ship with our fingernails.”
Mr. Williams nodded. “Every day, one of us says something like: ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you. The moon called and they want us to own them.’ “
Mr. Williams ordered an appetizer of sesame-cornmeal-crusted oyster mushrooms for those around the table, who included his wife, Sara, and Kevin Rose, the co-founder of Digg.com, and the talk turned to childhood inventions. Mr. Stone recalled trying to make an oxygen tank, using two empty Coke bottles and a plastic tube, that would allow him to breathe underwater. Mr. Evans admitted to even loftier super-human aspirations: he wanted to fly and tried to make wings. Out of what? Plywood. Mr. Stone rolled his eyes. “Oh,” he said facetiously. “That’s the light wood.”
Mr. Stone and Mr. Rose tweeted throughout the evening (”having a good vegan dinner with @ev and @biz and @others,” Mr. Rose wrote at Millennium). Afterward the group went to Bourbon & Branch, where they sat in a circle in an upstairs alcove, their faces lighted by the screens of their iPhones. “At bourbon and branch with an interesting bunch,” Mr. Stone tweeted.
Mr. Williams looked at him and said, “You write boring tweets.”
Mr. Stone did not appear upset. “I don’t know what to say,” he replied.
The impact, when it comes, will be widespread and inflict massive suffering on other countries and territories as well, such as Bangladesh, China and Tibet. Greenpeace estimates that Himalayan glaciers, called the ‘third pole’ by some on account of the massive reserves they hold, are the primary source of water for one-sixth of the world’s population. If they cease to exist, agriculture – the backbone of South Asian economies – could take a hit from which it may never recover. The result: acute food shortages, loss of livelihood and, ultimately, internal or transnational conflict.
The ranks of ‘climate refugees’ will grow exponentially and further burden the already dilapidated infrastructure of towns and cities across the region. This is not some doomsday scenario concocted by the radical fringe of the environmental movement. Science supports this view. If the current rate of global warming is not arrested forthwith, drought and famine of unprecedented proportions will be seen within the lifetime of the generation now in its infancy. Water wars will indeed take place if climate change continues apace. People will die in the fight over resources.
It is estimated that Himalayan glaciers are receding by 30 to 50 metres a year. In another 50 years they could be gone altogether. If current trends persist, there will be an over-abundance of water at first and possibly an increased incidence of flooding. And then, when higher temperatures ensure that glaciers can no longer be sustained, extreme drought will set in. The Indus, the lifeline of Pakistan, could see dramatically reduced flows and agricultural holdings across the country will become less productive.
The strangling of the Indus will in turn result in greater sea intrusion – already a major problem in Sindh – and the loss of even more arable land. Mass migration is inevitable in this scenario and squabbling over dwindling resources may lead to serious conflict amongst peoples and nations. Pakistan’s contribution to global warming is almost negligible, yet it will be among the countries hardest hit by climate change. It is up to the developed countries and emerging powers such as China, India and Brazil to arrest the slide before it is too late.
SOurce:dawn
Where in the world do people feel most content with their lives?
According to a new report released by the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, a Paris-based group of 30 countries with democratic governments that provides economic and social statistics and data, happiness levels are highest in northern European countries.
In Depth: See All 10 of the World’s Happiest Places
Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands rated at the top of the list, ranking first, second and third, respectively. Outside Europe, New Zealand and Canada landed at Nos. 8 and 6, respectively. The United States did not crack the top 10. Switzerland placed seventh and Belgium placed tenth.
The report looked at subjective well-being, defined as life satisfaction. Did people feel like their lives were dominated by positive experiences and feelings, or negative ones?
To answer that question, the OECD used data from a Gallup World Poll conducted in 140 countries around the world last year. The poll asked respondents whether they had experienced six different forms of positive or negative feelings within the last day.
Some sample questions: Did you enjoy something you did yesterday? Were you proud of something you did yesterday? Did you learn something yesterday? Were you treated with respect yesterday? In each country, a representative sample of no more than 1,000 people, age 15 or older, were surveyed. The poll was scored numerically on a scale of 1-100. The average score was 62.4.
Why did the northern European countries come out looking so good? Overall economic health played a powerful role, says Simon Chapple, senior economist from the Social Policy Division of the OECD, which put together the report.
While the global economic crisis has taken a toll on every nation, the countries that scored at the top still boast some of the highest gross domestic product per capita in the world. Denmark, which got the highest score, is not only a wealthy country, it’s also highly productive, with a 2009 GDP per capita of $68,000, according to the International Monetary Fund. The United States’ GDP per capita, by contrast, is $47,335. Though the U.S. got an above-average score of 74, it did not break the top 10.
Wealth alone does not bring the greatest degree of happiness. Norway has the highest GDP per capita on the list – $98,822 – yet it ranked ninth, not first. On the other hand, New Zealand’s happiness level is 76.7 out of 100 on the OECD list, but its 2009 GDP per capita is just $30,556.
According to a 2005 editorial, published in the British Medical Journal and written by Dr. Tony Delamothe, research done in Mexico, Ghana, Sweden, the U.S. and the U.K. shows that individuals typically get richer during their lifetimes, but not happier. It is family, social and community networks that bring joy to one’s life, according to Delamothe.
The OECD data shows that another important factor is work-life balance. While Scandinavian countries boast a high GDP per capita, the average workweek in that part of the world is no more than 37 hours. In China, which got a low score of just 14.8, the workweek is 47 hours and the GDP per capita is just $3,600.
Low unemployment also contributes to happiness. “One thing we know for sure,” says the OECD’s Chapple, “not having a job makes one substantially less satisfied.” Denmark’s unemployment rate is just 2 percent, according the C.I.A.’s World Factbook. Norway’s is just 2.6 percent. The Netherlands: just 4.5 percent. Many economists concur that a 4 percent unemployment rate reflects a stable economy. The U.S. unemployment rate is currently 9 percent.
« Previous Entries