A spokesman for Cheshire County Council said ‘Educating children in the beliefs of different faiths is part of Cheshire’s diversity curriculum’
It was claimed that the boys, from a year seven class of 11 and 12-year-olds, were given detention after refusing to take part in a practical demonstration of how Allah is worshipped.
Yesterday parents accused the school of breaching their human rights by forcing them to take part in the exercise.
One, Sharon Luinen, said: “This isn’t right, it’s taking things too far. I understand that they have to learn about other religions. I can live with that but it is taking it a step too far to be punished because they wouldn’t join in Muslim prayer.
“Making them pray to Allah, who isn’t who they worship, is wrong and what got me is that they were told they were being disrespectful.”
There are significant, simple differences between understanding diverse cultures and requiring young minds to practice all the silly devices human beings get up to - in the name of religion. Sounds like the school cares more for indoctrination rather than building understanding.
The Federal Reserve’s use of core inflation measures is harming its credibility, the new president of the St. Louis Fed wrote in an editorial released on Thursday.
James Bullard, who took over from William Poole in April, said focusing on inflation indices that exclude food and energy work well when those prices are rising at rates similar to those of other prices, “but that is not what is happening today.
“It is hurting Fed credibility to say that we are trying to keep inflation low and stable, but at the same time we are not counting some of the prices that are going up at the most rapid pace,” Bullard wrote in the bank’s magazine, “The Regional Economist.”
The 47-storey third tower, known as Tower Seven, collapsed seven hours after the twin towers.
Investigators are expected to say ordinary fires on several different floors caused the collapse…
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, based near Washington DC, is expected to conclude in its long-awaited report this month that ordinary fires caused the building to collapse.
“We’ve been at this for a little over two years and doing a two or two and a half year investigation is not at all unusual. That’s the same kind of time frame that takes place when we do aeroplane crash investigations, it takes a few years.”
This should keep conspiracy sites in business for decades. Fairly detailed article; but, the real fun doesn’t start till the whole report is released.
Control Room: “South Wales Police, what’s your emergency?”
Caller: “It’s not really. I just need to inform you that across the mountain there’s a bright stationary object.”
Control room: “Right.”
Caller: “If you’ve got a couple of minutes perhaps you could find out what it is? It’s been there at least half an hour and it’s still there.”
Control: “It’s been there for half an hour. Right. Is it actually on the mountain or in the sky?”
Caller: “It’s in the air.”
Control: “I will send someone up there now to check it out.”
Caller: “OK.”
The mystery was soon solved, as the exchange between control and an officer at the scene, makes clear:
Control: “Alpha Zulu 20, this object in the sky, did anyone have a look at it?”
Officer: “Yes, it’s the moon. Over.”
I would never survive a gig like emergency despatch. Too willing to tell people the truth, too likely to respond by pointing out they just may be a stupid git!
At least it was BBQ sauce. Ketchup would have been a little too weird.
An Appleton couple was awakened in the wee hours of the morning Wednesday to the sound of a burglar whistling in their basement.
Then events really got strange: The man was discovered wearing the couple’s clothes and covered with barbecue sauce.
The homeowner grabbed an unloaded shotgun, confronted the intruder and ordered him upstairs, where he held him at gunpoint until police arrived, according to the criminal complaint.
Aaron M. Maurice, 35, 300 E. Fremont St., was wearing the woman’s jacket and the man’s hat and explained “he was in the military and that someone had tipped off the FBI that (he) was providing secrets to the terrorists.”
He told the police that the barbecue sauce, taken from the couple’s refrigerator, was “an urban disguise, if you will.”
The image is digitally manipulated by fragmenting it into horizontal lines and then combining lines from different frames in the display. The result is a distortion of the figures caused by their motion in time, or, as Brazilian researcher Arlindo Machado calls it: chronotopic anamorphosis.
The effect as he walks in and out of the door is cool.
Does it look like a Cash Register - or just another Bunker?
The ferocity of the reaction in the German media to the fortress-like new U.S. embassy in Berlin, which former U.S. President George Bush will inaugurate on July 4th, strikes me as a reflection of the strains in German-U.S. relations since 2003’s Iraq conflict.
It underlines just how long gone the days of the Cold War really are. Then, when Berlin was the front line in the Cold War, America was West Germany’s best friend and U.S. soldiers were welcome across the country.
Architectural critics in Germany have slammed the boxy building with narrow windows as being reminiscent of Baghdad’s Green Zone.
The embassy is a picture of a country traumatised by 9/11 and by the consequences of globalisation, of a nation with such heavy armour that it can no longer see the world,” wrote conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung earlier this year.
Other critics have been just as hostile, deriding it as a discount supermarket, a prison, a bunker and like Fort Knox.
Once upon a time, the United States was a nation of courage and confidence. Now, led by greedy and arrogant Oil Patch Boys, no one even remembers how our nation survived the burning of the White House and the Capitol by British invaders during the war of 1812. Americans must think the Pearl Harbor Memorial just grew out of the tidal waters of Honolulu.
Perhaps, there is a mote of subconscious guilt below the scum of neocon brains? Perhaps, they simply are the cowards I think they all are?
Whatever the case and cause, our Fearless Leaders rely nowadays on structures of state better suited to Stalin than Jefferson.
Larry Harmon, who turned the character Bozo the Clown into a show business staple that delighted children for more than a half-century, died Thursday of congestive heart failure. He was 83.
His publicist, Jerry Digney, told The Associated Press he died at his home.
Although not the original Bozo, Mr. Harmon portrayed the popular clown in countless appearances and, as an entrepreneur, he licensed the character to others, particularly dozens of television stations around the country. The stations in turn hired actors to be their local Bozos.
Minn. teen charged with offering his vote on eBay | KOMO News - Seattle, Washington | Offbeat- — Here is the problem I’m having here. This old law is a dead-letter law that hasn’t been enforced for 80 years. You cannot vote for someone else so this whole thing is a ridiculous prank. In a normal society if the authorities didn’t think this was funny, they’d tell the kid to take down the post and not do this again. Instead he has an office full of dickheads who are going to waste the taxpayers money and charge a teenager with a felony based on some 1893 law. Are they going to enforce those old anti-kissing laws too? We should identify these scandalous public officials and demand their resignation or vote them out of office or both. The state of Minnesota should be outraged.
A college student claimed it was all a joke when he put his vote in this falls presidential election up for sale on the Web auction site eBay. But prosecutors didn’t see the humor.
University of Minnesota student Max P. Sanders, 19, was charged with a felony Thursday in Hennepin County District Court after allegedly asking for a minimum of $10 in exchange for voting for the bidders preferred candidate.
“Good luck” Sanders wrote under the eBay handle zepdrummer612. “Youre sic country depends on You”
Sanders was charged with one count of bribery, treating and soliciting under an 1893 state law that makes it a crime to offer to buy or sell a vote.
According to a criminal complaint, the Minnesota secretary of states office learned about the offering on the Web site and told prosecutors. Investigators sent a subpoena to eBay and got information that led to Sanders.
Oh, and aren’t there more important crimes to prosecute in Minnesota? Like murders? Or perhaps this is a cover-up for the fact that the a-hole Secretary of State in Minnesota is being investigated himself. Oh, and there is this scandal. Who elected this guy?
Thomas Beatie, the transgender man who made headlines as the so-called “pregnant man,” gave birth Sunday to a healthy baby girl, ABC News has learned. The birth, at St. Charles Medical Center in Bend, Oregon, was natural, according to a source, who added that reports that Beatie had had a Caesarean section are false. “She’s really cute, really pretty,” the source told ABC News Thursday afternoon. The source said Beattie was resting and the family was focusing its attention on the new baby. Born a woman, Beatie, 34, who had had his breasts surgically removed and legally changed his gender from female to male, leaped to prominence around the world in April when the wispy bearded man revealed he was pregnant.
Despite years of taking hormones and living outwardly as a man, Beatie maintained that he retained his female sex organs because he intended one day to get pregnant. “I actually opted not to do anything to my reproductive organs because I wanted to have a child one day. I see pregnancy as a process, and it doesn’t define who I am,” Beatie told Oprah Winfrey in April. “I feel it’s not a male or female desire to have a child. It’s a human need. I’m a person and I have the right to have a biological child,” he said. Beatie was impregnated with sperm from a donor. His wife, Nancy, inseminated him at home with a device she said was like a syringe without the needle. They bought it from a veterinarian and it is typically used to feed birds.
And you thought your family had “issues”. Congratulations, I guess.
Four out of five men are sexually harassed by women at work - but are too afraid to complain to their employers - according to researchers.
A study by the law firm Peninsula found 85 per cent of employers admit they take a complaints of sexual harassment from a male employees less seriously. Two-thirds of the 2,300 men questioned also said sexual banter was inappropriate at work. David Price of Peninsula said: “The balance has shifted and it is now women who are aiming sexual banter at male workers.”Many workers are under the opinion that sexual banter is an acceptable norm in the work place. “But not everyone is happy with these types of jokes and the situation is a consistently growing problem for employers.
“The majority of men don’t feel that gender discrimination applies to them, and tend to just accept any banter aimed at them. “Male employees should not feel they can’t report incidents to their employer. It is an employer’s responsibility to investigate harassment claims, whatever the employee’s gender.” Earlier this month girls at a further education college were reprimanded for wolf-whistling at builders. Officials at West Kent College in Tonbridge, Kent, warned pupils the behaviour was “totally unacceptable,” and said any student caught harassing the contractors would face disciplinary action.
Do you live in a place where fireworks are illegal? Perhaps you’ve never gotten a chance to see the amazing artwork that is usually found on them now and in the past. The ones above are from one guy’s collection. Then there’s the British Fireworks Museum site.
Don’t forget to heed the words of this fireworks label if you play with real fireworks. Happy 4th!
Britain’s most senior judge reopened one of the most highly charged debates in Britain last night when he said he was willing to see sharia law operate in the country, so long as it did not conflict with the laws of England and Wales, or lead to the imposition of severe physical punishments…
Phillips insisted last night there was “widespread misunderstanding” of the nature of sharia law, and argued: “There is no reason why sharia principles, or any other religious code, should not be the basis for mediation or other forms of alternative dispute resolution [with the understanding] … that any sanctions for a failure to comply with the agreed terms of mediation would be drawn from the Laws of England and Wales.”
He also suggested sharia principles should be applied to marriage arrangements…
“So a Muslim woman who divorced according to Sharia principles would be free to marry again, but not if she only went to a civil court.
Nations with judges appointed on the basis of their commitment to politics probably get what they deserve. The man is a reactionary and a dunce.
